Best of Three

I wasn’t going to write a concluding post for my Pertwee watch-a-thon. I thought, if there’s anything I could ever find to say on this era, I must have said it somewhere in the last year or so that I’ve been a-watchin’ and a-bloggin’ about it. But then I thought of this title for this post and I thought, well, a top ten list wouldn’t go amiss, would it?

Also, a nagging part of me remembered writing a farewell to Troughton and apprehensive look ahead. I remembered saying, ‘I’ve never been a very great fan of the Third Doctor,’ that everything about the Third Doctor’s era is ‘basically antithetical’ to my beloved 1960s era. Is he, I asked, truly Doctorish? Was this, I wondered, going to be any fun at all?

I must admit, the major reason I didn’t feel like writing this blog post after I finished Planet of Spiders is that I was weary. I couldn’t face staggering on to Robot et al. Part of me wanted to list all my Who ephemera on eBay and be shot of it. But why?

While Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is ‘Doctorish’, it’s on a very odd point of the spectrum. Sometimes, when he’s fierily, fiercely yet foppishly intelligent, he reminds me more of his First incarnation than any other Doctors do. Yet in other ways he’s unrecognisable. He handles a ray gun, throws people over his shoulder as soon as look at them, and winds up owning a silver version of the Batmobile.  

Most importantly, he casts aside his mystery and his vagabond ways, and with them loses a certain magic. And magic, I think, is a quite specific turn. This Doctor is an avowed scientist, but this sometimes detracts from his Wizardly quality - in an Arthur C. Clarke, 'any sufficiently advanced technology', sort of way. Instead of an uncanny or tricksterish aura, he’s plain-speaking and direct – not one to fool his enemies, or hide behind a clown’s façade. He speaks without irony, in earnest, sometimes with heavy overtones of self-importance.

Sometimes this works brilliantly. In particular, Pertwee makes his enemies and even his alien allies more credible through his serious, sober gaze. Peladon (first time around) is as serious as a Hartnell historical (and therefore hysterically funny at times). This series can go totally wild when it wants to, knowing that its lead actor will always anchor the whole show. But when a story loses power, Pertwee’s straight and faithful line readings do nothing to lift it.

And overall, it’s missing something. We are rarely surprised by Pertwee. Mother Hens don’t tend to surprise us. One of the peculiarities of this era is that as soon as his dematerialisation circuit turns up, there is no dematerialisation – but how could this Doctor turn his back on his family? It’s hard even to picture it happening, the lever on the console falling, the Police Box doors swinging shut, the Brigadier raising his eyebrows in disapproval.

Yet this is the great strength of the series. The Doctor and his work-mates’ relationships are cartoonish, but they work in the context of the show. And while it would be a lie to say they evolve, they are drawn in ever bolder dashes of the pen, ever brighter splashes of colour. Not only that, they all get their big moment. Benton outsmarts the Master (briefly). Jo walks out on the Doctor and sets us all blubbing. Mike Yates goes undercover, then bad, then Buddhist. The audience’s investment in these characters is rewarded in ways that haven’t happened in Doctor Who before.

 

In my goodbye to the sixties, I looked back to the early years, my favourite era, ‘when we really care about the companions, when the actors are always slightly revelling in being the most mundane sci-fi heroes ever’ as well as ‘a time of rampant invention.’ In retrospect, the early seventies aren’t so different. Our heroes are perhaps less earthly than Barbara Wright, but they’re also distinctly unheroic. They say all the things that Star Trek and Buck Rodgers characters wouldn’t. They didn’t pass their O Levels. They watch the Rugby highlights while they’re on duty. They make jokes about the Clangers. At the end of the day, they go to the pub.

 

The Doctor himself, no longer a Who, is more of a ‘real’ character than he’s ever been before. He’s the man with two hearts, two worlds, forever torn between the local and the extra-terrestrial. This is a man who represents, not the longing to travel and explore, but simply the freedom of the mind. When the mind is free all sorts of new dangers can arise – but it’s still better than closing yourself off. This idea of transcendentalism – of being bigger on the inside – is spiritual and political at the same time. This is a series made by people who believe science and imagination can liberate, not just the individual but the world.

