Serial 149: Delta and the Bannermen

Doctor: Sylvester McCoy (7th Doctor)

Companions: Ace, Mel

Written by: Malcolm Kohll

Directed by: Chris Clough

Background & Significance: As the first season of Sylvester McCoy was in full swing, a number of changes swept across the behind-the-scenes production of Doctor Who. First, John Nathan-Turner needed to rectify the fact that he had an "uneven" number of episodes to spread across and indeterminate amount of stories. There was the option to do a six parter, but that wasn't particularly attractive. The last time he had tried something that length it had cobbled the story before it had even begun and a four part story and a two part story felt like it was giving short shrift to the two part story. To compromise, they devised the notion of coming up with two three-part stories, one shot on location (in this season, "Delta and the Bannermen") and the other shot entirely in the studio (in this season, "Dragonfire").

Oh. And Bonnie Langford wanted to leave. So The Doctor was gonna need a new companion. And fast.

This left the show with a noticeable hole they needed to fill. The continuity Langford brought to the show as it  transitioned from Baker to McCoy cannot possibly be overstated, but now the 7th Doctor was going to need to move on and with his own companion. Cartmel, as script editor, set about devising a new companion almost immediately, sketching out the broad designs for a hip teenagery character who'd be more... shall we say "realistic" than the companions as of late. Peri was something of a socialite when it came down to it and Mel was never actually given a proper introduction story NOR was her history ever intimated as anything other than a bubblegum-chewing, aerobics-obsessed, bright, bubbly teenager. Cartmel wanted something different, something that would be a bit more realistic to the world of the 80s. Someone that wouldn't be focused so much on the jazzercise as the more punk and anti-establishment leanings that were present at the time.

So he came up with this character (whom he dubbed "Alf") with plans to introduce her after Mel's departure, but he also asked that the two scripts that were meant to cap the season ("Delta" and the previously discussed "Dragonfire") introduce a version of his "Alf" character, hoping that they would come up with something good that they could use instead of having to come up with a character on the fly later on. And applause to the delgation of that. I mean, even Robert Holmes did something similar when it came to Leela's introduction (handing off the responsibility to Chris Boucher). As we all know Ian Briggs's "Dragonfire" ended up giving us Ace while Malcolm Kohll's script ended up giving us a character known as "Ray" about whom I'll have much to say later.

Why Ray didn't work and was never mentioned again will certainly be point of discussion for this entry.

Kohll, it's worth mentioning, was not really ever brought back to write more Doctor Who. Cartmel, it seems, did have him in mind moving forward, but where Stephen "Paradise Towers" Wyatt and Ian "Dragonfire" Briggs were both brought back for "Greatest Show in the Galaxy" and "Curse of Fenric" respectively, it's interesting that Kohll never made it back for another story. Director Chris Clough, on the other hand, was invited back for another round of stories in the next season. Take that for what that's worth.

So let's get to it!

Serial 150: Dragonfire

Doctor: Sylvester McCoy (7th Doctor)
Companions: Mel, Ace

Written by: Ian Briggs
Directed by: Chris Clough

Background & Significance: After a whole season of Mel as The Doctor's companion, Bonnie Langford had decided that she did not want to be Mel anymore. She feared typecasting (which, as it turns out, was an entirely founded claim) and wanted to move on. It probably didn't help that Mel is [unfairly] hated by vast majorities of Doctor Who fandom despite Langford being actually quite good. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and was never really given a fair shake until Big Finish went in and proved to everyone how utterly brilliant she could be.

So the decks were clear for a new companion.

To prep, Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel started the process off creating a new companion, sketching out a few ideas and characteristics they thought would be good for a new companion. Affectionately code-named "Alf", they planned for this character to take over as The Doctor's companion in the upcoming season should Bonnie Langford choose to actually depart as she was thinking. To see if their other writers could come up with anything better, they handed the rough sketch to "Delta and the Bannermen's" Malcolm Kohll and "Dragonfire's" Ian Briggs to see if they could do anything with the concept.  (This, by the way, explains why Ray in "Delta and the Bannermen" is a totally Ace-y character, but we'll talk about that in a few weeks.)

History, as we know, went with Ian Briggs's character: Ace.

Let's back up, though. Ian Briggs was a fresh new Doctor Who writer whose mission statement was to make something with a comedic bent. In response, he went and basically homaged all of his favorite movies, and when one homage didn't work out he simply went and changed the source of the homage. This, unfortunately, was mostly lost on the audience of "Dragonfire", who can't ever seem to see beyond the "that cliffhanger moment is stupid" and see that the whole thing as a big ol' Star Wars homage pulp adventure running through a bunch of ice-flavored BBC sets. While being camp. Utter utter camp. So like last week we have a story that is utterly and completely derided story that wound up in the bottom 10% of the Doctor Who Magazine Top 200 poll. And I really have to ask, is the hate deserved?

