BBC2 / BBCHD - 16th and 23rd July 2009 -10.00pm

We're back to the regular series format for Episode Five after the giddy heights of the previous week's Hitchcock homage. Kicking off with the Astons returning from a night out and Joy desperate to get doll Freddy attached to her breast, this utterly bonkers series has us actually believing that Freddy really is alive. But more on that later. Bob asks the Crabtree sisters the questions that we all would like answered: 'How do you go to the toilet?' 'I assume each of you has your own anus?' Not something to ask in polite company whilst you're digging into a nice chocolate eclair.

There is a a wonderfully sick gag when Mr. Lomax spins an extremely heart-rending tale outside Ian's bedroom door in order to get him to talk and eventually hand over Snappy the Crocodile. Typically, Shearsmith and Pemberton weave a tale of Hamley's black mohair bears made in memory of all the children that drowned after the Titanic sank and Lomax's need to keep the inner child alive through his collection, all beautifully and mournfully scored by Joby Talbot, and then undercut it with Ian opening the door behind Lomax and in a thick brummie accent declare, 'I can't hear a word you're saying'.



After a brief catch up with the panto dwarves, which for me is the weakest of the sub-plots in the series, we're back to Joy Aston and little Freddy Fruitcake. He's started to call for his mum over the baby intercom and in a rather disturbing sequence, lit rather fantastically too, Joy goes to Freddy's room only to see her doll, animated and darting about the room. It's a wonderful play on Child's Play but also reminiscent of the TV movie Tales Of Terror where the iconic Karen Black is menaced by a rather savage voodoo doll. As Joy is bitten and then attacked, she yells, 'I think you need some Calpol!' The scene does rather get overworked with Freddy, riding a toy car and knocking Joy down the stairs. The boys have obviously been watching The Omen again.

Love the great visual joke of the nurse shrieking at the huge teddy bear seemingly walking down the ward towards her only for Robert to pop out from behind it on his visit to the comatose Debbie. There's a nice visual reference to the earlier mention of Biggins switching the Christmas lights on (and quite honestly the late Autumn would have been the ideal time to show this series. It seems odd that this is going out in July if you ask me) as Robert emulates the story of Sleeping Beauty and wakes Debbie up with a kiss and the lights go on with a cheer outside the window.

Whilst Joy deals with the murderous Freddy and we get that marvelous twist of George and Nicola plotting to bump her off (even though it's fudged slightly as to how Freddy actually becomes so animated), Jelly and Jolly get to sit in a car and do nothing more than give us exposition about Jolly working as a consultant in a psychiatric hospital (as revealed in the previous episode) and surprise, surprise that all the characters were inmates being cruelly treated by the evil Nurse Kenchington (Eileen Atkins in wonderfully severe form).



Despite this rather uninspiring revelation, the episode has one more moment of brilliance to offer up. David and Maureen have lured their next victim from Murder And Chips to a wax works and it is while David prepares to murder him that all the wax works of Haigh, Christie (Shearsmith doing a blindingly good version of Richard Attenborough as Christie from 10 Rillington Place) and Ellis come to life, take the piss out of each other and the actors who played them on screen and then proceed to do a musical number with Jack The Ripper as the leading man! It's breathtakingly left field, wonderfully performed and scored and a perfect summation of David's troubled little mind. David and Maureen wander off without killing their victim, Robin, it seems. Robin has an idea for a Murder And Chips evening where all the wax works come to life. Spookily, Jack tells him it's already been done.

By Episode Six, Joy is out for revenge against Nicola and George, both of whom have assumed she's died of heart failure after Freddy's attack. Lomax's associate, Tealeaf, has driven off with the Crabtree sisters in search of Snappy's owner. The tedious sub-plot with Robert and the panto drags on again, with Debbie now convinced Robert is her fiance, but it does provide us with a reinvigorating twist when Robert's friend Kerry reveals that it is she with the telekinetic powers and not him. It's the liveliest that plot has been through the entire series.



Better is the short scene in casualty when a distraught Joy, screaming that her baby's head has come off, is told by the Doctor, 'I'll get you a needle and thread.' And I love that whole sequence with Tealeaf and the Crabtree sisters in the van. In an attempt to steal the money Tealeaf...er...Michael Fry has to pretend to want to date Kelly Su. Chelsea is horrified, 'He's just interested in what's between your legs. All that filthy green stuff.' 'You are talking about the money, ain't you?'

This episode pretty much preoccupies itself with setting up the big reveal about who is the blackmailer and how they are connected to the characters' incarceration in Ravenhill. The writers try to keep us guessing over the blackmailer's identity - could it be Mr. Jolly, or Robert, or Nurse Kenchington (she might not be dead as we are led to assume)...and whilst all this is going on in a frenzy of quick cutting between the characters that's actually quite annoying here, Maureen's down at B&Q buying an indoor barbeque for the last of the Murder And Chips crowd. And she has a little moment of realisation when David's friend spells it out about his 'bad murder'.



Meanwhile, Mr. Jelly has been inadvertently handcuffed to a pensioner from a care home. Don't ask. He's returned home to discover his front door open and Mr. Jolly's body on the floor of the living room. He's been suffocated by a blue plastic bag. Watch out for the blue plastic bag. And are we sure it's really Mr. Jolly lying there? It's the episode's Macguffin. Whilst he and the pensioner hide from a man in black carving up Jolly's body, she regaling him of stories about vibrators, back at the theatre the panto turns into a moment from Carrie as Kerry reveals that it was her wot dunnit. She does a splendid Sissy Spacek routine with slamming doors, and pins Debbie against a wall with the Seven Dwarves' pick axes.

If that isn't bonkers enough, Kerry then manages to put the blame on Robert in front of the other dwarves (such a cruel joke that they're all too small to climb up on stage to the rescue) and as he escapes, the queeny Brian materialises in full wicked Queen drag and belts him across the head with a shovel. Did I mention this series was seriously deranged?



Joy breaks into Ravenhill to perform a blood transfusion from the kidnapped Nicola and Michael Fry also arrives to complete the purchase of Snappy the Crocodile. 'Look, he's already got the colour coming back into his cheeks!' cries Joy as Nicola's blood leaks out of Freddy's unseeing doll eyes. Maureen returns to the flat, now fully realising that their murder spree was based on David's misunderstood confession of 'I've done a bad murder'. It's a brilliantly dark scene as an overdosed Maureen grabs a pillow and decides to suffocate David in order to spare them both arrest. Except of course, David isn't in bed, a balloon bursts where his head should be and Maureen, realising she's poisoned herself, shoves her fingers down her throat. Twisted stuff.

As Joy drains Nicola of blood, back in his mansion Lomax is depressed that his latest helper loves Tony Hancock. She promptly and aptly quotes that infamous line from The Blood Donor. Lomax gets a call from Tealeaf, now locked in a room in Ravenhill with Snappy, and obviously Lomax will join the rest of the characters, including David carrying a rather suspicious blue plastic bag, for the finale in Episode Seven.

