Earthshock by Eric Saward (1982)

Sentinel – Eric Saward and the shock of the new

Firstly an explanation. I wasn’t sure how to approach Earthshock, I am not entirely sure what else remains to be said about it – some people like it, some don’t, quite a few people don’t like what happened after it’s ‘success’. I could be wrong but I don’t think anyone is radically going to change their mind about it, no matter what anyone else says.However there is something that I find fascinating about the story – in particular whether it is possible to watch or review something which relies on surprise and shock, as if it were new, when you already know what happens.

Of all the Doctor Who stories aired in my lifetime, this is the story that most suffers from knowing two key moments in advance – perhaps only the regeneration at the end of The Stolen Earth comes anywhere close. I would be quite surprised if anyone who saw Earthshock at the time would disagree that a lot of its effectiveness is lost without that sense of shock. Simply put, I don’t think people watching it today with foreknowledge are watching quite the same story that I did in 1982 – I don’t mean that in some sort of ‘you had to be there’ elitist sort of way, more that it is difficult for me to overstate how important the surprise factor was.

JNT understood the importance of the shock I think, maybe it appealed to his showman side? The public gallery at TV Centre was closed during filming and probably for the first time, every effort was made to avoid spoilers. The Radio Times summary for episode one/two were the less than promising ‘ What do the silhouettes guard’ and ‘What is behind the hatch?’ (the episodes were aired twice weekly). The producer was offered and turned down a Radio Times cover for this one – a big deal in those days and something that the programme hadn’t had since Jon Pertwee was the Doctor. So he sacrificed the potential ratings boost for episode one, just for the shock. The story belongs in a time when it was just about possible to keep spoiler-free, things changed very soon after this, with fandom often knowing what was to come and now people are lining up to tell you every important plot twist – something each of the modern show runners know all too well.

1982 in context

Some context. In 1982 the past was a foreign country. We had the Master return in Keeper of Traken in 1981 and in 1979 the Daleks had appeared in Destiny of the Daleks, but apart from that returning old enemies hadn’t really been a feature of Doctor Who for quite some time. In the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era after season 12, (commissioned by Barry Letts) we only had the Master (who was unrecognisable in any case) in Deadly Assassin. In Season 15 the Sontarans, nothing in Season 16. Just think about the years since the show came back – we’ve had the Daleks every year, the Cybermen almost as often – Silurians, Sontarans, the Master, the Ice Warriors have also made repeat appearances – so we haven’t had much of a thrill of a returning foe for quite some time probably since Series One or Two. The Cybermen are back, oh really that’ll be nice then.

In 1982 the Cybermen hadn’t been in the programme for 7 years. I know that doesn’t sound that long, but the whole ethos of the show had really changed in that time (actually a number of times) and it was half my young lifetime. The lack of being able to see stories again, meant that 7 years felt far longer than it would now. Up until that point in Season 19 we had the Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday, Kinda, the Visitation, Black Orchid all quite sedate, almost pastoral, cerebral stories, fitting the pattern established in season 18. The then recent Williams era was also very much its own animal, with very little acknowledgement that anything much had come before it. Earthshock was going to change all of that.

I’m struggling to entirely understand the influences of Earthshock, I think I’ve had them all jumbled up and slightly wrong for some time. In my mind for a while now I’ve had it down as Doctor Who does ‘Aliens’ in a multi-camera studio in TV centre with Beryl Reid, on a sitcom budget. However that clearly isn’t true – I could understand if it had been made in 1987, but it predates Aliens or Predator or Terminator or any of the other military grunts get massacred films, even the Carpenter remake of ‘The Thing’ only came out in 1982. Was it Alien, a far more sinister, creepy film, lacking the military presence?

Outside of the zeitgeist of the early 80’s, it does also feel like Eric Saward had watched the Troughton Cybermen stories and absorbed them into the stories DNA, re-purposed for an 80’s audience – we’ve since added all of Tomb of the Cybermen and 1 episode of Wheel in Space, but the rest were available in 1982. Saward certainly watched old stories – he talks about that in the context of wanting to get Robert Holmes back as writer, Ian Levine apparently selected the clips for the flashback sequence. Anyway, whatever the influences were, it injects a huge amount of pace, action adventure and a certain amount of horror into what was then quite a sedate, talkie, studio-bound, often over-lit show in 1982. It was very, very startling to us kids back in 1982. The feeling was very much that for a few weeks Doctor Who had got its mojo back. For a few short weeks the show was hip with the kids in school again (or at least until episode 1 of Time Flight..) – those who had deserted the good Doctor for Buck Rogers back in season 18.

