"Phil won't leave his room" - A Doctor Who Production History
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Part 39 - The End of Season 30
"I had to novelize that story. Given the direction of the books at the time, I could be sure another writer wouldn't take those scenes in the opposite direction."
Graham Ardwyne, Convention appearance, 2009
In the 80s, particularly in comics, there'd been a vogue for deconstruction. Looking at popular stories, particularly ones that appealed to children and adolescents and holding them to the standards of higher forms of literature or even real life. Alan Moore's Watchmen being the gold standard of this kind of thing.
But after deconstruction should come reconstruction. After his Watchmen, Moore was called upon by DC to reconstruct Superman after various other writers had followed Frank Miller's lead an deconstructed him until the character was useless. The whole dark age of comics seemed to be spreading into other genre properties and there was a general desire to make out "this is not you father's" whatever. Everybody's trying to reinvent things for the new century and in most cases, that meant "darker".
Then we get cases like Batman. Batman was reconstructed without really being deconstructed. The Spielberg films had explored Batman's tragedies but also his triumphs. Harrison Ford played Bruce Wayne as troubled and driven, but a man whose plan to save the city was audacious rather than insane. As a result, Batman didn't get a big deconstruction in the comics. DC ringfenced him from the rest of the comics culture, lest someone mess up what Hollywood had managed to do.
The Doctor was arguably in the same class as Batman, reconstructed without deconstruction. Every change of production team and actor saw the show being re-evaluated. Linda's death on the surface looked like it was part of that deconstructionist dark age thing, but it turned out very, very different.
To begin with, the way it was handled was less brutal than the two companion deaths in the 60s. We just saw the barn, knew Linda was inside and then it was blown up by a Silurian.
Bear with me, I'm going to break down two episodes of Doctor Who that you could watch for yourself. But I want to highlight every little thing that's building to the end of Season 30.
Season 30, episode 12 might just be the worst set of circumstances that The Doctor has ever been through. TARDISless, hunted and still somehow trying to negotiate a peace between humans and Silurians, even though one of the latter species has killed The Doctor's friend. A peace is negotiated, the Silurian who killed Linda is offered to The Doctor for killing and The Doctor, normally the champion of life, doesn't really know if she wants to kill the Silurian or not. She shakes her head and gasps "Just take him away. Lock him up." The Silurians withdraw and The Doctor is left alone. In a blur, UNIT return the TARDIS to The Doctor for preventing a massacre, but advise her to steer clear of Earth. So The Doctor goes inside the TARDIS and…nothing. She just stares at the console for an age and then flicks at the controls without much enthusiasm.
All that leads us to The Doctor on a hillside in the Lake District "some time before the invention of climbing boots" so she can be alone. Leaning on a rock, reading a book in some unearthly language. For a moment, on first viewing, I was expecting the credits to roll slowly and the series to end there. Except, in my shock, I'd miscounted. There's one episode left, so I realized there had to be a cliffhanger. There was.
- Andrew Barbicane, Dimensions Of Doctor Who blog, July 2017
"You ran away." The voice of The Meddler was not a welcome sound. The Doctor had to admit, she was a little surprised that he would stoop this low.
"I never thought you were actually evil, not like some of the others I've had to deal with. Amoral, maybe, but to follow me here and mock me over the death of a friend…"
"I'm not mocking you. I'm trying to make you see. Your way isn't moral, it's just fussy. Go back and get Linda. Pluck her from the timeline. You and the Time Lords have entirely the wrong idea. The people inside the timeline don't suffer if we change history. They don't notice. The changes change them. The new history we make is the way things have always been as far as they can tell."
"They don't consent. You rob them of free will."
"It's not the same for them. They don't feel it like we do. That's our gift."
The Doctor said nothing. She clearly felt it useless to argue.
The Meddler scowled at what he perceived as a form of piety. He shouted "Come out now! Tell The Doctor what you think of her 'morality'."
A figure emerged from the boulder that was the Meddler's TARDIS.
"Doctor?"
"Linda?"
- novelization of A Broken History by Graham Ardwyne
I haven't mentioned the novelizations yet. As fandom grew up, the novelizations of TV stories started to turn from children's books into Young Adult books. Things hinted at onscreen started to be dealt with in depth in the books and the envelope was pushed about what was acceptable to go out under the Doctor Who brand. Authors who came up through fandom were called on when the original scriptwriter of a TV adventure passed on the chance to novelize the story. These books became the setting for all kinds of fan theories and even fan battles to play out. Hand in hand with this approach was a somewhat adolescent tendency to appear deeper and more grown-up than the TV adventures. Inelegant plotting, such as companion departures that were a little hasty, were treated as ethical failings on the part of The Doctor. This resulted in lots of scenes being given over to companions remonstrating with The Doctor, perhaps as surrogates for the authors who were biting back at the "children's show" that obsessed them. It struck me as inevitable that this would end up being picked up by the TV series.