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SPOILERS AHEAD

You have been warned.

It seems, judging by the blurry trailer below that debuted at this weekend's Comic Con, that we might possibly know a number of things and definitely can confirm others about the final days of the Tenth Doctor.

Timothy Dalton's opening narration opens onto a quick grab bag montage of returning characters (Donna, Wilf, Sylvia and the Ood) and then that final moment when a hoodie wearing blonde chap by the name of John Simm turns to the camera and announces his return as...The Master!

Blimey.

And it looks like the final Tennant episode is called The End Of Time

At last, a new trailer for the forthcoming Doctor Who special, The Waters Of Mars. Now this really looks the business! Roll on November.

BBC2 / BBCHD - 2nd and 9th July 2009 -10.00pm

Episode Three opens in very confident style. A nightmarish, colourfully garish 'Clown Court' where Mr. Jelly is accused of stealing Mr. Jolly's act and then told 'you killed her, didn't you'. Anyone tuning in at this point must have thought they'd gone mad because it's quite simply one of the oddest things that's been seen on British television for a while. It's beautifully and simply put together by director Matt Lipsey who then goes to town on dutch angles and wide lenses, dropping in litle moments such as the little girl in a party frock bashing away on a typewriter like some diminutive court stenographer. It culminates in a life sized Mr. Punch slicing off Mr. Jelly's hand. Somehow, I can't see this being a Christmas panto at Drury Lane.

Dawn French provides another helping of malignant put downs ('I see Dr. Miriam Stoppard has snuck back in. Hello, Miriam? How's Tom? Oh, no. Sorry, of course she left you for Felicity Kendall') as she introduces her class to a birthing pool. French has been perfect for the role of Joy Aston, providing a strained pathos for a clearly delusional woman whilst also being brilliantly acerbic in her observations of mums to be.



The Sowerbutts are also at their revolting best. The scene where Maureen chews a piece of sausage in order to then make it digestable for her repellent son is certainly memorable, especially when there's that great tag to the joke when she makes him use a fork when he tries to pick the part digested food off his plate with his fingers. They realise that their previous murder has now turned into a serial killer spree to kill all those who saw him 'do a bad murder' at the Murder And Chips evening. Meanwhile, in Dudley, the search for Snappy the crocodile goes on with the Crabtree sisters and Mr. Lomax converging on the house of eBay sellers Karen and Bob. Love the reveal of the two sisters pressed up against the patio window.



Perhaps one of the best sequences in Episode Three is the flashback to a younger Mr. Jelly and the complications of the surgery for his RSI (from too many kids' parties) and an origin story for the 'red raw stump' and also for Mr. Jolly, who turns out to be his surgeon. It's genuinely tragic when Jelly wakes up, in full clown make-up incidentally, to hold up his bandaged arm and that pathos is carried by Shearsmith's lovely performance. It's bittersweet, undercut with that gag of both his GP and his surgeon providing a running commentary, and there's a bravura piece of visual storytelling as we see Jelly trained to use his prosthetic limb whilst gradually he gives away all his tricks of the trade as an entertainer to Mr. Jolly who, by the end of the sequence, has donned bright purple gloves and clown make up and stolen his entire act. Wonderfully done.

And it doesn't end there. Flash forward to the present day and there's a frantically hilarious chase sequence round an indoor children's play area (the 'no shoes' gag is great, the soap in the eye moment is hilarious) that is again told in a purely visual slapstick manner, harking back to the masters of silent comedy, including some great hand held shooting too. Back with Joy Aston, a video arriving in the post gives us a clue to how all these characters are connected. And Freddy seems to be acquiring a life of his own as Joy's husband confronts her about her obsession with the doll.



David and Maureen, dragged up as beauticians from The Gentle Touch beauty salon ('...this is Jill Gascoigne and I'm Maggie Forbes'), and here Shearsmith and Pemberton are also clearly giving us an homage to a very similar scene in the cult classic Theatre Of Blood, barge in on Murder And Chips player Cheryl McGinnis (Janet McTeer) to give her a very special make over ('...when I first met Jill, she looked like Brian Blessed, didn't ya Jill'). It's a very funny scene and McTeer is really game to be left to the mercy of Shearsmith and Pemberton.

Back in the panto, midget Robert uses his telekinetic powers to ensure Sleeping Beauty Debbie lives up to her character's name. And the bidding for Snappy the crocodile is a joyous pisstake of anal collectors everywhere as the sellers attempt to pass off a sock with buttons as Snappy and Lomax and the Crabtrees are reduced to insults (...'serves you right for dealing with Mr. Magoo there'. 'That sounds rich coming from a Push Me Pull You').

A fabulous episode ends on a shock revelation as Joy watches the video, featuring all the characters in a mental institution and David plaintively singing "A Land of Our Own" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and we see Mr. Jolly amongst the medical staff.



Episode Four is a three-hander between Shearsmith, Pemberton and fellow Leaguer Mark Gatiss. I don't quite know what they were trying to achieve by emulating Hitchcock's classic Rope, and similarly using a single set and continuous takes as well as lifting many visual tropes from the film. It opens as the film opens, a slow pan towards an apartment window and then a quick cut to two people strangling a third. The Hitchcock is laid on a little too thickly by having the stabbing strings from Psycho playing over the murder and would seem initially to just come over as indulgence. However, once the body is despatched into an antique trunk, Maureen whips off her marigolds and ironically deflates the tension by comically inflating her gloves whilst Henry Kelly announces on the radio they've just been listening to 'Movie Magic'.

Shearsmith in particular should be singled out for his performance here, perfectly capturing Maureen's exhaustion and world-weariness under the layers of latex. It's a brilliant tragi-comic creation. And after two and a half minutes of no dialogue, Maureen sums it all up with, 'Well, shall I put the kettle on? I'm absolutely gasping!' Whilst David eloquently sums up the serial-killer raison d'etre, Maureen succintly responds with, 'Like I say, it's more-ish' and she is only really bothered about trying out some pyramid tea bags.



In the end, Episode Four is not about the flummery of riffing from Hitchcock's Rope. It is about Maureen as a serial-killer and the revelations about the fate of David's Dad. David maybe obsessed with the history of such killers but it's Maureen who really is a killer even though initially she blames David. As David reels off a litany of poisoners and Maureen, as she dusts the victim's flat, snaps back her cynical responses ('Which Doctor administered lethal doses of hydrobromide?' 'Oh, I don't know. Dr. Legg off Eastenders') it all culminates with the accusation that he poisoned his own Dad with 39 sleeping pills in a dinner of instant potato

Shearsmith and Pemberton are masters of these characters, even if this does disrupt the format of the series at this point, and it's a chance for us to get beneath the surface and find out what makes the Sowerbutts tick. It's pure performance, with little or no incidental music and just a roving camera for company. They breathe some much needed humanity into what were, originally, just a pair of comedy grotesques. The revelations are painful and quite disturbing. And then there's the 'cheering up' tape. Utterly hilarious. Black Lace's Superman Song, a much reviled party favourite, will never be quite the same again. Love the bit where Maureen flutters her cardigan as she does her version of Superman.