Anyway, in order to review this I feel that I have to be able to do two very different things at the same time – remember what it was like to see this for the first time and the initial context and secondly to step back and critically view it as an adult – for all I have already written, it is still just a Doctor Who story. So with all of that in mind I am going to have to draft in a guest co-reviewer, my 13 year-old self – not a place or time that I would normally chose to visit, but for this thread I will go to that dark and disturbing place one more time. 1982 – Thatcher was in charge, the Falklands War was just about to start and Johnny Marr was about to form The Smiths. Oh and somewhere in Merseyside a teenage boy was about to tune in to Doctor Who on Monday (!) 8th March and was about to leap about the living room in surprise.

Episode One

It is difficult to explain just how different this episode is from the stories surrounding it – after all, it follows on from Black Orchid, a sedate country house murder mystery. Here, right from the start we are straight into the action and the central mystery, with the troopers preparing to enter the cave system to investigate the attack on Professor Kyle’s team of palaeontologists and geologists. The technology and costumes feel like they are part of the real world – chunky, practical, built for wear and tear and a bit knackered – in contrast to early 80’s over lit pastel shades and beige of the likes of Castrovalva. I’ve been watching a lot of the Fifth Doctor recently – from Logopolis to Black Orchid and then the Black Guardian trilogy and Caves of Androzani. Only the latter matches and exceeds the pace and atmosphere of this episode.

There are parallels between the work of Peter Grimwade here and Graeme Harper – they both direct from the floor with energy, characters properly run through the sets – stumbling and falling, taking a bit of a beating – both stories have a grim realism that most of the rest of the era lacks and so the contrast is rather heightened. There is a pace and energy to proceedings and somehow both Harper and Grimwade managed to persuade someone to turn the lights down, lending atmosphere and tension to their respective sequences in the caves. These two manage to get the most out of a BBC multi-camera studio in way not seen since Douglas Camfield or David Maloney.

There are two plot strands to this episode. One the progress of the Professor Kyle, Lieutenant Scott and his troopers back into the cave system where Kyle believes her colleagues have died. The second strand is the argument between Adric and the Doctor, leading to the Doctor Nyssa and Tegan exploring the cave system, while Adric tries to plot a course back to e-space. It was years before I realised that fans really didn’t like Adric. I didn’t think much about him at the time – here he just seems like a typical stroppy, self-obsessed teenage boy. I rather like the references to the loss of his new surrogate parents – the Fourth Doctor and Romana, along with the family dog K9 – he had already lost all of his real family, including his brother Varsh in Full Circle. He almost treats the Fifth Doctor like a new step dad, you almost expect him to stomp off to his room saying ‘you’re not my real Dad’. These elements just about work in the context of episode one (some of the dialogue and delivery is just a little bit clunky here), but make a lot more sense by the end of the story and are a nice addition – a few human moments before it all gets very grim.

The big change (at least it felt like this at the time) is the casting of so many women – the troopers – Mitchell, Snyder and Professor Kyle (who unfortunately is a bit wet). So although it is often accused of being macho (which to be fair is true), there is at least this element to balance that – along with Briggs and Berger in later episodes and the two female companions. Also Scott aside (who is so macho you might expect to see him on a night out with shirt open, medallion and chest-hair on show Burt Reynolds-style) , the men in this episode are not a very butch bunch at all – from Walters, through to the Doctor and Adric.

The cave sequences with Walters on the surface monitoring the progress of the troop are very atmospheric. There is one unfortunate sequence where the shadows of the ‘silhouettes’ are still visible when a trooper turns around, but this is studio TV made at speed, unfortunate but easily forgiven. One by one we see the scanner flare and first Snyder, then Mitchell and their fellow troopers end up as steaming pools of green slime, with only the scraps of overall and name badges identifying them. These sequences are really quite grim, but I think work very well to raise the stakes – especially the moment when an unfortunate trooper steps in the remains of Snyder.

‘What sort of weapon can do that to a person?’