All this meant that, as jawdropping as that cliffhanger was, I knew what was coming next. Linda would give a speech about how The Doctor had let her down and how could she let her die and…
Obviously, that didn't happen.
- Andrew Barbicane, Dimensions Of Doctor Who blog, July 2017
Linda said "Take me away from here," and walked into The Doctor's TARDIS. The Meddler tried to catch The Doctor's eye, to register his disgust at her self-righteousness, but The Doctor just gazed after Linda.
Inside the console room, The Doctor quietly entered, prepared for some kind of outburst from her friend.
"Can he hear us in here? That man. The Cowboy or whatever."
"No. Linda, I…"
"You're not going to take me back to die are you?"
"No, what's happened has happened. You weren't in that barn when it blew up. That's a fact now."
"I'm glad to be alive, but…I'm more on your side than his. You explain why you do what you do. That guy just does it and expects a round of applause."
For the first time in what felt like a long time, The Doctor smiled.
- novelization of A Broken History by Graham Ardwyne
That scene drew some criticism in some fanzines at the time. There was a feeling it made The Doctor too powerful and to do that was to make The Doctor "patrician". Yeah, there was a lot of Sixth Form politics going around at the time. The Doctor was middle-aged and clever and some fans felt The Doctor needed to be put in her place by young people. Like the 60s,perceived Britain had a broadly progressive, left-wing government so the urge to be anti-establishment seemed to turn on how unfair it was to be governed by people who didn't read the NME. Maybe I'm being grumpy.
But the fact remains that there was a growing gap between Doctor Who the television series produced by the BBC and Cinema Verity watched by millions of people and Doctor Who, the pop cultural property that thousands of people had grown up with and made an essential part of their view of the world. The fandom that was writing and buying the novelizations. The fandom that was dead-set on deconstructing The Doctor, even as the TV series was setting out why that wasn't necessary, why The Doctor saved some people and not others.
You don't need to know how the rest of the story ends, do you? Just watch it, the solution isn't brilliant, but it holds together. The important part is that it ends with The Doctor and Linda exhausted, but still friends and looking for somewhere to chill out for a while.
- Andrew Barbicane, Dimensions Of Doctor Who blog, July 2017
Graham Ardwyne, Convention appearance, 2009
__________________
In the 80s, particularly in comics, there'd been a vogue for deconstruction. Looking at popular stories, particularly ones that appealed to children and adolescents and holding them to the standards of higher forms of literature or even real life. Alan Moore's Watchmen being the gold standard of this kind of thing.
But after deconstruction should come reconstruction. After his Watchmen, Moore was called upon by DC to reconstruct Superman after various other writers had followed Frank Miller's lead an deconstructed him until the character was useless. The whole dark age of comics seemed to be spreading into other genre properties and there was a general desire to make out "this is not you father's" whatever. Everybody's trying to reinvent things for the new century and in most cases, that meant "darker".
Then we get cases like Batman. Batman was reconstructed without really being deconstructed. The Spielberg films had explored Batman's tragedies but also his triumphs. Harrison Ford played Bruce Wayne as troubled and driven, but a man whose plan to save the city was audacious rather than insane. As a result, Batman didn't get a big deconstruction in the comics. DC ringfenced him from the rest of the comics culture, lest someone mess up what Hollywood had managed to do.
The Doctor was arguably in the same class as Batman, reconstructed without deconstruction. Every change of production team and actor saw the show being re-evaluated. Linda's death on the surface looked like it was part of that deconstructionist dark age thing, but it turned out very, very different.
To begin with, the way it was handled was less brutal than the two companion deaths in the 60s. We just saw the barn, knew Linda was inside and then it was blown up by a Silurian.
Bear with me, I'm going to break down two episodes of Doctor Who that you could watch for yourself. But I want to highlight every little thing that's building to the end of Season 30.
Season 30, episode 12 might just be the worst set of circumstances that The Doctor has ever been through. TARDISless, hunted and still somehow trying to negotiate a peace between humans and Silurians, even though one of the latter species has killed The Doctor's friend. A peace is negotiated, the Silurian who killed Linda is offered to The Doctor for killing and The Doctor, normally the champion of life, doesn't really know if she wants to kill the Silurian or not. She shakes her head and gasps "Just take him away. Lock him up." The Silurians withdraw and The Doctor is left alone. In a blur, UNIT return the TARDIS to The Doctor for preventing a massacre, but advise her to steer clear of Earth. So The Doctor goes inside the TARDIS and…nothing. She just stares at the console for an age and then flicks at the controls without much enthusiasm.