They are interrupted by the arrival of Mark Gatiss. He plays Jason Griffin...or does he? We're led to believe he's the James Stewart character and is investigating the Sowerbutts trail of murders. The episode's terrific bluff is that in fact he's an actor who has come to audition for the Murder And Chips troupe. Before he gets to reveal that we are treated to a great bit of line feeding between all three performers. Maureen's description of what they use the Queen Ann chest for (after the requisite boob jokes) is lovely, 'Broken glass, nettles, dead wasps, that sort of thing' and has a Leagueish surreality about it. And Griffin's recital of Freud's theory about each man wanting to sleep with his mother and kill his father is the cue for some further physical comedy from Pemberton. And if you watch Gatiss closely you'll realise that as soon as Maureen mentions police work being more like working in a bank he drops the Griffin character momentarily, offering a glimpse of the man's true identity.

A wonderful, funny episode with one of the highlights being the scene where David attempts to stab Griffin only for the cuckoo clock to go off and the ensuing embarrassed silence broken finally by David proferring a plate of biscuits and simply saying 'Hobnob?'. Hitting the heights of farce with moving dead bodies and covering them with coats, it's at this point that Gatiss turns out to be a very camp amateur actor, who works at the Abbey National, thinking he's come to an audition ('Oh, I'm really nervous. Sorry, I keep trumping. It stinks, ' he says with a waft of his hand).



It concludes with that stunning confessional from Maureen when she's still convinced that Griffin is a real policeman. We find out that Maureen was a battered wife ('He used to beat me. It's what people did before they had tellys') and that she poisoned David's Dad. And that she 'created' David, made him a 'monster'. She has to explain herself when Griffin recounts what she confessed back to David and has just about bluffed her way through when Griffin pops up, discovers the dead body and the whole murderous cycle begins again. A superb script ends with Maureen smiling to herself as David strangles Griffin accompanied by Black Lace's song again. Such a very, very dark conclusion.

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SEASON FIVE: “The First Duty Of A Revolutionary Is To Get Away With It” - Part Four
(c) 2009 Frank Collins. If you wish to quote from this article please ask the author's permission.

Mind The Doors Of Perception

Above: Jon Pertwee and a Yeti...on a loo, yesterday.

The Web Of Fear, set in the London Underground, is the epitome of the ‘yeti on the loo’ concept, a phrase coined by, oddly enough, Troughton’s successor Jon Pertwee, to explain the shift the series would undergo when the Time Lord was exiled to Earth by the start of Season 7 in 1970. It's ironic that the sound effect of the yeti's roar was also concocted by slowing down the recording of a flushing loo. The battle with the Yeti in the Underground was certainly a trial run for the UNIT set up and indeed introduced us to Colonel (later Brigadier) Lethbridge-Stewart, a character that would become a stalwart of the series. ‘Yeti On The Loo’ proposes that it’s far more interesting to bring the alien menaces to the familiar setting of Earth than it is meeting them in outer space. Many of the Troughton ‘base under siege’ stories rehearse this idea as early as The Faceless Ones (and, with Hartnell, even earlier if you go back to The War Machines), and become almost formulaic by the time The Web Of Fear and The Invasion are transmitted.

It forever changed the idea of how the series was, and still is, perceived by the general public, and later producers Philip Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams emphatically moved the series away from contemporary Earth bound UNIT/Doctor conflicts with aliens. They could see the limitations of Innes Lloyd’s attempt to bring ‘realism’ to the series and saw it as a proverbial millstone round the neck of the programme. To them it simply repeated and repackaged particular post-war tropes in British SF, in the dystopias thoroughly explored by John Wyndham in The Day Of The Triffids and by Nigel Kneale with the Quatermass series on television. The Web Of Fear and Fury From The Deep, already an adaptation of Victor Pemberton’s radio serial The Slide, follow hot on the heels of Wyndham, described by Brian Aldiss as the "master of the cosy catastrophe." As in The Kraken Wakes, the weed creatures living at the bottom of a pipeline in Fury From The Deep can be destroyed by amplified sound. As in Quatermass And The Pit, aliens take over the iconic London Underground and London itself in The Web Of Fear. To witness where this trend takes us, and Doctor Who, then look no further than Tobe Hooper’s dead end, if not hilarious, homage to ‘cosy catastrophe’ Lifeforce.


Above: The Underground tunnels of your mind

However, both The Web Of Fear and Fury From The Deep aren’t just the classic Doctor Who ‘base under siege’ and ‘yeti on the loo’ stories, emanating from a particularly British post-War psychosis, that we all know and love. They both share startling themes about physical and mental possession, about altered states of thinking. Going back to Lewis Carroll, both narratives take the viewer on a journey into the interior. This is a physical and psychical journey via the Underground tunnel systems and pipelines and like Alice venturing down the rabbit hole, some very strange things happen that are as far away from reality as you can get. Since the 1960s all the psychedelic qualities in Carroll’s work have frequently been read as an initiatory work of drug literature, an esoteric guide to the other worlds opened up by psychotropic substances. The re-emergence of Carroll within the counter culture tentatively reflects the changes that were then occurring within science fiction itself, where there was an express move away from the anti-utopianism of writers such as Wyndham and Kneale, whose paranoia filled fantasies were reflections on a disappearing post-war Britain, and towards the psychological approach of scientific romance, rejecting outer space for ‘inner space’. With a British perspective on Vietnam already being reflected in the science fiction of Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard, the battles with the Yeti in the Underground may be more reflective of the that conflict than merely a throw back to the British loss of colonial and military power post 1950.



The striking quality of The Web Of Fear is that it is a story that not only takes place in an environment of sensory deprivation, where hypnotic susceptibility mirrors the possession of certain characters by the Great Intelligence, but also chillingly reflects the germ warfare experiments carried out by the MOD between 1952 and 1964. As reported in The Guardian in 2002, “These were tests to determine the vulnerability of large government buildings and public transport to attack. In 1956 bacteria were released on the London Underground at lunchtime along the Northern Line between Colliers Wood and Tooting Broadway. The results showed that the organism dispersed about 10 miles. Similar tests were conducted in tunnels running under government buildings in Whitehall.” Yeti spreading through the Underground may well be a subtle commentary on the barrage of government-run experiments to test the effects of everything from radiation, LSD and nerve gas to intense electric shocks and prolonged sensory deprivation.