 

Perversely, this is when the TARDIS really comes to life. After years of being taken for granted as the vehicle to deliver us to the party and take us away at the end, it’s given its due value as a symbol of escape and liberation. There’s something really exciting in The Time Monster when the Doctor and Jo dash inside and vanish, off to Atlantis (you couldn’t get a more fabulous, impossible destination). This is where it truly becomes a conceptual space (two Tardises capable of landing inside one another), when it is first described as ‘alive’. At times like this, the writers actually seem drunk on the possibilities of these ideas of alien worlds and time travel.

 

At other times during The Time Monster, they just seem drunk. (Ah, you knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

 

This is the best of Doctor Number Three, and this is the reason: the producers really care about it. Some writers, actors, designers, it’s just a job, but the production team are invested in it, enthused by it. They make the show into a series, as far as they can. Eventually it runs its course. It’s time to shift away from a ‘setting’ and explore a multiplicity of worlds, to make the Doctor a restless wanderer once more, to bring a tight focus onto just two (or three) lead actors. Time to head into the unknown and unexpected once more.

 

Yesterday I went online and ordered a DVD of Robot, Tom Baker’s first story. I’m ready for the new.

 

 

 

A quick thank you to two blogs that have helped me illustrate this blog over the past year or so: the gorgeous, inexhaustible Third Doctor Costume blog, which includes an enormous amount of chocolate-wrapper/TV Action ephemera (and the like) - and Not Tonight Dalek, whose scans and images have been invaluable. Both blogs are Giant K-1 Robots to my equivalent Quark-like specimen.

 

 

So, My Top Ten Third Doctor Stories

 

1          Spearhead from Space

2          Doctor Who and the Silurians

3          Inferno

4          The Claws of Axos

5          The Daemons

6          The Curse of Peladon

7          The Time Monster

8          Carnival of Monsters

9          Invasion of the Dinosaurs

10        Planet of the Spiders

The Green Death

She's off.

It feels like ages since Jo Grant came into the Doctor's life and began changing things. In those earlier stories, she quite often bears the brunt of his bad temper – and she in turn doesn't quite 'get' him. It's not until Colony in a Space that she can accept the Tardis is real, that he's not a fantasist. And to be fair, even a mad alien scientist in an Edwardian cape is a bit of a leap to one who travels  in time and space.

Perhaps it's a change of view for Jo – that scientists can be as heroic and crusading as soldiers. After all, her original ambition, facilitated by her Uncle, is to join the services – and before falling for Professor Jones, she tries dating Captain Yates. (Can't quite see that relationship going places.) Since then, she's been a humanising force on the Doctor, who has generally cheered up and calmed down. In return, she's become a woman of the universe, to the extent that she can reject the Master's hypnotism and generally talk down to him, before walking out of the Tardis doors, alone, into the alien night of Spiridon...

I still don't think she was ever quite on the same page as him though. Not like Zoe, for instance, who bravely stowed away in the Doctor's old sea-chest to discover the Universe. Jo's travels in time and space tend to be accidental and slightly reluctant. She's not fazed by them – she disputes with planetary colonists and rude-looking aliens without hesitation. Jo is always self-assured, passionate and morally certain: to coin a phrase, down-to-earth. But generally that's where she wants to be. 'There's only one little world I want to see right now,' she says, almost wearily, after all the fun on the Planet of the Daleks. 'Home.'

We're so used to show-runners' arcs these days, the original series can seem rather rackety and thrown together by comparison. But this season, beginning with The Three Doctors' liberation of the Tardis and its crew, travels rather satisfyingly to this announcement of Jo's. The Green Death is the story in which Jo Grant leaves not just the Doctor, but UNIT – and if it wasn't for Professor Jones, it might not have been such a clean break. The Doctor is clearly on the threshold of a new life away from Earth, and one feels rather certain that's not a life Jo would have joined him in.

From the Dawning of Aquarius to her stack-heeled boots and now, her passion for environmentalism, she's associated with the here and now. 'Well,' she says about the Tardis in Frontier in Space, with flippant prophecy, 'I'm never going in that thing again.'

Not that she hasn't learned from her adventures. I've reflected a couple of times on the visions of future Earth she's had: over-developed, uninhabitable, unsustainable, even ungovernable, threatened by fear and greed and waste. These are thematic connections rather than literal ones – Jo never even witnesses the ministerial self-interest that hands complete control over to Global Chemicals in Episode Two. But a lot of care has been taken with references back to Jo's arrival. Only the production team of the time and fans of today can really appreciate these: when Jo talks about her job description being 'tell the Doctor how brilliant he is,' for instance, she's quoting a line from three years earlier!

