What's Bad for the Earthing is Bad for the Martian

It turns out Communism doesn't work in practice even when your whole planet is red. The 2011 Doctor Who audio play Thin Ice draws a parallel between the 1960s Soviet Union and a generation of Ice Warriors--the hissing, green helmeted Martian natives--who have a sobering encounter with one of the founding, legendary figures of their society. Adapted by Marc Platt from his own teleplay, Thin Ice is based on Ice Time, the story that was to be the season opener of the 1990 season that never happened. If it were anything like the audio play, it would've been a pretty good serial.

This was also originally meant to be the last story for Ace (Sophie Aldred) and we finally learn the purpose behind the manipulations which the Seventh Doctor (Sylvestor McCoy) put her through in stories like Ghost Light and Curse of Fenric--he's grooming her to enrol in a Time Lord academy on Gallifrey. This seems to make it clear once and for all that "Time Lord" is a title, not a species, which makes sense, though, as usual, the script creatively dodges addressing whether Ace would be called "Time Lord" or "Time Lady".

Supposedly the TARDIS is knocked off course in an attempted trip to late 60s London--they get the time right but location ends up being Moscow. They make friends with a Soviet lieutenant called Raina (Beth Chalmers) and a cockney thief called Markus (Ricky Groves). The Soviets are trying to use some Ice Warrior relics to their advantage which of course results in resurrecting an Ice Warrior, a fellow named Hhessh (Nicholas Briggs).

Through all this, the Doctor is leaving more and more decisions up to Ace and we gradually learn why when we hear his secret conversations with a Time Lord Adjudicator (Nigel Lambert). Ace indeed has to make some decisions when she finds herself in the midst of Ice Warrior drama after an ancient leader called Sezhyr (Beth Chalmers) is resurrected in the body of Raina. Sezhyr's occupation of Raina's body underlines some thematic paralleling of the dashed early idealism behind the formation of the Soviet Union and an ancient, revolutionary group on Mars headed by Sezhyr. The Ice Warriors even start calling one another "comrade". Hhessh's realisation that he can't blindly submit to his group's imperatives is contrasted with Ace grappling with the need to take greater control of the situation as an individual. Naturally her decisions involve Nitro-9.

It's an entertaining story and the cast are great as always. Platt also, thankfully, rewrote the story so that it does not, in fact, mark Ace's departure.

Twitter Sonnet #1268

A miller's stone adorns Tenochtitlan.
A floating crane alights beyond the state.
A squad of trees adrift support the swan.
A brig and sloop assist a second mate.
Selected stars appeared in mirror drinks.
The lightning froze to make somebody's veins.
The frozen air combined for skaters' rinks.
These summer thoughts diverge from proper lanes.
Prophetic rocks adorn the planet Mars.
A walking rabbit told a final joke.
A shave was sold behind the hidden bars.
A drawing's sequinned heart at last was broke.
Approaching tides harass the crabs and weeds.
An ancient drake subsumes a lizard's needs.

Never Forget Daleks

I naturally continued my tour of Dalek episodes of Doctor Who recently added to BritBox's collection by watching Remembrance of the Daleks this past week, a Seventh Doctor serial from 1988. This season première serial is when the Seventh Doctor really started to cook after his spotty first season and when his companion, Ace, made good on the potential she showed from her first appearance in the previous season's finale. It also continued the Dalek civil war storyline from Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks but with the decidedly different tone of the Seventh Doctor's era. It lacks Eric Saward's penchant for pushing the envelope, violence-wise, yet its introduction of the Daleks conveys more of a sense of danger. But what I like most about this serial is its theme of misapprehension and people, good and bad, suffering for their mistaken impressions. But not the Doctor.

Despite an amusing moment in one of the episode cliffhangers where Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor pulls a face and delivers a line straight to the camera about how he miscalculated, it's very clear the Doctor's only miscalculations are pretty trivial. The proto-UNIT military group in the serial, with which the Doctor quickly makes himself an ally just by intruding on one of their surveillance vans and explaining things, seem to be also his only real problem. As he tells Ace (Sophie Aldred), he has to keep them occupied while the Daleks play into his hands.

The proto-UNIT group has no idea what they're fighting, of course, but a lot of this serial is about just how much the Daleks and humanity have in common, referencing the relatively recent menace of the Nazis in World War II (the serial's set in 1963) and the recent tensions arising from Jamaican immigrants who came to England for the rights promised to them as citizens of a British territory.