As well as operating as a pastiche of Kneale’s alien visitors in Quatermass II, it’s interesting to note that the ‘adversary’ in Fury From The Deep is described as a form of ‘weed’. Pemberton’s script was developed during a period of social and political turbulence around recreational drugs. The 1965 Dangerous Drugs Act began to bring UK law in line with parts of the UN Single Convention and an Advisory Committee on Drug Dependency was set up, with a sub-committee chaired by Baroness Wootton. This started to look into the legal position of cannabis, still the same as for opiates, with no distinction between possession and supply. The Wootton Report was ready early in 1968, but not published until January 1969. Meanwhile it was leaked to the press, who were almost all hostile, producing headlines like 'The deadly path to addiction.'







In Fury From The Deep, the effects of the deadly weed can be seen as a form of toxic psychosis. That’s a ‘bad trip’ to you and me. The adverse of effects of LSD were becoming newsworthy from 1962 until about 1969 with many reports of large numbers of LSD users hospitalised - some of them for considerable periods - following LSD trips. Reports of LSD accidents also increased - falls or jumps from windows, death when someone on LSD threw himself in front of a passing car, and so on. Bad trips were the result of drugs playing into individual insecurities. During the Cold War, both the British and the US governments were keen to exploit LSD's unique qualities, for "social engineering". They were convinced it would be useful as a "truth drug" during interrogations.

There is a bleakness about Fury From The Deep. It tends to feel like one big come down after a season of playful psychedelia, especially in the way it depicts the possession of Maggie Harris by the weed. Stung by the deadly weed, she’s overpowered by the already possessed Mr. Quill and Mr. Oak who suffocate her with toxic gas emitted from their mouths. It’s a deeply troubling sequence, nightmarishly soundtracked with a pounding mix of incidental music and sound effects that give a nod to the acid rock and experimental electronic music of the time and the disorientating and malleable qualities of television mixing as director Hugh David piles images of Quill, Oak and the choking Maggie on top of each other against a seriously psychedelic bit of wallpaper in Maggie’s room.

Even the ubiquitous foam machines come over as the series own equivalent of the barmy goings on at the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream, a happening in Alexandra Palace in 1967 that briefly ushered in British psychedelia. Once possessed, Maggie, walks into the sea, apparently drowning, uncannily replicating the behaviour of someone suffering from a bad trip, under the influence of the weed. Equally, when the weed is defeated by the sonic boom of Victoria’s screams, it also signals a sea-change in the counter culture itself. The final episode of Fury From The Deep was transmitted on the 20th April 1968. A fortnight later, students at the Sorbonne in Paris were out on the streets protesting and rioting whilst Doctor Who headed back into space with The Wheel In Space.

After the revolution

Season Five contains, for good or bad, Innes Lloyd’s vision for Doctor and, as I’ve examined here, it also flirts with the counter-culture of the 1960s through his attempts to make the series more of its time. The legacy of British psychedelia in the series would be carried forward to its ultimate expression in the following season’s The Mind Robber and The Krotons. Further Vietnam War analogies would emerge with The Dominators and The War Games and the ‘yeti on the loo’ theme would find its ultimate expression in The Invasion and a far bleaker future coda in Season 7. The Mind Robber would arguably be the last attempt at real playfulness and fantasy within the series format for some time and The Space Pirates would remain a retro-futuristic anomaly until the space opera of Frontier In Space. But the 1960s, it seems, are always with us. There is a continual media weakness for anniversaries and the 1960s are still widely made to carry significant symbolic weight in contemporary social and political argument. The Doctor Who of Season Five makes you yearn for its dizzying spirit.

Bibliography:

The British Counter-Culture 1966-1973 A Study Of The Underground Press (Elizabeth Nelson, Macmillan 1989)

About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who: 1966-1969, Seasons 4 to 6 (Tat Wood and Laurence Miles, Mad Norwegian Press 2006)

Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered (Lester Grinspoon & James B. Bakalar Basic Books, New York 1979)

Man and Machine in the 1960s (Sungook Hong, University of Toronto Seoul National University. Techne, Spring 2004)

The Hippie Narrative: a literary perspective on the counterculture (Scott MacFarlane, McFarland, 2007)

Ian Fleming & James Bond: the cultural politics of 007 (Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt, Skip Willman, Indiana University Press, 2005)

Sixties Design
http://www.bbc.co.uk/homes/design/period_1960s.shtml#influences

The Fortean Times - Psychedelica Victoriana (Mike Jay February 2004)
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/170/psychedelica_victoriana.html

History Of The Club Of Rome
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_clubrome3.htm

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SEASON FIVE: “The First Duty Of A Revolutionary Is To Get Away With It” - Part Three
(c) 2009 Frank Collins. If you wish to quote from this article please ask the author's permission.

Talking ‘bout a revolution

Beyond the continual replay of the ‘base under siege’ formula throughout Season Five, it’s interesting to note a number of other themes weaving through the stories. Enemy Of The World, for example, reflects on the notion of the ‘global village’, as coined by media theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' (1962), describes how sophisticated satellite telecommunications networks (the offshoot of the epic space race between the Cold War superpowers) had now enveloped the world in a vast "cosmic membrane." With time and distance as no hindrance, the emergence of the "information age" fostered a new global consciousness. "We can now live, not just amphibiously in divided and distinguished worlds," McLuhan wrote, "but pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously".

The experience of history itself was revolutionised through telecommunications and international events could be experienced locally, and they could be experienced now. The idea of instantaneous communication is one that permeates much of the Troughton era of Doctor Who, reaching an apotheosis in The Seeds Of Death with continent and Earth-Moon hopping achieved in seconds via T-Mat. Through television and satellite transmissions the key events of the 1960s: Vietnam, the Civil Rights struggle, assassinations, the construction of the Berlin Wall; crashed against the rise of the counter-culture. The decade is underpinned by disillusionment (starting with the death of Kennedy) and also a sense of renewed hope for the future. Rampant consumerism, the strain upon the environment, racial and sexual inequalities, the giddy escalation of technological progress could still be countered by the communal belief in the possibility of changing the world for the better. McLuhan’s idea that technology could enable people to interact and live on a global scale within a society feverishly attempting to square the circle on flamboyant cultural over-indulgence and a disturbing event such as the Vietnam War is summed up by the Our World satellite broadcast which is now famously remembered for the debut of The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ as the War raged thousands of miles away. A less politically charged sense of globalism is also something that the series had been toying with since The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, with their mixed race personnel, that would find its apotheosis in The Enemy Of the World and The Wheel In Space.


Above: License to thrill - 'The Enemy Of The World'

With The Enemy Of The World we find the series reflecting on this clashing of ideologies and then framing it within a Bondian subtext. It’s easy to dismiss the Bond like trappings to the story – Salamander with his underground bunkers, trained assassins etc – but it and the Bondmania of the 1960s does sum up many of the concerns of the day. As Drew Moniot argues in 'James Bond And America In The Sixties', the Bond films appealed to European and American audiences because the films did tap into the mood of disillusionment that audiences had with the corporate state. In a climate of increasing state control, epitomised in the films perhaps both by the way SPECTRE sought to remove the rights of the individual through the application of super-technologies, and by the corporate nature of the British Secret Service itself, Bond signifies a maverick figure, bending the accepted rules and becoming something of a licenced Angry Young Man. In this atypical Doctor Who story, the plot shifts from Australia, to Malawi and to Europe, there are assassination attempts on the Doctor, and Salamander is for all the world, a pastiche of Blofeld, engineering volcanoes and the weather whilst promising to put an end to world hunger. The story touches on other vital concerns about the environment and the Cold War. Salamander has convinced a gaggle of scientists that the planet has been irradiated after a war and that he’s the man to help them return to a revitalised planet. All this subterfuge and paranoia takes place within a futuristic environment of Paco Rabanne jumpsuits, PVC suits straight out of The Avengers and state of the art hovercraft and helicopters.