It feels a far cry from some of the 1960s seasons, where individual stories shine but the lives of the regulars – and their ongoing stories – are treated with ambivalence. The overriding feeling with the Jo Grant era, for me, is that the writers believe in the strength of their leads, in the security of this family (in part, because of the actors performances), and enjoy throwing them into new situations. In all the years I've been watching Who in sequence, this is a moment when it really feels like a series rather than a show. It would have made a perfectly fitting last story for the Master, too. As it is, it brings to an end the chronicles of that UNIT family.

What about the Doctor, though? If Jo Grant was a reluctant traveler in time and space, the Doctor has been reluctant to leave without her. After bridling so long at his confinement, it feels as if his main tie to the Earth and his main excuse for not returning to a bootless existence among the stars has been suddenly taken away – and after his solitary voyage to the fabled Metebelis 3 (has nobody ever said how brilliant that planet's name is?) he seems grateful to scramble back to Earth, to a world of mines and silly disguises and mathematical flautists called Nancy. Where exactly does he belong?

Yes, he's changed. He's at risk, you might think, of losing his Doctorishness, his capacity to transcend the present day. Yet that's exactly what his extra-terrestrial, mystical blue sapphire connotes: a very 70s sort of transcendentalism, requiring a physical bauble (whereas in the 60s they just did it, lived it, breathed it) but still effective. His conversations with BOSS, where he seems to take real pleasure in disdainfully scuppering its plans, are good to see and great to watch. And despite the coming departure of his longest ally, Pertwee seems more comfortable than ever in this scene – baiting a disembodied voice (but what a voice!).

So perhaps, he's off too. Perhaps this is just what he needs. But to where, and with whom? Who could possibly take the place of Katy Manning's consummately performed Josephine Grant...?

Scarier than any story this season, but also cosier and camper (escape in milk float to hippy commune, for example), this is a strong story by a team with real fondness for the world they've constructed - and a forlorn recognition that nothing goes on forever.

Planet of the Daleks

Apparently, with this story I officially arrive at the midway point of pre-2005 Doctor Who. I am deep in the thick of the alien jungle, green light bathing my face, up to my pac-a-mac elbows in deadly plant spume, weird Dick Mill bird noises screeching round my bewildered head. But doesn't it feel a good deal further from Survival than An Unearthly Child? More to the point, doesn't 1964's The Dead Planet feel very near?

After the mordant political allegory of the previous story – well, alright, after the Master and his sardonic, thoroughly 1970s attitude to everyone he meets –

this story is utterly wide-eyed. Political machinations and humanity's latent fear of the Other are displaced as threats by invisible aliens, eye-plants and – 'Daleks!' Even in the 1960s, the show was never as Flash Gordon as this, with its improvised air rafts and ice volcanoes. What with the gaudy colour scheme, this feels more like the Chad Valley Give-A-Show Projector era.

I already miss the Master. Without him around, pretty much everybody in the story is just too nice. Too selfless. Too sweet. The Master is above such things, and one can imagine him rolling his eyes at any number of homilies from Uncle Pertwee in this story, not to mention the stone-age sexual politics governing the Thals romantic relationships. The Master isn't just evil – he's amoral, completely uncommitted to a principle, an objective or another person. He has the detachment of a TV viewer: he smokes and drinks and laughs, rather cynically, at anyone taking themselves too seriously.

But this is a story completely without that cynicism, and we are encouraged to set ours aside for the duration of the story too. The production team are aiming for high grade escapism, and do you know what? I think they do a fantastic job. The story moves at a fair pace, six episodes feeling like four, and the many outrageous set-pieces, the weird planet of Spiridon and its subterranean city, are painted on the screen in wonderfully gaudy hues. It's a massive improvement on Solos, and even Omega's anti-world.

Another improvement concerns the Daleks.  Back in the Day, they looked and sounded about as threatening as a clothes airer with a cat stuck in it – a far cry from the devious, quasi-demonic villains of the 1960s. In this story, David Maloney pulls them back from that ignominy. They still don't behave like the sharpest egg-whisks in the kitchen, with so many plans to attack the Universe they can't pick one to go with first, and end up a) locking themselves in a room with their own deadly contagion, b) situating their army fatally close to a deadly volcano, and c) leaving their spaceship unguarded so their enemies can just stroll in and fly away in it.