So let's get to it!

Serial 148: Paradise Towers

Doctor: Sylvester McCoy (7th Doctor)

Companion: Mel

Written by: Stephen Wyatt

Directed by: Nicholas Mallett 

Background & Significance: As we said back when we reviewed "Time and the Rani", it's hard to blame McCoy's first season on anyone. It's really more a case of rushed and slapped together delivery. Nathan-Turner wasn't expecting to produce another season of Doctor Who (let alone two more after it), nor did Cartmel have a lot of time to develop a tone or direction going in.

It's really just Doctor Who flying by the seat of its pants.

The best way to judge the season is by judging the things that came on either side of it. Take "Time and the Rani". The Bakers were notoriously mediocre writers (that's putting it mildly) so it's no wonder that story mostly sucked beyond all belief. Andrew Morgan really knocked "Remembrance" out of the park, so he's really just saddled with a bad script and a rushed production, neither of which he can do much with. So too, with "Paradise Towers" we have a writer and director who have great credits on either side of this story. Mallett really did a great job with "The Mysterious Planet" if you ask me, and I quite enjoy the direction on "Fenric", and were it not for "Remembrance", Wyatt's other Doctor Who script ("The Greatest Show in the Galaxy") would easily be the best of its season.

And yet "Paradise Towers" is derided, and on the surface it's not difficult to see why.

For one thing, it's the return of yet another Doctor Who staple: an anti-establishment Doctor bringing down the government he's landed in and tearing down the infrastructures of society so that it can be remade. The difference here is that it's got Mel (whom fandom had already decided they hated; still do by and large, actually) and it's blatantly on the nose about the fact that it's about fascism and the perils and horror therein. It also suffers from the Cartmel direction and while you can see the hints of it starting to poke out, it's still not crystalized so efficiently as it is in McCoy's two subsequent seasons. 

So it's maligned and perhaps unfairly. What do I think? I think I should start talking.

So let's get to it!

Serial 147: Time and The Rani

Doctor: Sylvester McCoy (7th Doctor)
Companion: Mel

Written by: Pip and Jane Baker
Directed by: Andrew Morgan 

Background & Significance: Much like "The Twin Dilemma" and "Timelash", "Time and the Rani" is one of those stories that is almost universally reviled. It always ends up WAY low on those rankings of best Doctor Who stories (and by that I mean, always at the bottom of everything). Granted, the rankings almost always inevitably end up with Tom Baker stories and Dalek stories much higher on the list than, say, Colin Baker stories, but the fact still remains that this is one of those constants that will most likely never change.

It's not really anyone's fault, though. Well, I suppose it is, but it's a miracle it exists at all.

After completing work on the marathon, nightmare of a season that was Trial of a Time Lord, Producer John Nathan-Turner went on a much needed holiday. After all, he was under the assumption that all the nonstop drama from the past few years on Doctor Who (Colin Baker's disastrous tenure (not Mr. Baker's fault) and in-fighting with his script editor (who eventually quit) and people in charge of the BBC who seemed to want nothing more than to cancel Doctor Who) was behind him now. He was moving on! To bigger and brighter pastures. He'd done his time. And now he could do something else.

When he came back from his trip in late December he found that his new assignment was Doctor Who, the show he had just left behind for good. He begged to be taken off the show, but if he left the BBC would cancel it, so he stayed on so that Doctor Who would not die.

But now he was faced with a number of problems. In just over eight months the next season would air. But he didn't have any scripts. He didn't have a new script editor. Hell, he didn't even have a new Doctor. Additionally, any attempts to woo Colin Baker back for a regeneration scene were met by Colin Baker's refusal to reappear after the way he was treated (and if I might commentary a phrase, "Good on ya, Mr. Baker"). Nathan-Turner immediately commissioned Pip and Jane Baker (hereafter referred to as "Pip'n'Jane") for a story, knowing they could write something shootable in a short amount of time, regardless of quality. They decided to bring back their "fan-favourite" creation The Rani. And... well... it turned out so good the first time that why not make her "even better"?

In mid-February Nathan-Turner found his replacement in Sylvester McCoy and had his new Doctor signed to a deal by mid-March. Also around this time, Nathan-Turner found his new script editor: Andrew Cartmel.

Both of these helped put all of the new season of Doctor Who in place, and the new Doctor's first serial commenced shooting in the first week of April, just five weeks after McCoy signed his name on the paperwork that would make him the new Doctor. Bonnie Langford would stay on as Mel (allowing some sort of continuity) and before everyone knew it, the cameras were rolling and the twenty fourth season of Doctor Who was a go, with everyone scrambling about to make it happen.