Logic games

Above: Deep frozen Boolean logic available now

A paranoid fear of technology, echoed in the subtext about the dangerous and relatively new exploration for North Sea Oil in Fury From The Deep and the advancing Ice Age of The Ice Warriors, were at the top of the agenda in the 1960s after the formation in 1968 of The Club Of Rome. A think tank put together by Italian industrialist, Aurelio Peccei, and a Scots scientist, Alexander King, The Club Of Rome aimed to tackle problems and future trends at both the local and global levels. They wanted to try to understand what was happening culturally, financially, socially and ecologically, and then to mobilise thinking people everywhere to take action to build a saner and more sustainable world. They highlighted an explicit link between economic growth and the consequences for the environment.

In The Ice Warriors the discovery of the Martians in the glacier is the backdrop to a very human story about the clash between man and technology. This becomes a bit of an obsession with the series during Season Five and it seizes upon the tried and trusted critical science fiction tropes of the relationship between man and machines. Fears about automation, cybernetics and machines fueled concerned debate in the 1960s and the divisions between machine and organism, and the nature of human intelligence in the light of such developments, were all on the agenda. The human condition was now being measured within the context of computers, systems theory, cybernetics, electronic battlefields, hydrogen bombs and man-made threats to the environment.

The Tenth Planet, concluding Hartnell’s era, marks something of a sea change in the way Doctor Who addressed these concerns because the series was then being influenced and written by its very own scientific adviser, Dr. Kit Pedler, then the head of the electron microscopy department at the Institute Of Opthalmology, University Of London. He was hired by Innes Lloyd to inject more hard science into the stories for Doctor Who and began this contribution with The War Machines, and formed a lasting partnership with story editor Gerry Davis. Pedler’s influence is at its keenest in the mid-1960s and ranges from those iconic symbols of technological schadenfreude, the Cybermen, to concerns about computer intelligence and the interaction between man, machine and the natural environment. These concerns reverberate through Season Five. It’s bookended by two Cybermen stories that each deal with machine intelligence and logic.


Above: Zoe could be so irritating

The Tomb Of The Cybermen couches its fear of dehumanising technology within real world Boolean logic, a complete system for logical operations. Boolean logic has many applications in electronics, computer hardware and software, and is the base of digital electronics. Pedler was suggesting Klieg’s desire, as one of The Brotherhood of Logicians, to emulate the Cybermen's emotional bypass, was in tune with society’s concerns about machine domination. The Cybermen not only symbolised a potential extension of organ replacement therapy but also highlighted the place of the human within an automated, technologically dominated capitalist world. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm deplored the notion that the only man fit for survival in modern capitalist society was an “automation, the alienated man” (Fromm 1965/6). Herbert Marcuse, in his widely read 'One Dimensional Man', criticised technological rationality as a form of control and domination (Marcuse 1964). The Tomb Of The Cybermen and The Wheel In Space explore these themes wherein the human characters confronted by the Cybermen are offered a behavioural choice, either embracing what it means to be an irrational human, or seeking the logical perfection which at its extreme means conversion into a Cyberman.

The Wheel In Space, and forgive the pun, puts a slightly different spin on this with the introduction of Zoe Herriot, a parapsychology librarian, and an interesting piece of character development makes her highly trained in maths and logic but bemoaning the fact that her training has turned her into something like a robot, or a machine, while leaving her short on emotional experience. This is a young woman who has identified the dehumanising effects of an environment devoid of nurturing and emotional engagement. To her, the Doctor and Jamie represent the possibilities of life beyond not just the slavery of a technologically advanced human society but also the rejection of the inhumanity of the Cybermen.


Above: A whole new meaning to the Cold War

In The Ice Warriors the relationship between men and machines is epitomised by the triangle of Penley, Leader Clent and the computer controlling the Ioniser. Clent is a slave to the Ioniser, to technology, whereas Penley is very much depicted as a hippy drop-out and along with Storr represents the human need for instinct and the ability to leap beyond machine logic to find a solution to the dual problems of controlling the ice floes and defeating the Ice Warriors. The Ice Warriors, along with much of the series output in the mid-1960s, is all about the idea of survival born out of strategical analysis. This represents a huge shift in the late 1950s and early 1960s that was taking place in the debate over how emotion and reason were used by both man and machine in decision making within the escalating Cold War.

The schism between Penley, Clent and the Ioniser is perhaps best summed up by Ulric Neisser in his 1963 paper ‘The Imitation of Man by Machine’ - “If machines really thought as men do, there would be no more reason to fear them than to fear men. But computer intelligence is indeed “inhuman”: it does not grow, has no emotional basis, and is shallowly motivated. These defects do not matter in technical applications, where the criteria of successful problem solving are relatively simple. They become extremely important if the computer is used to make social decisions, for there our criteria of adequacy are as subtle as multiply motivated human thinking itself.” Particular stories such as The Ice Warriors, The Tomb Of the Cybermen and The Wheel In Space wrestle with the way essential emotional human qualities survive in a world dominated or threatened by logical machine intelligences.

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SEASON FIVE: “The First Duty Of A Revolutionary Is To Get Away With It” - Part Two
(c) 2009 Frank Collins. If you wish to quote from this article please ask the author's permission.


Above: Blissed out in the Detsen monastery in 'The Abominable Snowmen'

Psychedelic Victoriana

The Tomb Of The Cybermen and The Abominable Snowmen both concern themselves with expeditions, and the notion of various British eccentrics plundering the cultural riches of Earth and outer space. On the surface these are pastiches of well-established fictional tropes, everything from 'The Mummy' to H. Rider Haggard, but Tomb also alludes to the environmental disaster of the Aswan Dam, where in 1956 it was revealed that flooding behind the dam would destroy a number of ancient Egyptian tombs, whilst Snowmen riffs on Hilary’s patriotic conquest of Everest. Let’s also not forget that Hammer Films were also treading a Victoriana influenced path through these post-colonial anxieties with a successful run of Mummy themed films as well as a filmed version of the Nigel Kneale play, 'The Creature', entitled uncannily enough The Abominable Snowman.