The two plot strands meet in the cave system, when Scott and the Doctor go head to head. This really works with the more vulnerable, innocent Fifth Doctor – I can’t imagine Scott aggressively physically abusing and threatening the Third or Fourth Doctor’s like that – Jon would have just applied Venusian aikido with an accompanying bon-mot and Tom (in Seeds of Doom mode) would have just punched him. Despite all of that in a short sequence culminating in the attack by the ‘silhouette’ androids (which work well in this I think) and the reveal of the hatch in the cavern, the Doctor manages skilfully to win Scott over. Why the androids? Well to delay us finding out who is behind all of this of course – the same reason for the audience as it is within the fiction of the story.

The Cliffhanger

The ending of episode one is probably one of the best in the history of the programme. After the troopers have managed to destroy the androids and burn through the hatch, the bomb inside activates. That electronic music as the screen turns red and the handheld camera searches and zooms in on the Doctor’s face, the pulls back and with a metallic clanging shows the big reveal.

‘DESTROY THEM, DESTROY THEM AT ONCE!’

Cue titles.

Sad though it might seem, that was one of the most exciting moments of my childhood! After the credits had rolled, I remember wishing that we had a video to wind back just to confirm that what I had seen definitely was a Cyberman. Except we didn’t have a video recorder, so I wound back the audio tape back quite a few times, but that didn’t help much. Fortunately, we didn’t have a week to wait – just one night later episode two was broadcast. On Tuesday, for the first time for a very long while, it seemed like everyone was talking about Doctor Who.

Episode Two

‘Explode the bomb…’

So we didn’t have long to wait for this episode – the next night in fact, which just doesn’t seem right, we should at least have had to wait until the following Saturday. There’s probably a whole piece to be written on the loss of the delayed gratification of the multi-part serial in an age of box-set binge watching, but for me it simply boils down to sometimes having to wait for something is a good thing. Anyway, episode two really cranks up the tension, the troopers battling with the androids, while the Cyber-leader and lieutenant watch and comment on events like a Greek cyber-chorus and then we switch to the freighter and start to join the two plot threads together.

It’s only Episode Two and I’m struggling to say anything much original about the story – it just rockets along and if you like the sort of thing it does, you’ll love it and if you don’t well you won’t. It is very strange in that it is startlingly different to the stories surrounding it, very well made and directed, but not hugely original, pace aside – at least not when viewed from the standpoint of having seen every surviving episode of the show. The pace relents a little bit, but not much in episode two, actually this happens almost immediately as ‘Destroy them, destroy them at once’ is followed by a few seconds hesitation before the androids actually do anything – today that would be edited out – charitably you could put it down to the time the signal takes between the freighter and Earth!

I haven’t mentioned the new Cybermen yet – they are just a brilliant piece of design – classic in the way that the bronze Daleks from the new series are – they take all of the basics of the original design(s) – don’t lose any of the good bits, but just add in more detail and make the whole thing chunkier and more real. The only downsides are the moon boots, but the helmet, chest unit and flight suit more than make up for that – I miss Cyber-shoelaces! I even like the voices – David Banks is great – and although it is really obvious, up until recently I hadn’t thought of the Darth Vader connection. First time around I had no idea how Cybermen were supposed to sound like – I hadn’t heard one in about 7 years, so I had no preconceptions that it should be more electronic.

Back in the cavern, the Doctor wins Scott over very quickly, with Nyssa helping to exploit the logic dilemma in the androids between survival and protecting the hatch. Both are destroyed in a hail of gunfire that is strangely reminiscent of pink and white Blackpool rock. Adric’s contribution in dropping a rock on one of the androids is interesting in that we get to see the Doctor’s pride in him ‘It’s Adric!’ – the pride of a Dad for when his errant child has finally done good. This act is quite brave but a bit inept and clumsy- which is very Adric – more of that later. The sequences of the bomb counting down while the Doctor tries to block the signal and the Cybermen trying to break through are pretty tense and this whole sequence cranks up the tension before the switch of location to the freighter – the caves having done their job. It is also a typical delayed gratification episode as we wait for the two halves of the stories to meet and the Doctor to a) realise who is behind the bomb (he has a hint later – ‘I’ve seen injuries inflicted like this before’) and confront the Cybermen.

