Doctor Who's Putrid Ham
A quest through the Dr Who novelisations
"The excellent ham of Doctor Who is more than a little off"
1974 Times Literary Supplement review of Doctor Who and the Crusaders (quoted from David J Howe's The Target Book)
"You could always handle greed. Stupidity was apt to be dangerous, though"
DOCTOR WHO AND THE CREATURE FROM THE PIT
by David Fisher
First published 20 November 1980 (1), between Full Circle and State of Decay (2)
I’ve been waxing poetic over Dicks for pretty much all of 1980, but it’s a joy to be given a new voice. For a start, he tears up significant parts of what had started to feel like the Target rulebook, shifting, as Tim Roll-Pickering observes, screen dialogue to indirect speech and even interior monologue (3) and restructuring, as Jason A Miller details, the plotting now he’s free of 25-minute blocks (4). He even ditches the Part Three cliffhanger (5). That said, the similar loss of the final TV scene, though possibly also indicating, as Miller suspects, its addition post-script submission (6), does make the ending feel rather abrupt, as if, despite all his earlier compactness, Fisher simply ran out of pages.
Secondly, with Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit the first novelisation adapted by the original scriptwriter for over a year (7), the scripts aren’t the only source to which Fisher has recourse. About Time says he made ‘copious background notes on both Chloris and the Tythonians’ (8) when devising the serial and these, it seems fair to presume, result in an easy scattering of additional detail. Chloris gains a lived-in feel from passing turns of phrase such as the belief in good fortune following the sight of ‘all the moons together’ (9) and the measuring of time in ‘moonflows’ (10). The Tythonians, meanwhile, get, to pick one example, a wonderfully irrelevant, baffling and unnecessary long detailing of their mating mechanics (11). And then there are all the footnotes which, if nothing else, allow the characters to possess a wealth of unfamiliar but evocative vocabulary (12).
Above all though, Fisher’s prose is a glee. To take the footnotes for instance – fun as they are, the best is the last, a punchline to the whole set-up that offers the wonderfully uninformative clarification that uxal sauce is ‘made from uxal berries’ (13). There’s a lovely array of similes, my favourite being the Doctor hanging and turning helplessly by his scarf ‘like a chicken on a spit’ (14), which are a joy even when they artfully stumble, as when the Doctor can only contemplate rock in terms of rock (15). More generally, there’s just a lovely, lively tone to all the writing, one which also strongly focuses on how characters are reacting to and perceiving events and the world around them. As an incidental example, the Doctor’s eventual emergence from his encounter with Erato: Romana’s immediate reaction is to reflect ‘There are moments […] when I positively loathe that man’, the tone of indignation captured both in her repeated ‘How dare he’ and her almost dismissive description of Erato as a ‘what-ever-it-is’ (16). There’s even an apt simile, mortal danger touching the Doctor no more deeply than ‘a five-mile hike’, which not only captures his breezy manner well but also reveals as much about Romana’s field of reference when it comes leisure activity (ruddy, outdoorsy, aristocratic, all tweed and long socks) as her go to vision of flatness being a ‘crepe suzette’ does regarding food (continental, sophisticated, the stuff of suburban dinner parties). The Doctor, in return, picks up on Romana’s feelings with the more down-to-earth and pointedly repeated ‘miffed’ (17) in a line that not only captures Tom Baker’s voice as well as anything Target has published but also revels in the easy and relaxed way he accepts an escape that was as much a shock to him as Romana (18).
Does any of this have a point beyond just celebrating the arrival of David Fisher? Well, yes. This is a novelisation where everyone has agency, everyone’s point of view gets an outing and everyone’s distinct and memorable. And that helps Fisher tell his story, a story made sufficiently murky on TV that it’s only thanks to others that I’ve got any grasp on it whatsoever. Here is, in the words of Tim Roll-Pickering, a ‘tale of exploitation and monopolistic control of resources’ (19) and, in the words of El Sandifer, an ‘anti-capitalist screed’ (20) centred on a ruler who is ‘happy to thrive while everyone else suffers’ (21) and a society which can’t imagine any other way for the world to be (22). Toby Hadoke presents a narrower version of the same reading (23), but also acknowledges it’s ‘something of an academic exercise’ (24) finding it, which makes me feel a little better that it had gone right over my head and so compels me to include him in the list.