But they sound proper. Crunchy. And hysterical. They rant like coked-up executives having mental breakdowns. Their Supreme, who looks utterly edible, goes so far as to exterminate one of his inferiors after too much bad news in the board room: sort of like the denouement of The Apprentice, but with ring modulators and luminous eyestalks. Brilliant.

There's even a scene where the Doctor has to clamber into a nest of groggy Daleks, their sucker arms twitching at his velvet coat-tails. It's one example of a story doing style over substance, but doing it pretty deliciously.

As well as being midway through the series, I have my own particular fondness for this story. Shown on Friday nights for the thirtieth anniversary, Planet of the Daleks was the last Who I watched not as a fan. I saw it with the detachment of any other television viewer, even with some amusement. (When I bought The Dead Planet script-book in 1994, it was 'for a laugh'. Ha.) I thought of it as entirely representative of the Pertwee era, and in fact, of Doctor Who in general.

Funnily enough, sitting here and writing this now, I can't tell whether I was right or wrong.

But I do think it's a pity we don't have a shot of the Thals entering the Dalek spaceship at the story's end, a fair-haired man already at the controls. A man who turns to greet them, lifts a black-gloved hand, sweeps off the blonde wig, to reveal...

Frontier in Space

Doctor Who is a lovely example of the wise adage, ‘Less is more’, along with the philosophy, ‘Wise adages are for wimps, let’s give it a try anyway.’ Every now and then, its makers decide to go epic, grand, Cecil B. DeMille crazy. The temptation is there: your canvas is the size of the history of the Universe, can you really restrict your painting to one corner at a time? And when Doctor Who goes epic, the running time always goes up – possibly to stretch the budget a bit further, possibly to fit in extra world-building and character stuff.

From The Daleks’ Master Plan to The End of Time, via Evil of the Daleks, The Invasion and The War Games, with Day of the Doctor thrown in for good measure: small is beautiful but big is special. And so with Frontier in Space and its sequel Planet of the Daleks.

These last two are interesting, in that they’re essentially a remake of that big Hartnell mega-story. Future dystopias, Global Presidents struggling to hold onto power, prison ships, weird-looking aliens in galactic peace treaties, and the Daleks: they’re all here. The Monk has been supplanted by the Master. Jo, like Katarina, is imprisoned in an airlock, though she comes out of that a bit better. It’s a bold idea, for an era without VHS: to return to the ideas, and ‘reimagine’ them for the new era.

They skipped the Dixon of Dock Green parody, but then, life isn't fair.

I’m a big fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan, and a 1970s tribute is justified. I wouldn’t have minded another remake with Davison, Ainley, Davros and Beryl Reid – and another with Smith, Kingston and some CGI Varga Plants. The Pertwee era brings swagger, helped by some familiar faces and ideas: look at Jo Grant, chewing gum in her calf-length platform boots, telling the Doctor off for a ‘traffic accident in space’, then asking whether the Earth Empire is the same one she saw on Solos, and are the Ogrons working for the Daleks...?

It’s a very good story for Jo. She gets a lot of funny lines, two good outfits, she talks sense to the Draconian Emperor and puts the Master in his place: ‘Oh well, can’t win ‘em all!’ In fact, she gives us perhaps the big moment of the story, even the season. Rejecting the Master’s hypnosis, she then overcomes his little box of frights. This is a story about the power of fear, but ‘It doesn’t work on me any more,’ says Jo.

It’s a timely bit of progression, with only two more stories of Ms Grant still to enjoy. When a companion isn’t scared any more, it’s probably time for somebody new.

Unfortunately, it’s not timely in a narrative sense. Really this should be the conclusion of the story, not thrown away as a cliff-hanger resolution. It’s typical of a story that never quite knows when it’s underway. Rather peculiarly, the Daleks travel across space to wave from a cliff-top, then set off for home: a twist delayed too far, another cliff-hanger missed. This is the thing about over-extending Who: it never ends well. Or, it might end well and open well, but for several episodes in the middle you’ll be checking your watch.