Although the serial isn't directly about racial tensions in Britain at the time, 25 year old Ben Aaronivitch's teleplay does a decent job of showing how racism operated in a community. Racists aren't simply easily identifiable two dimensional jerks; they can be the seemingly nice young man, Mike (Dursley McLinden), whom Ace almost falls for. Or Ratcliffe (George Sewell), an Englishman who felt the Nazis had it right, who now allies himself with the Daleks, finding their ideas of racial purity to be congenial.

The Daleks also aren't what they seem in this serial. The viewer is deliberately misled as to which side is which now in the Dalek civil war, which has become about race, as well, since one side has mutated, as is shown when the Doctor inspects the shell of a partially destroyed Dalek casing. The old rebels and the old establishment have switched roles but we don't know until we're directly shown, a nice way of showing just how illegitimate intrinsic ideas of racial superiority are.

Through it all, the Seventh Doctor earns his reputation as a manipulator, with Sylvester McCoy occasionally employing an effective, quietly sinister tone between his moments of clowning, giving the impression the latter is a calculated ruse. Like a good strategist, a lot of what he does is counter-intuitive, as when he seems to be working against his British military allies, or when he deliberately refrains from destroying some Dalek equipment, explaining to Ace that he doesn't want to strand the time travelling Daleks, which would increase the chances of them corrupting the timeline.

One of the famous moments in this serial is Ace cracking a Dalek with her enhanced baseball bat and that's one of the reasons she and Seven are such a great pair--he's the subtlety, she's the direct approach. But we see in this episode there's more to the Doctor's disdain for weaponry than pacifism--his techniques can be far deadlier than any weapon.

Responsibilities of the Doctor

The 2013 Seventh Doctor Doctor Who audioplay Afterlife feels more like a Tenth or Eleventh Doctor story than any audio I've heard so far. It's good, though, and it's kind of nice hearing Seven being taken out of his comfort zone.

Coming after the death of a companion in a previous audio, Afterlife begins with Ace (Sophie Aldred) furious with Seven (Sylvestor McCoy) over what she sees as his callous attitude. He tries to explain to her, as he has explained to many companions many times before and after, that he's gone through this so many times and his perspective as a Time Lord is so different from hers that he simply hasn't the capacity to grieve with the same levels of shock and horror that she feels. He makes an interesting point that, for him, all his companions are always alive and yet also always dead because all points in the timeline are equally real to him.

Of course, no explanation is going to make Ace's feelings go away so she finally talks him into visiting a relative of the deceased. The second and third acts of the story deal with resurrection and gods masquerading as gangsters which is partly airless and partly really intriguing. There's a lot of dialogue about whether the Doctor sees himself as a god, which makes sense considering how manipulative Seven typically is. But he finds himself frequently on the wrong footing as he's forced to deal with the emotions of others--"I keep getting things wrong!" he says plaintively a few times. At one point he's rescued kind of adorably by his occasional companion Sally Morgan (Amy Pemberton).

There's also a nicely sombre moment where Seven plays the spoons early on and a distinctively Elevenish-ish bit of grandstanding at the end which is effective coming from Sylvester McCoy and particularly gratifying coming after an audio where he spent most of the time off his game. Sophie Aldred's also really good, particularly in the early scenes, and there's some really good development for Ace's character.

Doctor of the Parliament

1963 continues to be a busy year for the Doctor in the 2013 Doctor Who audio play 1963: The Assassination Games. The Seventh Doctor proves a natural fit for this entertaining conspiracy espionage thriller.

Neither the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) or Ace (Sophie Aldred) show up for some time, the beginning of the serial featuring a press conference, an assassination, and some government men deciding what to do about it. John F. Kennedy's assassination is constantly referenced but Kennedy's name is never mentioned for some reason. In Britain dealing with this assassination are people from the UNIT predecessor Counter-Measures. The Assassination Games was one of several audios released for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary so it's fitting that it features an organisation introduced in the 25th anniversary television story, Remembrance of the Daleks, and Simon Williams reprises his role as Group Captain Gilmore from that serial.

There's a lot of misdirection and subterfuge which the story carries off well. Ace turns up as a housemaid and the Doctor seems to have become a Member of Parliament. As is so often the case with Seven, it's never completely clear how much he knows about what's going on. Less characteristic of him is some of the grandstanding he does in this story, giving a couple speeches about adventure and his blue police box that would've sounded much more at home coming from Eleven than the typically more mild mannered Seven. But maybe it was part of his politician role.

Mostly this is a good story. It features a direct reference to the inevitable fact that many years must have multiple Doctors visiting at once and there's an amusing moment where Ace nearly has a motorcycle accident.