Hadoke’s point is a little less academic in the novelisation. Though the tweaks are minor, they make the set-up on Chloris much clearer: the bandits explain that ‘Lady Adrasta closed down the mine’ (25), thus, as Romana lays out, ‘preventing the mine from being worked’ (26) and ensuring ‘metal became scarce’ (27). Metal may always have been rare and valuable on Chloris, but it’s specifically Lady Adrasta’s complete withdrawal of the resource, a deliberate manipulation of her monopoly (28), that has led to the dire situation Chloris is now in.
Sandifer’s point on Adrasta is similar but focuses on her particular psychopathy and, fantastic as Myra Frances is in the broadcast episodes, the horror of Adrasta comes through all the stronger thanks to the book’s exposure of how her mind works. The very first paragraph quickly establishes her theatrical malevolence, the ‘beautiful day’ she contemplates at its opening extended to explain ‘for an execution’ (29) at its end, an impression later reinforced by her ‘lustful’ look (30) in anticipation of Erato, agent of her executions, and by her guards belief that their overkill punishment for fleeing the creature would be crucifixion ‘upside down in a vat of boiling ix juice’ (31). Even her escape route in case of rebellion (32) feels performative, concealed behind a huge and intricate tapestry (33).
Most revealing though is the faultiness of the logic by which she operates. This is also spelt out on the first page: she has one ‘simple rule’, ‘Those who failed her died’ (34). In her head, this encourages ‘efficiency’ and culls the ‘obviously deliberately refractory’. In case the flaw in her method isn’t transparent, Fisher spells it out later with Doran, whose failure is one of knowledge and imagination rather than effort (35); none-the-less, ‘Engineer Doran had failed her. Those who failed her died. It was a simple rule’ (36). On top of this, witness the tangle Adrasta gets herself into trying to decipher Romana’s behaviour: she suspects, correctly, that Romana is lying when she says K9 is useless without her, a lie motivated by Romana’s certain death should K9 alone be useful to Adrasta (37) but which Adrasta attributes to Romana not yet being familiar with Adrasta’s simple rule (38); Adrasta’s all-too-clear methods inspire the very act she thinks her methods would stamp out.
As anti-capitalist screeds go, Fisher seems to be doubling down on the capitalist verdict that lack of success results only from indolence (39) – Adrasta provides the ultimate motivation and yet still she can’t improve productivity. Chuck this together with Hadoke’s observation and you’ve also got a commentary on how the untethered pursuit of self-interest, the great motivator of all human endeavour in a massively oversimplified model of capitalism (40), leads to societal collapse. Acknowledge Adrasta’s line that peasants always lie ‘in hope of reward or else to evade taxes or punishment’ (41) and it’s hard not to side with Sandifer that Fisher’s got Thatcher and her specifically monetarist outlook in his sights (42).
Sandifer expands on her second point – that it’s Chloris’s whole society rather than just Adrasta that’s Fisher’s target – by explaining that it relies on first mistaking ‘the bandits as the good guys’ (43) and then recognising they’ve got ‘a little too much edge’ (44) for that to be quite right. This is certainly clearer in the novelisation.
Whether or not the bandits ever quite seem like the good guys – they’re introduced as ‘wild men’ (45) and their initial raid leaves three dead (46) – the book does present them as comical. Romana, as on TV, runs rings around them with ease, never seemingly in much danger, and Edu in particular comes across as something of a wide-eyed innocent, his ‘pockmarked’ features suggesting youth, his blush when Romana flashes him a smile suggesting inexperience (47). She almost gives in to the urge to pat him on the head so seemingly unthreatening is her situation (48) and diagnoses the whole troupe of bandits ‘the most ill-organised, unprofessional collection of criminals she had ever met’ (49). It’s not just through Romana’s eyes they carry little threat. The prose presents them as unable to think for themselves (50) and easily led (51). There are some suggestions as the story goes on that they’re not quite the lovably ineffectual bunch they have so far seemed – Torvin’s ‘streams of abuse’ (52) sound much more violent than anything that could have happened onscreen, and the tale of how they used to cajole Edu into narrow mining spaces ‘with kicks and curses’ (53) sounds pretty unsavoury – but it is still a shock when they storm Adrasta’s palace so efficiently and bloodily and Fisher does his utmost to erase any possible pleasure at their exploits.