Never when Roger Delgado is onscreen, though. I’m not big on the Doctor having a recurring nemesis, but there’s no two ways about it – this works. Has worked. It’s the end of an era. The end of a true peer for the Doctor, now that the Brigadier’s been rewritten as a military buffoon; the end of a superb, sharp counterpoint to the Doctor and Jo’s almost oversweet moral certainty; the end of a delicious performance, which Malcolm Hulke supplies with endless riches: the Master has more character moments, victories and funny lines than the Doctor's had all season.

Perhaps that's the real reason this story never quite galvanises. The Doctor fades into a rather bland hero: even his outfit seems less dandyish, somehow, shirts less frill-fronted, frock coat less frockish.

But of course, the story’s not over – not in any sense. In the last five minutes, where nothing makes sense, the Doctor is fatally wounded. In a Tenth Planet-esque effort of will, he clutches the console, desperately contacting the Time Lords. The Tardis flies into the darkness – the atmosphere is grave – the scene is set...

Carnival of Monsters

In retrospect, it seems odd that Doctor Who's anniversary story should be so world-building, so forward-thinking, so unlike the stories of the First and Second, even to a large extent, the Third Doctor – only for the following story to encapsulate, in many regards, intrinsic qualities running throughout the series, and to reflect on them too. But that's what Robert Holmes, and the rest of the production team, managed to do.

It's not just that the Doctor and Jo are back in time and space. They went to the planet of the flea people last year, and the lost city of Atlantis not long after (Jo even got her hair done there). Carnival of Monsters, like my beloved Curse of Peladon, has a cosmic worldview, one that mirrors the unbounded multiplicity of a writer's imagination. Vorg the showman is really Robert Holmes in a false moustache: he can gather who he likes together, make them fight, pick them out of one world and drop them in another. As Jo says, at one point, 'I suppose we're due for monster bit in a minute.'

Like the Doctor (another double of his, in many regards) he's a figure who represents endless invention and mutability. If you can imagine it, the Tardis can take you there, and in this story multiple worlds are conjured up: Inter Minor, 1920s Earth, Drashiggia, and those places only gestured toward – the backwaters and fairgrounds that Vorg and Shirna tap dance in and out of, the Doctor's home planet, where he once ran a political campaign, and the worlds of Ogrons, Cybermen, Prehistoric Earth. In the Miniscope (which is, what – the story, the telly, broadcast media in general?) they can be interwoven.

It's all imagined and woven together so apparently effortlessly, each with its own little narrative, that the viewer really thinks – yes, the Universe really is a big place. And yes, it really is all one thing. Either because we can make it one narrative, or because we can bring it all together and look at it, or because we can travel between them all – these many worlds are all combined in us, our minds, our lives.

Holmes makes the continuity of worlds part of the colour and liveliness of the story. Alien travellers in the far future still use polari – in fact, they sometimes work fairgrounds on Earth (and do we realise they are not Earthmen when we see them?). Grey people called Shallak can fall for the same old cup-and-ball routine you see in old movies. Shirna, the hoofer from beyond the stars, even shares the viewer's POV, entertained by the Doctor's heroics, lifted out of her despondency by the magic of the Tardis dematerialisation at the end.

But it's all one thing in a serious way, too. We are shown that the actions of the audience are not disconnected from the lives of the people they watch, or the governing body that permits the show to run. The personal is political.

This is really a satire on how storytelling runs the world, the unreal representing and sometimes governing the real – from the romantic novel read by a man of the Empire ('Good heavens, a memsahib!' he exclaims, on discovering Jo) which ends disappointingly with a character becoming a missionary, to the machinations of the grey people to make bad news for the President (and play down bad news about the working masses). Power, oppression, pleasure, are all in the same industry.

The Three Doctors has no real story: its pleasure is all in the interplay of Doctors, companions, Omega himself. The problem at the heart of the story is a sad paradox: the freedom of the Time Lords is founded on the suffering of one man. The question is never asked, Is it worth it, or Can we find a compromise? Omega has already gone mad and tried to destroy the universe – the cartooniness of Bob Baker and Dave Martin, which works in its own way – leaves us nowhere to go but a big bang and a scream. In Carnival of Monsters, the oppressive Miniscope is partially transformed into a Tardis, a symbol of liberation. Then it's destroyed – and everything is changed.