All that leads us to The Doctor on a hillside in the Lake District "some time before the invention of climbing boots" so she can be alone. Leaning on a rock, reading a book in some unearthly language. For a moment, on first viewing, I was expecting the credits to roll slowly and the series to end there. Except, in my shock, I'd miscounted. There's one episode left, so I realized there had to be a cliffhanger. There was.
- Andrew Barbicane, Dimensions Of Doctor Who blog, July 2017
__________________
"You ran away." The voice of The Meddler was not a welcome sound. The Doctor had to admit, she was a little surprised that he would stoop this low.
"I never thought you were actually evil, not like some of the others I've had to deal with. Amoral, maybe, but to follow me here and mock me over the death of a friend…"
"I'm not mocking you. I'm trying to make you see. Your way isn't moral, it's just fussy. Go back and get Linda. Pluck her from the timeline. You and the Time Lords have entirely the wrong idea. The people inside the timeline don't suffer if we change history. They don't notice. The changes change them. The new history we make is the way things have always been as far as they can tell."
"They don't consent. You rob them of free will."
"It's not the same for them. They don't feel it like we do. That's our gift."
The Doctor said nothing. She clearly felt it useless to argue.
The Meddler scowled at what he perceived as a form of piety. He shouted "Come out now! Tell The Doctor what you think of her 'morality'."
A figure emerged from the boulder that was the Meddler's TARDIS.
"Doctor?"
"Linda?"
- novelization of A Broken History by Graham Ardwyne
__________________
I haven't mentioned the novelizations yet. As fandom grew up, the novelizations of TV stories started to turn from children's books into Young Adult books. Things hinted at onscreen started to be dealt with in depth in the books and the envelope was pushed about what was acceptable to go out under the Doctor Who brand. Authors who came up through fandom were called on when the original scriptwriter of a TV adventure passed on the chance to novelize the story. These books became the setting for all kinds of fan theories and even fan battles to play out. Hand in hand with this approach was a somewhat adolescent tendency to appear deeper and more grown-up than the TV adventures. Inelegant plotting, such as companion departures that were a little hasty, were treated as ethical failings on the part of The Doctor. This resulted in lots of scenes being given over to companions remonstrating with The Doctor, perhaps as surrogates for the authors who were biting back at the "children's show" that obsessed them. It struck me as inevitable that this would end up being picked up by the TV series.
All this meant that, as jawdropping as that cliffhanger was, I knew what was coming next. Linda would give a speech about how The Doctor had let her down and how could she let her die and…
Obviously, that didn't happen.
- Andrew Barbicane, Dimensions Of Doctor Who blog, July 2017
__________________
Linda said "Take me away from here," and walked into The Doctor's TARDIS. The Meddler tried to catch The Doctor's eye, to register his disgust at her self-righteousness, but The Doctor just gazed after Linda.
Inside the console room, The Doctor quietly entered, prepared for some kind of outburst from her friend.
"Can he hear us in here? That man. The Cowboy or whatever."
"No. Linda, I…"
"You're not going to take me back to die are you?"
"No, what's happened has happened. You weren't in that barn when it blew up. That's a fact now."
"I'm glad to be alive, but…I'm more on your side than his. You explain why you do what you do. That guy just does it and expects a round of applause."
For the first time in what felt like a long time, The Doctor smiled.
- novelization of A Broken History by Graham Ardwyne
__________________
That scene drew some criticism in some fanzines at the time. There was a feeling it made The Doctor too powerful and to do that was to make The Doctor "patrician". Yeah, there was a lot of Sixth Form politics going around at the time. The Doctor was middle-aged and clever and some fans felt The Doctor needed to be put in her place by young people. Like the 60s,perceived Britain had a broadly progressive, left-wing government so the urge to be anti-establishment seemed to turn on how unfair it was to be governed by people who didn't read the NME. Maybe I'm being grumpy.
But the fact remains that there was a growing gap between Doctor Who the television series produced by the BBC and Cinema Verity watched by millions of people and Doctor Who, the pop cultural property that thousands of people had grown up with and made an essential part of their view of the world. The fandom that was writing and buying the novelizations. The fandom that was dead-set on deconstructing The Doctor, even as the TV series was setting out why that wasn't necessary, why The Doctor saved some people and not others.
You don't need to know how the rest of the story ends, do you? Just watch it, the solution isn't brilliant, but it holds together. The important part is that it ends with The Doctor and Linda exhausted, but still friends and looking for somewhere to chill out for a while.
- Andrew Barbicane, Dimensions Of Doctor Who blog, July 2017
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That was amazing, just the doctor going back to save Linda was great, even though it went against what she and the Time Lords believe in. Now, I don't want to sound annoying, but is the episode guide next? Because it will be exciting to see full Episode lists of an alternative doctor who, where things are much different to our own timeline.
@Plus-Sized Scribe if you feel comfortable, will you post the episode guide?
I'm currently inundated with work IRL, but I should have time soon.