Before showing the bandits in action, Fisher spends a little time on the guard, emphasising through repetition the childlike way he’s making a wish and drawing attention to how young he is (54). Into this serene scene, the bandits ‘Suddenly’ intrude, but events are still presented from the guard’s point of view – he feels something strike him, then ‘a wetness’ and then, reaching around, he feels the knife in his back (55); Fisher might even be toying with the readers’ disbelief that such a character might have been so brutally dispatched. To round the scene off, the bandits’ response to their action is to watch impassively as the young guard breathes his last (56). As if to make sure the point, Fisher quickly follows this up with another similar scene but this time played out in reverse and from the bandit’s perspective: first the killing, its brutality made visceral when the knife grates on the guard’s rib bone (57), then the reminder the guard has a family and the businesslike manner in which Torvin steps over the corpse to assess the value of the metal skullcap (58). Torvin’s unthinking assessment of the guard as a ‘Lucky fellow’ just rubs salt in the wound (59).
Sandifer’s second point is further made by the way ‘The real resolution isn’t Adrasta getting her comeuppance’ (60), an event which closes the ninth of eleven chapters. What follows makes obvious that Adrasta’s death is no catalyst for change on Chloris, even more so as the novelisation allows it more space and Christopher Barry’s not around to miss the point. Though Fisher doesn’t show a new and indistinguishable regime in place, Kerala’s emergence from Adrasta’s shadow is what was always expected (61) and a succession that has been long in the planning (62).
Unlike with the bandits, Kerala’s brutality is no surprise, her faith in the knife clear from her first appearance (63), so when, as Adrasta’s power slips, she puts her favoured methods into practice, taking command of the palace guards by quickly stabbing one of them (64) then taking command of the bandits by dispatching Torvin (65), what’s shocking isn’t the violence but the efficiency – the knife is quick, precise, swift, deft. She may be old, but there’s a surgical ease to the way she ‘insert[s] her knife blade just below his rib cage on the left-hand side and drove the point upwards’ contrasted with how ‘Ainu, using both hands, drove his knife up under the guard’s ribs from the front. The knife point grated on bone’; the description of her as ‘an elderly but still lethal panther’ (66) is perfect. This ‘cruel, ruthless, murderous, and […] without scruple’ character is explicitly a product of ‘the savage society of Chloris’ (67), never more clearly than when Fisher strangely contrasts her with the doting grandmother she would have been had she lived elsewhere (68), and there’s even a logic to the way, having bemoaned Adrasta’s theatrical preference for the Creature over the knife, she resorts so wholeheartedly to the knife following Adrasta’s death by Creature.
As nicely as the novelisation handles Kerala’s rise, this is all much as on TV. However, what Sandifer suggests is the true resolution – ‘the moment where the Doctor blows up a massive pile of metal’ – isn’t quite the same in the
book. Onscreen, what’s presented is a sort of
prisoner’s dilemma – never better expressed than
by Jasper Carrott – albeit one with a hugely
overpowered cooperation reward, as Sandifer
identifies, ongoing symbiosis (69), as well as a
similarly overpowered betrayal penalty, complete
obliteration by a neutron star. In the novelisation,
however, the ‘massive pile of metal’ isn’t simply a
massive pile of metal – it’s metal gifted by Erato
(70) which deliberately ‘isn’t atomically stable’ (71). This could simply be seen as a slight shift of focus – rather than demonstrating ‘the folly of short-term materialism’, Fisher is presenting the dangers of reneging on a deal (72) – except it puts the Tythonians in the position of both participant in and arbiter of the game; not only do they get to choose whether to cooperate with or betray the Chlorissians, they get to decide what reward or punishment Chloris receives for its decision.