Even Vorg becomes temporarily heroic. But like the Doctor, he finishes the story as a man of words rather than status – a vagabond, exactly as the Doctor identifies himself, surviving on his wits.

What's distinctively Doctor Who about this story, is the lightness of touch. It's a complex story, but deftly presented for a general audience: playful rather than self-important. Visually, it's a treat - and it's actually funny. The little guys win the upper hand, and not just by escaping a dimensional compression field. When the Doctor faces the Tribunal at last, he beats them immediately on the strength of his rhetoric – a Doctorish victory more persuasive than the combined Three Doctors managed last story, and a brilliant moment for Jon Pertwee.

Just when you start to think the show has changed completely, or that in leaving UNIT behind it might fall back on old stories, it reminds us why this show means something: invention, reinvention, liberation and alienness.

Can it last...?

The Three Doctors

Season 10 is an interesting time for Doctor Who to be introspective. For all that Patrick Troughton's era has a different emphasis to William Hartnell's, superficially it's still just, 'But Doctor, where have we landed this week...?' It was noticeable as early as Spearhead in Space that the producers were courting a new audience, and we've made it through three seasons with no glancing back, no references to successes of recent memory (Yeti, Cybermen, Jamie's hairy legs). There was one encounter with the dreaded Daleks, and the one with the Ice Warriors saw them in a new light.

The format of the show has changed, of course ('But Doctor, who is it that's landed where we are this week...?'), but the much bigger difference is the complete reimagining of Doctor Who into Doctor Time Lord; the man of mystery becoming the man who ran away from Shangri-la, who grew up on a mountainside, talking to hermits, went to school with a kid who grew up to be the universe's most dedicated moustache-twirler, and now lives in exile, doing occasional cosmic courier work and driving vintage cars down country lanes at twice the speed of sound.

Quite strikingly, while it celebrates the past, this is a story it would be impossible for the show to have told in any previous era.

With this story, we get a potted history of his home world, not to mention an insight into Time Lord society: when their President foresees the loss of their 'time travel facility', he fears becoming 'as vulnerable as those we are pledged to protect'. They are the ultimate, the omniscient superpower, not 'intervening' but nevertheless 'Lording' it up. Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts have steadily developed this culture to the extent that practically everything the Doctor is or does is within its context. This cosmogony - a spectrum of enlightenment with the portentous President and Chancellor at one end, the Brig and Benton at the other, and Jo and the Doctor in the middle - seems bound to keep producing stories about magic, technology and god. What is the best way of seeing the world? What is the nature of power?

The result has been a new version of our hero with wants and cares. The First Doctor, for example, was never seen to think particularly of redemption of the Monk, as the Third  does of the Master. The Third Doctor is pained by Omega's impossible yearning to be free: for only a second, but a second longer than the Second Doctor ever considered his adversaries.

Omega is the Doctor seen through a CSO effect darkly: stranded on an alien world by the Time Lords, driven insane with resentment and pride, and Master of all he surveys. He is not content to be a hero, like Jon Pertwee. He quite fancies being a God. Perhaps the Doctor should tell another little anecdote, about Azal and the Daemons, and how they ended up.

There is a case for saying that these ideas remain under-developed in favour of daring escapes to inevitable dangers, and it's a strong case. I must say it would be good to see the Third Doctor envying his younger self's cavalier attitude to time travel, to see Jo disputing with the President of the High Council, or have the Brigadier say goodbye to his scientific adviser as if he means it ('Wonderful chap - both of him,' being more than adequate, I suppose). But equally, the show's treatment of all these ideas would be nothing without the lightness and irreverence they receive here. Troughton's performance is emblematic, but Manning and Courtney know their stuff too, and the whole shebang has genuine charm. Even Hartnell, perhaps my favourite Doctor, is included in the warm glow. I love the way he calls everyone into the Tardis at the end, sounding more 1970s grandad than 1890s grandfather: 'Everything okay?'

And then, in one tiny scene, the story arc of three seasons is resolved. The Doctor is given his Tardis back. Even though the script is rather awkward about it, Jon Pertwee knows what this means to his Doctor, and Katy Manning is on the same page. The show has been entirely rewritten, and the reward is a feeling of narrative progression, expansion of the Doctor's character along with his universe, and all in what could have been the most self-indulgent, self-regarding story of the series.

But Doctor, the question is, where next...?