The sequence that this episode is best known for is the ‘chat’ between the Cyberleader (David Banks is great in this) and his Lieutenant as they logically work through what has happened in the aftermath of the bomb failing to explode and review some archive footage, including a clip of Wheel in Space pretending to be from Tomb! By that point I knew the state of the archives from the DWM 1981 Winter special – which seems to have been a collective bad day for a lot of fans of my generation – it squashed our hopes and dreams of being able to see all of this for ourselves one day. This time around this sequence made me wonder if they just recorded their own adventures with the Doctor, in which case we’ll have a bit of a wait while UNIT recover the missing episodes of Tenth Planet and The Invasion from the dead Cybermen they have in storage and much longer for Wheel – perhaps they also have Marco Polo, the Massacre and Myth Makers? Anyway I absolutely love this sequence – so for no other valid reason than it makes me happy here it is in all its glory!

CYBER LIEUTENAT: A Time Lord. But they’re forbidden to interfere.
CYBER LEADER: This one calls himself the Doctor, and does nothing else but interfere.

Emotions. Love, pride, hate, fear. Have you no emotions sir?

(I love this clip – Bill is fantastic here – and I love him calling the Cyber leader sir!)

CYBER LEADER: It was in this regenerated form that he confined the Cybermen to their ice tomb on Telos.

I imagine you have orders to destroy me.

(again this is well chosen – it captures Pat’s downbeat, slightly shifty aspect really well)

CYBER LEADER: And as this, he defeated us in our attempt to destroy Voga, the planet of gold.

You’ve no home planet, no influence, nothing. You’re just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.

(Again – pure Hinchcliffe/Holmes era Tom)

CYBER LIEUTENANT: I did not see any of these men in the cave.
CYBER LEADER: It appears he has regenerated again, but whatever his form, he must be found and destroyed.

Finally on the freighter we get to meet the odd trio that is the rather useless Ringway, the ‘severe’ Berger and everyone’s favourite Nan as butch space Captain Briggs (the inestimable Beryl Reid). The casting of Beryl Reid is one of the other areas of debate – it seems to attract as much praise as ridicule, not least from the cast and crew – Peter Davison and Eric Saward seemingly a bit nonplussed at JNT’s casting choice. To be fair she had been in much, much better stuff than Earthshock, she was about to reprise her role of Connie Sachs in Smiley’s People, which she had first played to much acclaim in 1979’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Personally I can’t decide whether her casting here is inspired or terrible – it is certainly very Doctor Who, so perhaps that is enough. The only thing I would comment on is her appearance – she has the sort of dyed red hair that you only saw on old women down at the Bingo – this is then combined with the sort of ‘World of Leather’ jacket that Blake’s 7 blew their entire budget on in season 2 (probably why the effects are less than special). Part of me just loves Who for this stuff, even the new series isn’t immune – Peter Kay waddling about in a fat suit in broad daylight springs to mind. On that subject the bit that really made me laugh in this episode is the following bit:

CYBER-LIEUTENANT: The Earthlings are attempting to break through the hatch.
LEADER: Are their weapons capable?
CYBER-LIEUTENANT: Yes, Leader.

On the page nothing that wrong with that (apart from earthlings – I love that detail) – in reality Mark Hardy as the Cyber-Lieutenant delivers ‘Yes. Leader’ in a downbeat, crestfallen, shuffling of the feet sort of way – such that you just want to give him a hug and cheer him up a bit – from that point on he knows that part of their plan is buggered!

We do get a moments respite for a scene between the Doctor and Adric where the two of them talk in a stilted British male way about their argument and it is interesting that the Doctor takes Adric with him to explore the freighter – leaving the others behind.Perhaps recognising he has slightly neglected him.

DOCTOR: Look, I’m very grateful for your help with deactivating the bomb.
ADRIC: That’s all right.
DOCTOR: It was very brave of you also, the way you tackled the android.
ADRIC: All part of the daily routine.
DOCTOR: Hmm. Look, I’ve been thinking about your wish to return home.
ADRIC: And?
DOCTOR: Well, I thought that if we could work out a satisfactory course, I might give it a try.
ADRIC: Well, I’ve already done so, Doctor.
DOCTOR: Really?
ADRIC: As you can see here, I’ve even managed to calculate the way into the CVE, the gateway through E-space.
DOCTOR: You’ve done extremely well.
ADRIC: Thank you.
DOCTOR: Look, er, I’m sorry about our argument earlier.
ADRIC: So am I. I over-reacted.
DOCTOR: Do you really want to go home?
ADRIC: No, of course not. There’s nothing there for me any more.
DOCTOR: So you’ve done all these calculations for nothing.
ADRIC: Well, it made a point, didn’t it? Besides, who knows? I might change my mind again.