This makes substantially more significant the theme Rob Shearman identifies in the story – ‘communication’ (73). As on TV, much of this revolves around Erato’s quest to reclaim his vocaliser, though the pleasure of regaining a voice (74) and the expressiveness Erato can unleash (75) both come across more strongly here. On top of this, though, is the growing sense that being able to talk doesn’t do much for the issue that the Tythonians and the Chlorissians are barely comprehensible to on another. Almost as soon as Erato is once more able to talk, he laments that Tythonians usually ‘communicate through [their] skins’ in a way that feels more ‘meaningful’ (76), rather undermining any idea that the vocaliser might solve all misunderstandings. More fundamentally, it’s clear that the Tythonians’ long lives give them a very different relationship with time, which can be comical when brevity is necessary (77) but also means that Erato is by necessity always making some allowance when working with other species, such as going by ‘a single name’ rather than his true 135 (78).
On the plus side, this means Erato’s time down the pit was not quite the torture it might have at first seemed – it took ‘a year or two’ for Erato to even twig he’d been imprisoned (79) – on the other hand, it means Erato attaches almost no value to the individual lives he encounters on Chloris, viewing them as a person might a specimen, curious about their physical quirks (80), ‘analysing’ them and easily deciding to feel no guilt about their deaths (81), what with their ‘badly designed’ bodies having ‘barely [reached] the first rung of the evolutionary ladder’ (82). Rob Shearman points out ‘If Erato was a human’, the ‘murder his captor in revenge’ immediately upon release would be a pretty clear sign Erato ‘couldn’t be trusted’ (83); that the Tythonian is so baffled by people goes some way to mitigate that feeling, but Fisher, by focusing on Adrasta’s corpse (83), ensures the sense of disquiet isn’t wholly assuaged.
Crucially, because Erato is so alien, the reader can’t help but relate with the people of Chloris, however much their actions and society can be condemned, more than with any Tythonian. Much of the extra detail in the novelisation simply serves to strengthen this divide: as Erato dreamily describes his home planet, it starts off sounding simply exotic, with ‘orange seas’ and ‘indigo beaches’, quickly becomes ominous, with ‘pure powdered carbon’ and a ‘dark red sky’, and then reveals itself to be utterly antithetical to human life, with ‘great sulphur clouds’ and ‘sweet, sulphuric acid rain’ (85). When Erato declares it ‘the most beautiful planet in any galaxy’ (86), the reader is very likely to agree with Organon’s withering assessment (87). Even their benevolent, peaceful existence, over ‘forty thousand Chlorissian years’ of avoiding ‘any physical activity, like movement’, and devoting themselves ‘exclusively to music and poetry’ (88), sounds pretty dreadful.
This all matters because, though the novelisation mostly focuses on Erato’s difficulties understanding Chloris, it is the Chlorissians who are really out of their depth. In yet another little political barb, Fisher takes aim at nuclear proliferation. The ‘peace-loving’ Tythonians avoid war thanks to their development of ‘the supreme doomsday weapon’ and the fact no one’s willing ‘to risk total annihilation’ (89); the Chlorissians, totally oblivious to this ‘supreme doomsday weapon’, never even warned of it by Erato (90), blithely invite an ‘annihilation’ that not even Erato can prevent once its deployment’s no longer serves any purpose (91), not that it would ever would have done, what with the target having no idea this superweapon ever existed, that it would be deployed or that it has been deployed. They might have some inkling afterwards, but by then not just them, not just their planet but, in an act of very hazily targeted (92) overkill, their whole solar system (93) will have been destroyed. The Tythonians are a distant, massive superpower and the Chlorissians are some tiny island that’s never even heard of Hiroshima; fair enough, the trade deal might well be kosher, but the penalty for not taking it is so disproportionate to the point of being inconceivable. Erato isn’t a villain but, from the point of view of Chloris, the point of view the reader can’t help but at least partially share, he may as well be.