This avid interest in the cultural glories of Empire seemed to act as some compensation for, in the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘culture of decline’ apparently linked with the loss of imperial status. Hammer Films, the Bond films, The Avengers and Doctor Who all suggest a British culture of that time reluctant to abandon the virtues of Pax Britannia, the period of relative peace in Europe when the British Empire controlled most of the key naval trade routes and enjoyed unchallenged sea power, which led to a period of overseas British expansionism. Harold Wilson was also rather keen to build closer links with the Commonwealth rather than reluctantly drive policy away from Empire and towards Europe and the Common Market. By the mid 1960s Britain’s influence on the world was less political and more cultural, with a strong international focus on music, cinema, design and fashion leading to the now clichéd Time magazine article of April 1966 labeling London as ‘swinging’. Youthful expeditions and cultural visitations, as opposed to colonisations, into Indian and Buddhist philosophies were a further counterpoint to this and affected everything from the decline of Western religion to the re-contextualisation of Victorian design in the 1960s.


Golden lawns, village green. Victoria was my queen

For the period between the Evil Of The Daleks and Fury from The Deep, the series subtly, and not so subtly, captured this cultural zeitgeist. Not only do we have a companion aptly named Victoria, who rather like Adam Adamant and Alice before him, is taken out of her Victorian comfort zone and plunged into surreal adventures with the Doctor and Jamie, but we also have many of the stories thematically and visually summarising the fusion between a number of 1960s cultural obsessions; the modernist, forward thinking, and ‘futuristic’, the influence of India and Tibet and the plundering of Victorian design. The Victorian aesthetic heavily influences what we regard as the psychedelic too. The psychedelic is seen as fantastic, metaphysical and surrealistic subject matter (as in Carroll and Lear) but that also uses kaleidoscopic, fractal or paisley patterns, highly contrasting colors, stylization of detail, collage, spirals, concentric circles, and diffraction patterns. The psychedelic is enshrined in the opening titles, where the fractal patterns and spirals of the iconic Bernard Lodge design have been developed and expanded to fill the screen and now incorporate the face of actor Patrick Troughton who literally explodes out of the screen amidst a barrage of scudding electronic clouds.


Above: A whole lava love in 'The Wheel In Space'

Later, we get the target range for the Cybermen in Tomb Of the Cybermen with its hypnotic Bridget Riley-esque visual motifs, the paisley patterns of the costume worn by Kaftan (an appropriate name for a character in 1960s Who), the environs of the monastery and the costumes of the monks in The Abominable Snowmen, the bizarre effects of the sonic guns and the groovy futuristic costumes in The Ice Warriors, the paisley scarf and handkerchief sported by Travers and the rather groovy costume with hippy style beads that Victoria wears in The Web Of Fear. Even Jamie’s costume is enhanced, supplemented with a trendy paisley necktie and some afghan like trimmings to his waistcoat. There are also the trippy electronic effects that enhance and then uncover the true nature of the Cybermen eggs and the freaky positive-negative effects, similar to the Dalek exterminations, when Cybermen shoot their victims or are electrocuted by the Doctor in The Wheel In Space as well as some very gratuitous use of lava lamps as part of the set design for the oxygen supply room.


Above: Dedicated followers of fashion - 'The Ice Warriors'

These psychedelic tropes then bash up against the Victoriana and futurism that litters the season. The interiors of Brittanicus base, in The Ice Warriors, with its ornate furniture contrasting sharply with the all white futurism of the computer room, the wallpaper and the kitchen in Salamander’s central European zone headquarters in Enemy Of The World are redolent of psychedelia’s grabbing of elaborate, stylized leaf and floral patterns and the modified styles taken from various time periods in history like Gothic, Tudor, Elizabethan, English Rococo, Neoclassical. These merge with the influence of John Bates, who designed Emma Peel’s costumes for The Avengers and Pierre Cardin’s futuristic, space-age catsuits and bodystockings, Beatle suits and cut-out dresses, as reflected in the futurism of the costumes in The Ice Warriors and The Wheel In Space. And let’s not dismiss that triumph of Victoriana, the London Underground, as pioneered, designed and engineered by John Fowler, which is pretty much the entire setting for The Web Of Fear.

Listen To The Voice Of Buddha

The late 1960s and 1970s was, of course, a period in Western history when many Westerners, particularly young people, were turning to the East for wisdom, and when travel to India and Nepal was for the first time relatively easy and inexpensive for people in Europe and the USA. Looking at The Abominable Snowmen, for example, there are a number of themes in the serial that reflect this search for enlightenment in the increasingly industrialised and commercialised society of the 1960s. The decline of Western religions into secularism accelerated in the 1960s and as Hugh McLeod suggests in his book, ‘The Religious Crisis Of The 1960s’ “common to almost all writing on the religious history of the 1960s is a sense that something very important did happen to religious beliefs. In the 1950s, the majority of the population were, at least nominally, affiliated to one of the Christian denominations. By the end of the period, the kaleidoscope had been vigorously shaken: the range of practically available alternative systems of belief had widened”.


Above: The bells are ringing in 'The Abominable Snowmen'

The Abominable Snowmen situates itself at the nexus of this crisis. Its subtext concerns the development of alternative belief systems here in the UK, first seen in the successful founding of Tibetan Buddhist temples and centres in England and Scotland. This was also taking place against the background of the Cultural Revolution in China, which had been particularly devastating to minority cultures such as those in Tibet, with the destruction of 6000 monasteries and the Dalai Lama’s exodus to India. In this light, is it too much of a stretch to note that The Great Intelligence, possessing humans to do its bidding and using an army of robots to maintain order, symbolises the corrosive effect of Chinese Communism on its own cultures and religions of enlightenment and acts as a palpable threat to Western democracy? This force strives for physical existence through expanding its mental powers, or brainwashing by any other name, to dominate the Earth. The Doctor’s symbolic position is clear: he is the keeper of the Holy Ghanta bell, a symbol of the feminine power of nature according to Buddhist beliefs, and is therefore the story’s prime force for balance and restoration. He recognises the Yeti as robots as opposed to the shy, human fearing creatures that live on the mountain. He knows the true nature of the now possessed Padmasambhava, having previously visited the monastery in 1630. He represents the marriage between Western and Eastern philosophies and alleviates some of the general public’s natural fears of the counter-culture’s embracing of Eastern philosophies in England at the time.



The Abominable Snowmen not only reflects the expansion of Eastern religious philosophies in the West but it also situates the Doctor’s own journey within the ‘hippy narrative’ of the 1960s. This narrative, broadening the spiritual landscape beyond the Judeo Christian, included such texts as the 'I-Ching' and 'The Tibetan Book Of The Dead'. Timothy Leary’s ‘translation’ of the latter, written in 1964, positioned the text within the psychedelic experience of experimenting with drugs such as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD. A key text, embraced by the counter culture movement and that has certain parallels with the narrative of Doctor Who itself, is Hermann Hesse’s 'Siddhartha', the story of the lifelong quest of a man who leaves a life of relative privilege as a member of the Brahmin caste. Like the hippies, the Doctor, as we later discover at the end of Troughton’s era, was himself a child of the ruling class, the Time Lords. This makes his own Siddharthian rejection of the privileges of his own class all the more significant in this reading of the series development in the mid 1960s, providing a key to understanding the inner, spiritual disquiet that leads the Doctor, and his hippie equivalents in the 1960s, to reject the trappings of their affluence and to supposedly seek a higher peace.