After one absolutely top-notch cliff-hanger, as is typical with Who, we get the following damp squib:

‘On this ship we execute murderers.’

Great!

Episode Three

This episode is probably the point at which I think that the structure of this isn’t quite right. You want the big meeting between the Cybermen and the Doctor, but it takes 2 ½ episodes to arrive, when their arrival should probably have been the cliffhanger to episode 2. It seems slightly churlish to say that about a story that is already the paciest of this era by a long way, but it just feels like it is delayed slightly too long.

To be honest it isn’t really helped by the fact that I’m not in the slightest bit interested in Ringway, Berger and Briggs. Ringway makes a poor traitor – not even in the same league as Kellman and light years away from the likes of Vaughn. Briggs just wants to get her bonus and to verbally abuse Ringway and I’m not sure what Berger is – which is fine but really these are just random people that we meet rather than anyone who drives the story along or engenders any sympathy – I don’t really care if they are massacred or not. Actually I think Beryl Reid’s hair at least would be able to withstand cyber firepower. She does have a reasonable line in putdowns, but it isn’t quite Robert Holmes level stuff:

RINGWAY: I’ve apprehended two stowaways.
BRIGGS: Apprehended. Why can’t he say caught? So melodramatic.

The Cybermen are still watching the story on TV, it’s about time now that they get involved in it:

CYBERMAN: Which one is the Doctor?
LEADER: The tall one with the fair hair. Even under the threat of death, he has the arrogance of a Time Lord.
CYBERMAN: Now the Doctor is a prisoner, it is time to secure the freighter.
LEADER: Indeed, but the Doctor must be taken alive. He must suffer for our past defeats.

The sequences here that do work really well is the Doctor coming up with a really clever solution to keeping the Cybermen out, using the anti-matter containment system – which is really well thought through and a quite brilliant effect. Only then to have completely overlooked that they might just blow the other door up!

Also the massacre of the crew, whilst not perfectly executed, does raise the stakes, as does the fact that their rifles don’t have any effect on the Cybermen. This sequence reminds me of Parting of the Ways where you know those trying to hold off the Daleks are just doomed.

Things pick up considerably once they arrive on the bridge (they also have the good taste to shoot Ringway):

CYBER LEADER: Our records indicate that you have a fondness for Earth.
DOCTOR: Fondness? I’m surprised your emotionless brain understands the word.
CYBER LEADER: It is a word like any other. And so is destruction, which is what we are going to do to that planet.
DOCTOR: You’ve tried before.
CYBER LEADER: This time we shall succeed, and you will live just long enough to witness it

And when the troopers and a rather brave Tegan re-join the story after just fretting about it in the TARDIS for the first half of the episode. Tegan is wearing Kyle’s overalls (looks like she’s had them taken in a bit and cleaned as well) rather more fetchingly than the wet professor who’s opted out and decided to stay with perennial stay-at-home Nyssa in the TARDIS.

My army awakes, Doctor!

Thank God for that. The shots of them bursting out of the silos is very well done, but even back in ’82 I thought that having them wrapped in clear plastic bags, like a fridge being delivered wasn’t that great an effect, the photos of Tomb of the Cybermen looked better. Anyway a decent second half to the episode – on to episode 4 and the main reason why this story is in this thread .

Episode 4

‘If the freighter crashes into Earth with you on board, won’t that make it rather difficult for you to carry out your task? I mean, you would be very crumpled.’

This episode finally gets to the confrontation scenes between the Doctor and Cyber Leader that the story needs. It is well worth waiting for and Peter Davison and David Banks are superb in these scenes. The Cybermen are a massive, towering, powerful presence here, dwarfing the rest of the cast. The Fifth Doctor might be slightly bashful, sheepish and blown about by events, but give him a confrontation with a monster or villain and he really steps up – in some ways more impressively than the previous 4 incumbents – mainly because of the contrast. He’d rather be playing cricket in Stockbridge, but instead he has to take on a Cyber Leader or Davros or the Master and when he does that he is utterly fearless – I really rather love that about him.

