Doctor Who Season 17: Doctor In a Holistic Detective Story

The story so far: with the Fourth Doctor era now, in terms of number of seasons, exceeding that of the First, Second, and Third, Tom Baker has become synonymous with the role. The first chunk of his tenure, with the dream team of Philip Hinchcliffe producing and Robert Holmes as story editor, was magnificent, but current producer Graham Williams has a patchier record, with his first season in charge finding him and Anthony Read (the new story editor) struggling towards the end due to a horrendous economic crisis and his second season – The Key To Time – being commendable for its ambition but somewhat botched in terms of quality control.

Still, with the new season there was every reason to expect the script editing to tighten up – for Anthony Read, who’d done the job for the back end of season 15 and the whole Key To Time saga, was stepping down, and replacing him was one of the best writers the show had available: Douglas Adams. His first full serial in the role is Destiny of the Daleks, which is notable for being the very last story that Terry Nation wrote for Doctor Who. Put an asterisk next to “wrote”, however: although he was credited with the script for it, Douglas Adams alleged that he didn’t really receive a proper script from Nation for it, merely several pages’ worth of story notes largely rehashing old Dalek plots. Ken Grieve, who directed the serial, has backed Adams on this, stating that what you see onscreen is 98% Adams’ work.

Whether or not you believe Adams or Grieve, nobody disputes that the story was subjected to significant rewrites. K9 is in it, for instance – there’s some business about him staying behind in the TARDIS because he’s ill with robot laringytis, an excuse to replace John Leeson with David Brierley as his voice actor due to Leeson quitting (though Leeson would be back next season in the role) – and Nation has made it clear that he didn’t intend to include K9 in the story at all.

Likewise, Nation probably wouldn’t have been involved in writing the scene introducing Lalla Ward as a regenerated Romana – not least because it was a bit up in the air as to whether Mary Tamm would come back to shoot a regeneration scene. In the end she didn’t, so we have a bit where Romana is trying on different forms for her regeneration before settling on mimicing Princess Astra of Atrios (way to be a creep, Romana). People have griped about this because it seems to treat regeneration as far more relaxed and controlled than when the Doctor does it; my headcanon on this is that the Doctor is simply a bit rubbish at regeneration, largely because he only does it when he’s on the verge of death, whilst more capable Time Lords regenerate at a time of their choosing and are able to exert much more control over the process. (That said, it is kind of a shame Mary Tamm elected not to come back – because there’s a bit in the plot which would be perfect to have her regeneration happen in – and between Leela, the First Romana, and K9 Mark I, Graham Williams is now three for three on companions who get a rubbish exit.)

Doctor Who Season 16: Doctor On a Quest

After three excellent seasons shepherded by Philip Hinchcliffe, the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who had a slightly shaky transitional season as Graham Williams took on the producer role, with Anthony Read replacing Robert Holmes as script editor late in the season just as the budgets utterly disintegrated due to the UK’s economic doldrums. Now that Williams had settled in and the economic situation had somewhat stabilised, he could turn his attention away from fighting fires and try something ambitious – more ambitious, in some respects, than anything tried during the First, Second, or Third Doctor’s tenures: a season-long story arc, in which each serial would tie into one central story, The Key To Time.

We kick off with The Ribos Operation, by Robert Holmes, which is tasked with setting up the overarching plot: the Doctor’s finished building K9 Mark II, and has decided to go on holiday, but his journey is interrupted by a mysterious presence which overrides the TARDIS entirely and forces it to manifest. It’s the White Guardian (Cyril Luckham), a cosmic entity that even the Time Lords defer to, who informs the Doctor that the universe’s forces have been nudged so out of whack it’s necessary to pause time momentarily, adjust everything, and then start things up again.

The White Guardian, protector of the Kentucky Fried Cosmos.

To do that, though, the Guardian needs the Key To Time – a cube whose six components have been scattered throughout the cosmos and disguised as various different artifacts; he tasks the Doctor with finding them and returning them so that they can do the system reset on the flow of time, but warns that the Black Guardian, the White Guardian’s opposite number, will be seeking the Key for an entirely different purpose.

That’s not the end of the surprises for the Doctor at the start of the story; the Doctor will need someone to help him on his quest, and that someone is the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar (Mary Tamm), or Romana for short – a recent graduate from the Time Lord academy, where she aced every semester and she got an “A”. Romana brings to the table three important advantages: a total refusal to let the Doctor talk down to her or treat her as an assistant, a full awareness of how much of a bullshit artist he is, and the core of the Key, which allows the TARDIS to home in on the general proximity of the Key fragments, helps the holder zero in on its precise location, and causes Key components to revert to their true forms when brought into contact with it. Looks like K9 will have to wait for his holiday…

The Douglas Adams Core Canon

There will come a point in my ongoing Doctor Who coverage that I’ll have to talk about season 17 and Shada – which will mean that I have to talk about Douglas Adams a fair bit. Therefore, with the intention of getting myself ready for that, I may as well do a quick little side journey here to cover what you might call the Adams “core canon” – the major works of his once you trim away collaborations (which account for a good chunk of his output). That’ll be the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, plus the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency novels, plus The Salmon of Doubt, which has bits of relevance to both in it and is a posthumous odds and sods collection.

What I won’t be covering here is either of the Dirk Gently TV series, or the big budget movie version of Hitchhiker’s Guide; these all came to fruition without Adams seeing them through to the end, due to him dying in 2001. (Adams’ death just before 9/11 is a bit like David Bowie’s death just before the Brexit referendum – an omen that some really shit times are just around the corner.) We can’t know what he’d have thought of them, can’t fully blame him for their mistakes, and can’t fully praise him for their good bits. Moreover, much of the appeal of Adams’ works comes from his delightful turns of phrase, and so once he died we were left with either interminable remixing and picking over the scraps or people trying to mimic his tone of voice, neither of which could be 100% satisfying from my perspective because ersatz-Adams as far as I am concerned isn’t Adams at all. Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing…, the Adams estate’s officially-endorsed sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, can fuck right off.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy

This is the one which largely doesn’t need to be summarised or reviewed, because it was repackaged and reimagined many times within Adams’ lifetime and beyond it and was a massive hit in several of the forms it incarnated in. Its first form was as the first season of the radio series, six half-hour episodes of hilarity broadcast in March-April 1978, and it’s from these episodes (or “Fits”) which the foundational elements of most subsequent adaptations are obtained.

In particular, you get Arthur Dent’s house being demolished, Arthur Dent’s planet being demolished, Ford Prefect rescuing Arthur from the Earth, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian rescuing Arthur and Ford from being tossed out an airlock by the Vogons (said rescue being an accidental side effect of the Heart of Gold‘s Infinite Improbability Drive), the robots and machines with Genuine People Personalities (including Marvin the Paranoid Android), Magrathea, Earth being a computer, “42” being the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything for which Earth was meant to calculate the question, mice being behind the construction of Earth, the Restaurant At the End of the Universe, Arthur and Ford being stranded on prehistoric Earth with the occupants of the Golgafrinchan B-Ark, and all of this being interspersed with deadpan narration and quotable quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, which boldly declares “Don’t Panic” on its cover. (The Golgafrinchan B-Ark was originally the concept for a script a fresher-faced Adams submitted for season 12 of Doctor Who, but which was rejected because the show was already cooking up The Ark In Space.)