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An article recently published in the Doctor Who Appreciation Society's magazine, Celestial Toyroom, issue 372/3, as part of the 'Seasonal Variations' series and here reproduced for your delight and edification. And beautiful artwork on this issue's cover by John Waudby. Once again, thanks to Tony Jordan for the encouragement and publishing this material.

SEASON FIVE: “The First Duty Of A Revolutionary Is To Get Away With It” - Part One
(c) 2009 Frank Collins. If you wish to quote from this article please ask the author's permission.

Received wisdom has it that Season Five is, more often than not, to be dubbed as ‘The Monster Season’. In a run of seven stories we are overdosed on two return matches with the Cybermen (Tomb Of The Cybermen and The Wheel In Space), two skirmishes with new foe the Great Intelligence (The Abominable Snowmen and The Web Of Fear), an introduction to the Ice Warriors (The Ice Warriors) and a battle with parasitic weed (Fury From The Deep). A summation of the season also rather predictably accuses The Enemy Of The World as being the odd one out because there are no obvious ‘monsters’ in it but as we’ll discuss later, it’s not that anachronistic in relation to the rest of the stories. Whilst it may not feature ‘monsters’ in the traditional sense, the genre tropes it uses place it as a far better reflection of the 1960s cultural milieu in which it and the rest of the season sit.

Producer Innes Lloyd’s achievements, despite being something of a double edged sword, should not be underestimated because, without a doubt, it is he and his team who were responsible for creating the most enduring, and oft replicated, template for the series – contemporary Earth based encounters with monsters (often referred to as the ‘yeti on the loo’ format) that’s often coupled with a ‘base under siege’ story. It can be argued that Season Five, to its detriment, rehearses this format endlessly and inevitably towards exhaustion and essentially runs out of ways to contextualise the stories beyond this formula but I would argue that there is something far more interesting going on here. Whilst Lloyd truly modernised the series, for good or ill depending on your opinion, it is his vision that, erroneously or not, became the wider public view of what Doctor Who was and is, then and now.


Above: A rogue's gallery of adversaries from Season 5

Do The Hippy, Hippy Shake

From 1966, with Patrick Troughton in the lead role, the series shifts very perceptibly away from a grand narrative about exploring space and time. This narrative, more or less epitomising the Hartnell era, can be seen as a journey symbolising the end of British colonialism, the twilight of Empire, and full of stories that echo both the psychological impact of World War II and the emergence of Britain from the cultural deep freeze of the post-war years. Although later seasons would return to some of these themes again and again, Season Five offers a concentrated and calculated restructuring of the series, where the journey isn’t so much an articulation of the anxieties in British post-war society of the 1950s but more reflects and comments on the cultural zeitgeist of the mid-1960s and, in particular, many aspects of British counter-culture and the way British pop culture and mass consumerism replaced the angst over our decline in status as a world power. One of the biggest changes is with the central character, the Doctor ceases to be a patrician adult ‘grandfather’ and becomes a child-like revolutionary, ‘a little man who creates havoc with the system’, tackling some of the hot topics of the day; humanity versus technology, possession and conformity, the crisis in Western religion and nascent themes of environmentalism. By doing so, the Doctor is positioned as a British anti-authoritarian within a long tradition of British psychedelic culture that also found prominence in the period 1966-69. And he’s sporting an incredibly trendy Beatles mop-top whilst undermining various alien species attempts at world domination. The Doctor had gone 'rock n’ roll', became a metaphor for social change, and was reconfigured in ways calculated to disrupt the political intentions of his foes.

The trippy Troughton title sequence

Finally, it is important to also note that the series here dovetails with a mid-1960s obsession with Victoriana which is best exemplified, on television at least, as an empathy with the similar obsessions of other contemporaneous telefantasy series such as The Avengers, Adam Adamant, Sherlock Holmes (both the Douglas Wilmer and Peter Cushing episodes) and landmark dramas such as The Forsyte Saga. Mixed in with the trendy absurdities of Lewis Carroll and Spike Milligan, this resurgence of Victoriana should also perhaps be seen in the context of 19th century Romanticism and the counter-cultural writings and art of Blake, Byron and Shelley. In the late 1960s, futuristic themes merged with exoticism, romanticism and nostalgia. Drugs, the counter-culture and the hippy trail to India also suggested an alternative to the modernist dominance of Pop art and op art. Rediscovery of Victorian artists such as Aubrey Beardsley and William Morris stimulated a revival of historic and rural styles. The result was an eclectic combination of the modern, the ethnic, the antique and the psychedelic.

Turn On, Tune In And Play

Behaving like a child bunking off from school, Troughton’s version of the Doctor evolved within a perceived comedic subtext. His incarnation has often been codified as ‘Chaplinesque’ or described by the makers of the show as a ‘cosmic hobo’. This is partly due to Troughton’s own physicality in the role, his wonderful use of clown-like facial expressions and body language, and also the way that writers latched onto the idea of Troughton's Doctor as the symbolic figure of the Fool, where he expertly uses a childish persona to shield his hidden intellect. He is often seen entering each story with a degree of carefree innocence, a spirit in search of experience but with a childlike ability to tune into the inner workings of the universe. In Season Five this is immediately apparent with Tomb Of The Cybermen where the Doctor, working with Klieg and Parry, with almost child like glee, inadvertently solves the logic problem that opens the tombs. The concept of ‘play’ was one of the 1960s counter-culture’s basic tenets where it was seen as an alternative to the 19th century work ethic. Satre had also observed the idea of play as a result of freedom, ’As soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom…then his activity is play.’ The notion of play as freedom is nowhere better illustrated than in Evil Of The Daleks, where Daleks injected with the human factor turn into unthreatening child-like versions of themselves and actively begin to play 'trains' with the Doctor.


Above: It's a gas, gas, gas in 'Fury From The Deep'

The counter-culture’s vision of play was to use it as a revolutionary tool, a way of using fantasy to hi-jack the smooth functioning of bureaucracies and throughout Season Five, the Doctor can be seen using play as a way to defeat his enemies. Everything from the casual use of his recorder to using the electrified cable to fend off Cybermats and stink bombs to choke Ice Warriors, and using a control sphere to pilot Yeti in the Underground. The ultimate use of play is in The Enemy Of The World where it becomes meta-textual in scale. The Doctor and Salamander are both ‘played’ by the same actor, with Salamander positioned as an anti-Doctor, an evil-doer pretending to be a benefactor, ‘playing’ a good man. This set of relationships is then further expanded by the Doctor posing as Salamander, as the good man becoming the would-be dictator, as a form of ‘play-acting’ and the story becomes a series of complex slippages between the two roles.