In the DVD documentary, which features a young Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat (before they wrote for the new series), there is much hilarity at the ‘eating a well-prepared meal’ part of the speech! And yes it is funny – but that speech is great and nails what the Cybermen have lost/given up just to survive better than any point since Tenth Planet. Sometime in another thread I will cover Spare Parts – quite my favourite Cyberman story in any medium and one that really shows this aspect of them – the tragedy of them – their sadness and the sense of what they have lost – probably the most interesting thing about them, but the least explored. That again features Peter’s Doctor – something that resonates more strongly with this Doctor and Nyssa due to the events of this story:

CYBERLEADER: I see that Time Lords have emotional feelings.
DOCTOR: Of sorts.
CYBERLEADER: Surely a great weakness in one so powerful?
DOCTOR: Emotions have their uses.
CYBERLEADER: They restrict and curtail the intellect and logic of the mind.
DOCTOR: They also enhance life! When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower, watching a sunset, eating a well-prepared meal?
CYBERLEADER: These things are irrelevant.
CYBERDOCTOR: For some people, small, beautiful events is what life is all about!
CYBERLEADER: You have affection for this woman?
DOCTOR: She’s a friend.
CYBERLEADER: And you do not consider friendship a weakness?
DOCTOR: I do not.
CYBERLEADER: Kill her.

He isn’t wrong – here he reminds me slightly of Chris Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, where the small things in life are elevated in amongst the universal or global threat – in Father’s Day for example or the ‘chips’ scene in the ‘End of the World’. The simple things in life – our happy memories of those silly, insignificant little moments when we were happy.

And so to Adric. I’ve a theory about him, I’m not sure that it is entirely or maybe even at all original – the reason why fans dislike him so much is that there is a little bit of Adric in all of us and watching him just uncomfortably reminds us of that. We don’t like to admit it – the clumsy, bumptious, awkward, opinionated, self-important, unlikeable swot who tries his best, but is a bit rubbish, never gets the girl/boy and can’t even manage to walk convincingly, but who is good at maths. We all like to think that we are cooler than him, it gives us someone to look down on – I used to be a bit like him when I was 13 sort of thing – thank God I’m not like that now. Stop, think about it, you are reading this on a Doctor Who forum – of course you are still a bit like him – he’s even played by a fan! If we tried to save the world we’d end up like this. This week I watched a documentary where scientists were on a drilling platform in the sea over ground zero of the K/T boundary event asteroid strike – all I could think of was – there’s probably bits of Adric in those rock core samples. To paraphrase Quatermass and the Pit – we are the Adric’s now!

DOCTOR: I’m not going without him.
CYBERLEADER: The boy will stay here. If you do not cooperate, I shall have the Earth woman destroyed.
TEGAN: We can’t leave without him!
ADRIC: Take Tegan with you. I’ll find my own way. Please?
BRIGGS: The boy’s right. There’s a chance. Leave now.
ADRIC: Please, Doctor.
CYBERLEADER: There is no chance.
ADRIC: Just leave!
DOCTOR: Good luck, Adric.

‘Now I’ll never know if I was right.’

He’s very brave here – staying to try to save the day, but the sad thing is that Adric doesn’t know that he’s about to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs and the K/T boundary event when he ducks back out of the escape pod. Nothing that he does after that point is going to change anything – he might as well have left in the pod with the others instead of being smeared across pre-historic Mexico. Even his badge of honour – for maths – is used to save the Doctor, broken into pieces in the Cyber Leader chest unit – the logical monster defeated by a symbol given to a human (or as near as human) for prowess in logic – rather fitting. Like any good swot and I say this as one and I suspect that all of us here would qualify for some academic badge of excellence or other, his final thought is just not knowing whether his resolution to the final logic problem would have worked – Adric’s Last Theorem lost forever in time. His final act is to hold his Alzarian outler’s plait- a reminder of his lost brother Varsh, as the rather touching Outler’s theme from Full Circle plays. And then silence.