But, you might well say, Chlorisian society is rotten to the core. Everyone, not just Adrasta, is grasping and greedy; had they not been, none of this would have happened and they’d have got a lovely little symbiotic trade agreement with Tythonus and lived happily ever after. And here, summing up a theme that keeps popping up through the story, Kerala offers the answer: ‘You could always handle greed. Stupidity was apt to be dangerous’ (94). Erato acknowledged that, though she was greedy, what really propelled Adrasta’s course of action was stupidity or, to put it slightly more considerately, ignorance. Kerala’s quest to perpetuate the ways of Chloris end with the destruction of a huge pile of metal – you could say because she no longer has any material wealth to pursue, but you could also say because she finally glimpses an understanding of what Erato can do, a capability of which she previously had no conception. It doesn’t really matter what you choose to say: looking at the bandits, Ainu is ‘greedy’ and Edu is ‘stupid’ (95) but their actions are broadly interchangeable. I’ve no doubt that El Sandifer’s actually right about what David Fisher’s saying in ‘The Creature from the Pit’ but, in Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit, what he’s saying even more loudly is: be very careful of huge, amorphous green blobs, you never know what they’re capable of.
Height Attack
Erato is ‘enormous yet shapeless’ and travels in ‘an egg 400 metres long’ while the bandits are ‘seven little men’
1. Based on the Popular Television Series, ed. Paul Smith
2. epguides.com/DoctorWho
3. ‘In another strong move, Fisher has shifted some of the exposition from dialogue to characters' thought patterns, thus making the work feel more like a novel’
Tim Roll-Pickering, ‘He forgot the penis’, Doctor Who Ratings Guide, pagefillers.com/dwrg/frames.htm
4. ‘Fisher spends minimal time on adapting the Part One material, but almost half the book on Part Four alone’
Jason A Miller, ‘A Review’, Doctor Who Ratings Guide, pagefillers.com/dwrg/frames.htm
5. ‘The DVD text commentary for this story was quite fond of the novelization […] So we know that Fisher was novelizing his own pre-rehearsal scripts and not the finished product. Thus anything that Douglas Adams added to the scripts or that director Christopher Barry added in post-production (such as the we're-out-of-ideas Part Three cliffhanger, which is nicely produced but otherwise more abstract than tense) is just not here’
Jason A Miller, ‘A Review’, Doctor Who Ratings Guide, pagefillers.com/dwrg/frames.htm
6. ‘The final palace scene is not here, indicating that Adams, not Fisher, wrote it’
Jason A Miller, ‘A Review’, Doctor Who Ratings Guide, pagefillers.com/dwrg/frames.htm
7. Doctor Who and the War Games (25 October 1979) – though that does ignore Junior Doctor Who and the Brian of Morbius (13 November 1980), where Dicks wasn’t credited for the TV episodes and they, apparently, departed significantly from his original scripts, and Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon (20 November 1980), where Dicks wasn’t credited for the TV episodes but they, apparently, were largely his work. Include the latter and the statement becomes the rather underwhelming ‘with Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit the first novelisation adapted by the original scriptwriter since the previous novelisation’; mind you, discount Doctor Who and the War Games as Hulke only co-wrote the TV scripts and the last novelisation adapted by the scriptwriter was Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock (30 March 1978), though that does ignore Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen (18 May 1978), as the TV episodes were co-written by Kit Pedler (though I suspect he might have been less involved than Dicks was in ‘The War Games’) and Junior Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (24 May 1979), purely on the grounds that it’s Junior
8. ‘David Fisher wrote copious background notes on both Chloris and the Tythonians before he wrote the finished script’
Lawrence Miles & Tat Wood, About Time 4; p.296
9. ‘It was lucky, so they said, when you could see all the moons together’
10. ‘There was probably more metal in that thing than we’ve even managed to steal in four moonflows’
11. ‘once two Tythonians (who are essentially tri-sexual) decided to amalgamate. They rolled together, and over the course of a couple of hundred Chlorissian years they absorbed each other, becoming a single enormous entity (probably one mile in length) possessed of no fewer than six different sexes. This entity, this double Tythonian, then gestated for about two thousand Chlorissian years (sometimes longer), and, in the fullness of time, split and produced two identical Tythonians, approximately six inches in length. There were frequent multiple births—triplets or quadruplets’ – how does this work? If two Tythonians become, through absorption, one and then eventually split into two again, then surely the population would remain, at best, perfectly level, though actually in decline because ‘there were never more than sixty-three fertile Tythonians capable of child-bearing at any one time. Some of those would decide to devote their lives to music or poetry or just lying around and chatting about this and that’? True, it states there are ‘frequent multiple births’ but then there are lots of Tythonians who never breed, understandably as sex is a death sentence. Speaking of which, what does ‘child-bearing’ even mean in this situation? And where does the trisexuality fit in all of this?