Needless to say there wasn't a lot of prep time. By the time Cartmel came in to work on the scripts they'd already been commissioned by Nathan-Turner, so he was just cleaning up what would already be established. Similarly, McCoy had barely a month to scramble together a vision and interpretation for his Doctor. The "darkness" and the "chess mastersmanship" would come from Cartmel's influence once the production team had more time to develop the show, which left McCoy to act more comedic and clown-like in this first season of his. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it made for at least something that was vaguely engaging in this first round of stories, and McCoy himself is a very comic actor, which made it a bit easier to play given the complete lack of preparation time to begin with.

The question mark pullover was, of course, Nathan-Turner's idea.

So you can see why this whole thing is leaning towards being something of a sloppy before it even started shooting.

So let's get to it!

Serial 146: The Ultimate Foe - The Trial of a Time Lord Part IV

Doctor: Colin Baker (6th Doctor)
Companion: Mel

Written by: Robert Holmes & Pip and Jane Baker
Directed by: Chris Clough

Background & Significance: If you count The Trial of a Time Lord as one giant serial of fourteen parts and disregard the four-story structure of it, Trial of a Time Lord is the longest Doctor Who story of all time and this last two parter is the thing that puts it over the edge.

I don't want to talk too much about the actual dynamics behind this story here because they work a little bit better as we get into it, but I can't really talk about the finale of this epicness without going into the gritty details of the behind-the-scenes, which I find terribly fascinating.

So as we mentioned back in "The Mysterious Planet", Trial of a Time Lord was the last thing Robert Holmes ever worked on. The first episode of these final two parts is the last thing Robert Holmes ever completed, and it is a MASTERPIECE. Seriously, I think it's one of my favourite single episodes of Doctor Who of all time. It's dark, elegant, creepy, and amazingly Holmesian in the best of ways. And it's as good as anything we've seen him do so far if you ask me.

Unfortunately, Holmes got incredibly sick and passed away before he could get past more than a rough outline of episode two, meaning Holmes's climactic part two is lost to us forever and we'll never get it back.

For long-time script editor Eric Saward, Holmes's death was the last straw he could take under Jonathan Nathan-Turner. He quit Doctor Who after editing "Mindwarp", but offered to write the final episode based on Holmes's original outline on the condition Nathan-Turner not make him to change anything from Holmes's original outline, which included the planned cliffhanger ending where The Doctor and The Valeyard grappled with each other and over a Time Vent and fell in. The vent closed behind them and the story ended with the fate of The Doctor left up in the air.

So Saward wrote the script and turned it in and then production on the end of Trial started. Locations were scouted, sets were built, actors entered rehearsals...

Then Nathan-Turner, for some reason, decided that the ending was too much of a downer and asked Saward to change the ending. And really, JNT. Why did you do this? You know how much Saward isn't messing around, you had agreed to the ending with enthusiasm, and everything is going good. What did you THINK would happen? Spoilers! Saward told you!

But no. Nathan-Turner did it anyways, and Saward got pissed, walked off the show for a second time, took the copyrighted script and outline with him, and refused to let Nathan-Turner use either for the final product.

So now, they're about to enter production and they have neither script nor outline on the last episode. All they have is list of locations and actors. THAT'S IT. I can't even imagine that day for JNT. Musta been awful.

With no other options, JNT (who couldn't even give the new writers any details about the original part two because of Saward's copyright) turned to Pip and Jane Baker, gave them a list of sets and locations, and asked them to write the episode. He could give them part one because it was done and turned in, but all of part two had to be their own extrapolation.

They turned around a draft in three days.

Now, after all this, did they pull it off? I mean, at this point, you gotta know if they did or not, right? You just gotta know...

So let's get to it!

Serial 145: Terror of the Vervoids - The Trial of a Time Lord Part III

Doctor: Colin Baker (6th Doctor)
Companion: Melanie Bush

Written by: Pip and Jane Baker
Directed by: Chris Clough

Background & Significance: Oh god, Pip and Jane.

That was my first thought upon finding out who happened to write this third segment of "Trial of a Time Lord", especially since the last Doctor Who encounter with them turned out to be less than satisfactory. Apparently Script Editor Saward thought so too, because he wasn't exactly keen on working with this team again, but due to a bunch of delays and unsuitable scripts to constitute the second to last segment of the Trial, they really had no choice--apparently these two churned out work like nobody's business, which is important for a TV show with a rapidly approaching production deadline.

But also important for a TV show is not only the speed with which the work gets turned in, but the quality... Which, all things considered, turned out to be surprisingly good with this serial. But I'll get into that in a bit.

Also notable is the first appearance of Melanie "Mel" Bush, the Doctor's new companion. Created by JNT and portrayed by Bonnie Langford (a well-known actress and musical theater star), she's always had something of a bad rep among fans, but I think she'll surprise you in this.

Unfortunately for the behind the scenes aspect of the show in production at the time, the character as well as the actress chosen to portray her further deepened the rift between producer and script editor, finally culminating in Saward's departure from the show. (But he's kind of an asshole anyway, so his loss.)

Enough about that, though. Let's take a closer look, shall we?