Earthshock Coda no. 1

So what do I think about Earthshock – well first off I don’t think that it is quite the shoot-em up of legend – sure, lots of troopers die in the ambush and later on the ship as do the crew and later Kyle – but it feels less so than say ‘Dalek’ or ‘Parting of the Ways’ or Eric’s own ‘Resurrection’. Eric does love girls with guns doesn’t he? Here we have the troopers – Mitchell, Snyder and the other silent ones – then later Tegan uses the cyber gun, even Kyle tries to save Nyssa with one and then eventually even Nyssa uses one to shoot the Cyber Lieutenant. I’m not sure whether this is a step forward in the depiction of women in the show or not, I’m a man – I’ll leave it for others to decide.

In some ways this is meat and potatoes Doctor Who. I was going to say that there isn’t anything much profound in it, however the more that I think about it that really isn’t fair. Some of the dialogue is a bit clunky, but it does occasionally stop and have something to say. The main obvious example is the Doctor’s confrontation with the Cyber Leader. The speech could be better written (surely a cricket reference in here for the Fifth Doctor – the sound of leather on willow at Lords on mid-summers morning?) – but it does illustrate very well what he’s fighting for – simple moments of joy in life against a life without emotion, encased in steel and plastic.

And then we have Adric’s death. This really upped the stakes in a way that probably hadn’t been seen since Daleks’ Mater Plan (then 17 years away and lost somewhere apart from a Blue Peter clip of Katarina’s death) – but then Katarina, Sara and Bret had only just joined – Adric has been annoying us (or otherwise) for nearly 2 years. The show had felt quite safe for a long while – particularly when we had the invulnerable Tom in full flow with Romana and K9 – nothing could stop them. From now on – at least for a while – no one would feel safe.

I’ll cover the aftermath of his death and how the regular’s grief and sense of loss in another post – here I’ll confine my thoughts to how I felt about it at the time. I’ve seen fans sneer at the silent credits at the end as cheesy – but they really worked at the time. The DVD documentary has quite a decent discussion on this. My view is simple – it worked in 1982 for my 12-year old self and any weary old adult who wants to be cynical about this in the 21st century can sod off – this is my thread and I can cry if I want to!

It is easy to be cynical about the death of a largely unloved (at least that is the perception today) character. That is a very 90’s trait – look back at the past, poke fun, sneer (think all of those I love 1982 type programmes) and for all the great things about the 90’s and there are many – that is one of least edifying. Doctor Who suffered from it massively, people in their 20’s taking the piss out of something they loved, but were too embarrassed to admit. Only then to all come back around in 2005 and say they loved it all along – even showrunners aren’t immune to this. And neither was I, nowadays DWM arrives in my letterbox in a clear plastic sleeve, back then if that had happened, I would have been mortified. Mathew Sweet rather brilliantly summed this up in his piece for the Late Review before Rose aired – almost comparing DWM to other specialist publications that arrived in brown paper envelopes! Now we are both out and proud.

I didn’t dislike Adric back in 1982, or realise that some of the acting wasn’t that great (it didn’t seem unusual in comparison with the other stuff I watched – Grange Hill etc.), I don’t think I thought much about him at all either way. Watching it as an adult it is easy to see the issues, the comments of those colleagues on the production (Peter Davison, Janet Fielding in particular) haven’t helped either and often make quite unpleasant and unedifying reading/viewing – just let it go.

I’ll leave the final words on the story to my 12-year old self:

‘That was absolutely brilliant! I loved the bits in the caves. And the bit where the Cybermen came back and they looked really good. And the clips of the old Doctors. Me and my sister were very sad when Adric died and when there was no music at the end, just his broken badge’

Earthshock Coda no. 2

A Brief history of Time Flight. Or how we learned to live without Adric.

Adric’s dead (look sad for a bit), wow Concorde!