12. For example: ‘Knife, club or leetrobe*. Just kill her!’ gives ‘*A leetrobe is a species of giant flowering lettuce unique to Chloris’
13. ‘Uxal sauce is a kind of chutney made from uxal berries’
14. ‘For a moment the Doctor hung there in space by his scarf, turning slowly like a chicken on a spit, watching the third piton gently ease itself out of the rock face’
15. ‘The rock face seemed as hard as... well... rock’
16. ‘There are moments, thought Romana, when I positively loathe that man. How dare he look so cheerful when he’s been trapped the far side of that shell with a huge ravening what-ever-it-is? How dare he appear looking as if he’s just returned from a five-mile hike, when, by the rules that govern the Universe, he should have been torn limb from limb or squashed flatter than a crepe suzette by a million tons of green blob?’
17. ‘he had the distinct impression that his reappearance was not universally popular. Really people were most extraordinary. Why, even Romana looked miffed. Yes, miffed—that was the word’
18. ‘replied the Doctor, whose explanation of events was not wholly reliable. In fact he was as surprised as everyone else when the shell split’
19. ‘The Creature from the Pit is a reasonably simplistic tale of exploitation and monopolistic control of resources’
Tim Roll-Pickering, ‘He forgot the penis’, Doctor Who Ratings Guide, pagefillers.com/dwrg/frames.htm
20. ‘Some people, it seems, just don’t understand a proper anti-capitalist screed when they see one’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
21. ‘she’s a selfish arch-capitalist who is perfectly happy to thrive while everyone else suffers’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
22. ‘The point is that profit as understood on Chloris was simply wrong, and that there was another way. Adrasta did misunderstand, but not because she didn’t recognize Erato’s individual subjectivity, but rather because she didn’t recognize that there was another way for the world to be’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
‘The entire point of this resolution is that Adrasta wasn’t a special or unique villain, but rather merely the point at the top of an entire society that is diseased and unable to understand that alternatives exist’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
23. ‘a trade agreement being scuppered by the fragile power structure of a greedy ruler’
Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2; p.378
24. ‘the dirty secret is that even though I’ve found nice things to say about The Creature from the Pit, it’s been something of an academic exercise in digging for them’
Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2; p.378
25. ‘“Why did you become bandits?” she asked. “Because the Lady Adrasta closed down the mine”’
26. ‘Here was a real live monster oozing like toothpaste around the tunnels of what appeared to be the only mine on the planet, gobbling up failed engineers like so many cocktail canapes, and preventing the mine from being worked’
27. ‘“So that’s why metal became scarce!” exclaimed Romana. “That’s why the jungle started to encroach everywhere”’
28. ‘Adrasta needed him—not as a source of metal, but as an excuse to keep people out of her mine’
29. ‘It was a beautiful day, thought the Lady Adrasta […] a beautiful day for an execution’
30. ‘She was staring downwards into the Pit, waiting for something. Her expression was almost lustful, as if she were awaiting for a lover to appear’
31. ‘The thought of facing the Lady Adrasta once again did not appeal to any of them. She would without doubt crucify them upside down in a vat of boiling ix juice’
32. ‘Tales of the Lady Adrasta’s cruelty and cunning were legendary. He found it difficult to believe that she would ever leave herself with only one exit from her audience chamber. Surely there had to be a hidden door or a secret passage somewhere’
33. ‘A huge wall-hanging, embroidered with improbable hunting scenes and dating from the reign of the Lady Adrasta’s predecessor, caught his eye. […] Hidden behind the hanging was a small door heavily barred and bolted’
34. ‘Those who failed her died. It was a simple rule designed to encourage efficiency amongst her subjects. Some it did; some it didn’t. Those it didn’t were obviously deliberately refractory and she was better off without them’
35. ‘“Perhaps I had an unfair advantage,” remarked the Doctor. “Better equipment?” “An open mind”’
36. ‘Engineer Doran had failed her. Those who failed her died. It was a simple rule designed to ensure the total dedication of all who served her. She regarded Doran almost with regret. He was a not unattractive young man’
37. ‘“That makes both you and the Doctor redundant, doesn’t it, my dear?” “Not quite,” replied Romana, only too aware of what happened to those whom the Lady Adrasta found to be redundant. […] “ I’m the only one who can operate K9”’
38. ‘Very probably the girl was lying. She was after all a stranger to the planet. She had yet to learn that lying to the Lady Adrasta was a dangerous occupation. On the other hand, if what she said was true...’