The second Doctor’s role in Season Five, more than elsewhere, becomes his direct opposition to the forces of authority, both human and in-human, using foolery and trickery to outwit them and which traces a direct line back to Lewis Carroll, a figure undergoing a renaissance in the mid-1960s. “Carroll is the don of comic reduction: shrink the essence of authority to a child’s scale, diminish the threatening urgencies of society, make jokes of them, show up their triviality – those are his imperatives,” writes literary critic Robert Polhemus. The figure of the Doctor in Season Five, just like Alice, expresses this attitude in much the same way that the counter-culture made their own critiques of society in a cloud of Victoriana and psychedelia.

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BBCHD - 10th July 2009 - 9.00pm

The idea of sacrifice has been one of the strongest themes in both the new version of Doctor Who and Torchwood and the closing episode of Children Of Earth was perhaps the ultimate statement in this 'slaughter of the innocents' dramatic trope, the series own use of the 'death of one to save all' motif. What Day Five clearly demonstrates is the unflinching courage of writers Russell T Davies, John Fay and James Moran to travel into the abyss and conduct a reportage from the front line. I didn't think we were going to get a satisfying ending and I honestly thought that the idea of using a reset might just have made it into the episode as a way of writing themselves out of the various corners they'd arrived in. But they reveled in those dark corners and went further, pulling no punches as they went.

It was striking to open with Gwen narrating the end of the world in similar fashion to Rose's eulogy in Doomsday and it suggested that this was indeed the end of Torchwood itself and that all was actually lost even before the episode unfolded. The structure of the episode cycled back to this reportage and opened it out to feature Rhys filming Gwen in the barn with the children they had rescued from Rhiannon's house. This was not the end, merely a prelude to it. And the children, who were always the focus of the story and had been the beginning of the narrative through their possession by the 456 were also, very fittingly, and in the nature of this circular narrative, their end.



But what an end. As the government, hostage to American General Pierce, carried out their cull of 10% of the child population, those that indeed served its modus operandi in the end realised that they were propping up something so ugly and heinous they understood that only by switching sides could they affect the outcome of the 456 demands. Johnson (we never find out her first name) who has been the cartoon villain in the midst of the narrative finally reveals herself to us and to Alice, Jack's daughter. She's as real as all the other characters and just hides behind her duty. She finally becomes a lynchpin in the desperate solution that removes the 456 from the Earth.



The interesting aspect of Day Five is how it does pick the stories of Johnson, Alice and Clem and makes them integral to the conclusion of the story. Thinking their narratives had drawn to a close in Day Four, it's a surprise and a relief to see how they affect the outcome of the story. Clem's death isn't for nothing because the cause of his death is the way that Jack cruelly hoists the 456 with their own petard; Johnson effectively rescues Jack from incarceration to fulfill this narrative purpose; Alice provides a son, a lamb to the slaughter. It's a fantastic opening out of the narrative and it's chilling in the way Jack uses these separate threads. Jack very much becomes the untempered 10.5 version of the Doctor, knowing that he has to kill a child in order to save millions more and he doesn't flinch from the operation even though that child is his own flesh and blood. It's Biblical in scope.



Jack, as I discussed earlier, is not a very pleasant person to be around and it is truly shocking to see him go to these extremes. He has to become as monstrous as the 456 and Prime Minister Brian Green, be as ruthless as they are to accomplish the goal of eradicating the threat and saving those children. It's as gut-wrenching as Bernard Quatermass and his daughter setting off the nuke to banish the alien threat in the 1979 Euston Films series. There are great parallels here between both series about human sacrifice as well as the raison d'etre of the alien incursion. In Quatermass, humanity is being harvested as a condiment to a greater meal, here the 456 are simply drug addicts who want to get a good deal on the merchandise and get high on kids. That there was still yet another, darker twist to the 456's purpose in the story added to the complex political metaphors. Here, it's about the demands of the free market.

At the centre of this bleakest of codas is that utterly chilling scene in which Frobisher, ordered by Green to publicly offer his own children up to the 456 as a sop to a government demanding a positive spin on their policy of 'the first born must die'. In that perfectly realised confrontation between Frobisher and Green, where Green can barely raise his eyes from the paperwork on his desk and look Frobisher in the eye whilst telling him to bury bad news, it's Capaldi's performance that succinctly signals to the audience just how dark this is going to get. I can't praise Capaldi high enough and his performance in this epic saga is probably one of the elements that has propelled Torchwood from what could arguably considered cult status to a full blooded serious drama that can hold its own in a prime position in BBC1's schedule. When he kills his own family, the sequence is brilliantly cut together with the scene of Bridget talking to Lois in her cell about him being 'a good man' who 'worked hard' which again touches on the themes of class, the social pecking order and how that refers to Johnson's observations about the desire to remove certain kinds of kids from our street corners whilst the 90% who are 'good' and 'work hard' are spared.

The sequences where the troops arrive to take children away are painfully reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing activities reported from various unstable regimes from around the globe. Euros Lyn connects to this viscerally through rough and ready hand held camera work, adding a searing verisimilitude to the drama. Children Of Earth has clearly shown that Lyn has a blooming career in major films if he so chooses and his contribution to the series should not be underestimated. His visual judgement and his obvious attention to performances has paid off and if Torchwood did return then the notion of allowing a single director to hold the reigns wouldn't be a bad idea at all.



Depressing as it was, the 'final solution' in which Jack kills his own grandson also offered us very decent performances from John Barrowman and Lucy Cohu, as Alice Carter. I was pleased that Alice's story was continued beyond her simply being held in a cell and that there was a conclusion of sorts to the Jack/Alice arc, even though Russell T Davies took it to perhaps one of the darkest extremes he's ever taken his writing. It's also interesting to compare the actions of Jack and Frobisher - Frobisher executes his own family and technically one could argue he's a coward for not facing up to the 456 or even attempting to get his kids out of harm's way and Jack, shell-shocked from all the death and destruction he's instigated, buggers off six months later after a final goodbye to Gwen and Rhys. Technically, is he also a coward for not starting over? Jack's journey could be seen as similar to that of Homer's Odysseus - a hero that undergoes a series of tragedies and moral struggles in striving for a sense of place. Jack flees the cause of his pain for the home of imagination - in this case abandoning the Earth because he observes it as a sterile and futile waste land. Several times in the poem Homer describes Odysseus's quest as a desire for re-birth - a rising from the dead that can only occur when he reaches his home. Jack is now clearly looking for that home.

Torchwood ends as it should. You can either accept it as a well realised conclusion to the entire Torchwood saga or you can see it as the end of this particular phase of the programme and, if a fourth series is given the go ahead, a new beginning, potentially with an entirely new cast. For now see this as a vindication of Davies faith in the series as a modern, adult drama and as the Torchwood we always hoped we would get three years ago.

Day One review
Day Two review
Day Three review
Day Four Review

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