Coda no. 3

Ok. There’s more

This is the scene from Time Flight in the aftermath of Adric’s death presented in full, in all of its glory:

DOCTOR: Crew of the freighter safely returned to their own time.
NYSSA: Cyber fleet dispersed.
TEGAN: Oh, great. You make it sound like a shopping list, ticking off things as you go. Aren’t you forgetting something rather important? Adric is dead.
NYSSA: Tegan, please.
DOCTOR: We feel his loss as well.
TEGAN: Well, you could do more than grieve. You could go back.
NYSSA: Could you?
DOCTOR: No.
NYSSA: But surely the Tardis is quite capable of
TEGAN: We can change what happened if we materialise before Adric was killed.
DOCTOR: And change your own history?
TEGAN: Look, the freighter could still crash into Earth. That doesn’t have to be changed. Only Adric doesn’t have to be on board.
DOCTOR: Now listen to me, both of you. There are some rules that cannot be broken even with the Tardis. Don’t ever ask me to do anything like that again. You must accept that Adric is dead. His life wasn’t wasted. He died trying to save others, just like his brother, Varsh. You know, Adric had a choice. This is the way he wanted it.
TEGAN: We used to fight a lot. I’ll miss him.
NYSSA: So will I.
DOCTOR: And me. But he wouldn’t want us to mourn unnecessarily.
NYSSA: Where are we going?
DOCTOR: Special treat to cheer us all up.
NYSSA: 1851, Earth, London. What’s so special about that, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace.
TEGAN: 1851. The Great Exhibition?
DOCTOR: All the wonders of Victorian science and technology.
TEGAN: Well, the Tardis should feel at home.
DOCTOR: All the wonders of Victorian science and technology.
TEGAN: Well, the Tardis should feel at home.
DOCTOR: How about opening day? Pass the time of day with the foreign royals. We could even drop in at Lords, see a few overs from Wisden and Pilch. I wonder if the Lion will be bowling?

I think that explains how much everyone misses Adric on the production! Cricket, brilliant! There should have been another way. Something that linked in to the events that had just happened or helped with the loss or acknowledged it in some sort of clever way, whilst allowing the new adventure to start and everyone to start to move on. I don’t know what – probably the reason why I’m not a writer. The Massacre doesn’t acknowledge the events of Dalek’s Master Plan, but at least the feel of the piece does feel appropriate, we aren’t straight into something like The Gunfighters.

In fairness when I thought about this, this problem is not just confined to old Doctor Who – it is deliberately built into a lot of new series finales as a way of saying – the adventure goes on – Catherine Tate appears after we’re all in floods of tears leaving Rose on Bad Wolf Bay, the Titanic appears after Martha has left to pick up the pieces of her family, only Ben Cook spares us Cybermen after Donna has lost all her memories of her travels, Santa turns up as the Doctor leaves the grieving Clara in the café.

I hate all of those scenes with a passion. I know why they are there, In understand the reason, but maybe it is just me, but I can’t stand it when the series does that, it is the dramatic equivalent of the picture being squeezed into a corner of the screen and someone telling you about some ¤¤¤¤e TV show that you have no interest in, ruining the moment like some demented Graham Norton avatar. After the credits are over tell us the show will go on – but leave us a minute at least before we move on.

Anyway, I’ll return to that very idea of saving someone who should have died and it’s consequences in a later review. So I’ll save discussion about that aspect of Adric’s death for then. To be fair to the production team, there is this later in Time Flight, a rather disturbing passage (clunky dialogue and all), where Adric appears in front of Tegan and Nyssa and tries to stop them. Adric’s scream here is really quite haunting:

TEGAN: Adric!
NYSSA: No. Adric’s dead.
TEGAN: How can we be sure?
ADRIC: Go back, Tegan, or you will destroy me.
NYSSA: It’s only imagination. It’s the only power Kalid has left to stop us.
ADRIC: If you advance, you will kill me, Nyssa.
TEGAN: We can’t take that risk.
NYSSA: The badge.
TEGAN: What?
NYSSA: Adric’s wearing his badge.
TEGAN: But it was shattered when the Doctor destroyed the Cyberleader.
NYSSA: Exactly.
TEGAN: Come on.

Adric screams and they walk straight through him as he vanishes. Rob Shearman talks about this scene – they are walking through Adric’s ghost and just how disturbing the scream is. All of which is true, but it feels like reaching a bit for meaning amongst all of this. Time Flight is a mess on many levels, so it isn’t just this aspect that is fumbled.

Next season we see Adric’s room in Terminus in a scene where Turlough dismisses his things as ‘childish – a kids room, to Tegan’s disgust and promised to chuck everything out.

And then finally, Adric appears before the dying Doctor in Caves of Androzani – as I pointed out in that earlier review ‘Adric?’ is the final word that the Fifth Doctor says before he dies. Which is rather fitting, he hasn’t forgotten him after all, just moved on.