39. I’m thinking of Tebbit’s ‘he got on his bike’ routine, but UK politics in the 1980s throws up plenty of examples of the suggestion that the jobless just need to try harder
40. ‘In general, capitalism as an economic system and mode of production can be summarised by the following: […]
-
Freedom of capitalists to act in their self-interest in managing their business and investments’
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
41. ‘Peasants always lied in her experience, either in hope of reward or else to evade taxes or punishment’
42. ‘Here I should pause and point out a particularly galling error in About Time, in which Miles and Wood […] say that reading Adrasta as a Thatcher figure is anachronistic. Which, given that the story was written in the midst of the general election, is fairly ludicrous. Yes, it was made before Thatcher was Prime Minister, but I think one can pretty safely make the connection while she’s merely the odds-on favor [sic] to win the election. It’s not exactly a stretch to think that a female ruler written in the middle of Thatcher’s campaign might be inspired by her somehow’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
43. ‘The impact of this story depends on the assumption that the audience is going to mistake the bandits as the good guys’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
44. ‘your usual batch of oppressed miners with just a little too much edge on their part’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
45. ‘She had been abducted by the wild men’
46. ‘Leaving two soldiers and one of their own number dead, the men vanished into the jungle again’
47. ‘only the pockmarked Edu had voted for Romana’s continued survival, and he hardly looked cut out for the role of a knight in shining armour. Romana rewarded him with a dazzling smile which brought a blush to his pitted cheeks’
48. ‘Romana smiled. She almost felt like patting the unappetising little man on the top of his filthy head’
49. ‘They were probably the most ill-organised, unprofessional collection of criminals she had ever met in her travels through umpteen galaxies and only the TARDIS knew how many hundreds of thousands of years’
50. ‘The bandits thought. It was not a process with which they were familiar and they showed signs of strain’
51. ‘The bandits nodded, unhappily aware they were about to be talked into some lunatic plan of action’
52. ‘Torvin, who felt the need to establish his ascendancy over them once again, even if only by streams of abuse’
53. ‘The puka, they had christened him then. And when his courage had sometimes failed him, they had driven him ahead of them with kicks and curses’
54. ‘Make a wish. He closed his eyes and wished: to make Guardmaster before he was thirty’
55. ‘Suddenly he felt something strike him between his shoulder blades. He felt no pain, only a wetness in the middle of his back. He put one hand to the spot and with astonishment touched the protruding handle of a knife’
56. ‘He turned and saw a small, incredibly filthy individual, one leg over the parapet, watching him. Too astonished to cry out, he died where he stood’
57. ‘Ainu, using both hands, drove his knife up under the guard’s ribs from the front. The knife point grated on bone. The man gave a peculiar sigh and sagged in Edu’s grasp’
58. ‘the dead guard slid to the floor, his metal skullcap rolling across the flagstones. Torvin stepped over the corpse and retrieved the skullcap. He tapped it against the edge of a table. ‘Pure metal,’ he announced knowledgably. “Lucky fellow to be able to afford head protection like this. I expect it was a family heirloom.” He put the skullcap into his sack and looked around for more booty’
59. I realise this all feels a bit Austin Powers now, but it precedes that by over 15 years and is being played in earnest
60. ‘The real resolution isn’t Adrasta getting her comeuppance […] but rather the moment where the Doctor blows up a massive pile of metal in order to demonstrate the folly of short-term materialism in response to the failings of the entire planet’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
61. ‘Adrasta herself wondered at the old woman’s implacable spirit. One night, she thought, Karela will enter this chamber, knife in hand, determined to make herself sole ruler of Chloris’
62. ‘At last, after all her years of loyal service to the Lady Adrasta, after all her years of patience and plotting, she saw a way of assuming supreme power on Chloris. The day of
Karela had arrived’
63. ‘The wizened old woman with evil eyes fingered the knife she wore at her waist. All this business of the Pit, she thought, is a waste of time. Why the Pit? Simpler to cut their throats—quicker, too’
64. ‘It took her precisely ninety seconds, including a swift knife-thrust to the throat of the first and only vocal mutineer, before she restored order’
65. ‘Karela, with the deftness of long practice, inserted her knife blade just below his rib cage on the left-hand side and drove the point upwards’
66. ‘She stalked them like an elderly but still lethal panther’
67. ‘She was a survivor; one had to be to make one’s way in the savage society of Chloris. She was cruel, ruthless, murderous, and totally without scruple’
68. ‘On other planets in other galaxies Karela would of course have retired long ago to spend her declining years spoiling her grandchildren and infuriating their parents’
69. ‘What Erato was going for all along was to create a symbiotic relationship between two planets with complimentary sets of needs. In other words, the entire point of the story is not, in fact, “Erato was just like us” but “we never needed to be so obsessed with mining in the first place and the entire basis of our economy and culture was flawed.” The point is that profit as understood on Chloris was simply wrong, and that there was another way’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/theyve-taken-this-animal-and-turned-it-into-a-joke-the-creature-from-the-pit
70. ‘In an attempt to establish friendly relations Erato had disgorged half a ton of pure copper at her feet’
71. ‘“the trouble is, the metal isn’t atomically stable” […] “Those ingots are copper. Adrasta and I tested them ourselves.” “Of course they’re copper. But it’s unusable”’
72. ‘I thought there had to be a catch in it somewhere. There had to be some way he could take back his gift if Adrasta reneged on him. The molecular structure of the metal was rearranged slightly, so that it reacted to certain resonances’
73. ‘The theme of this story becomes all too clear. It’s all about communication’
Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2; p.376
74. ‘Having discovered the use of the Doctor’s voice, the Creature obviously had every intention of enjoying its sound’
75. ‘The Doctor’s face went purple in alarm as his voice rose two full octaves in sheer indignation […] “Don’t make him angry,” he begged in a hoarse whisper. “It’s hell on the throat when he gets worked up”’
76. ‘Normally we communicate through our skins. So much more meaningful, I always think, don’t you?’
77. ‘Romana watched fascinated as the Doctor/Erato went purple with the effort to achieve brevity’
78. ‘Like all Tythonians, I have 135 names, indicating clan, family, parents, credit rating, political persuasion, etc. However, when dealing with species whose life cycle is of such indecent brevity, I prefer to use only a single name’
79. ‘At first he presumed that Adrasta meant to keep him out of sight until she had prepared the population for his appearance. Then after a year or two it gradually dawned on him that she had trapped him in the mine hoping he would die’
80. ‘yet it was unable to communicate with these ridiculous creatures who moved about on such impractical appendages. Perhaps the possession of such extremities destroyed their ability or will to communicate’
81. ‘At first he had worried that perhaps he had brought some terrible disease from the depths of space, some alien bacteria that caused Chlorissians to die the moment they saw him. But then after analysing a couple of the bodies he had rolled on he came to the conclusion that they were appallingly badly designed. They were a collection of impractical projections—arms, heads, legs—all of which broke so easily. It was not his fault, he decided, that his visitors failed to survive the encounter; it was a miracle they had survived thus far’
82. ‘One tends to forget that whilst we Tythonians arrived at evolutionary perfection many aeons ago, you ape-descended creatures have barely got your foot on the first rung of the evolutionary ladder’
83. ‘If Erato was a human who’d been imprisoned, his first action upon release – to murder his captor in revenge – would leave us in little doubt that he couldn’t be trusted’
Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2; p.377
84. ‘The Lady Adrasta lay dead, her eyes wide open in a state of pure horror’
85. ‘the beautiful orange seas with the long, soft, indigo beaches where it used to laze on pure powdered carbon; the dark red sky above, in which floated great sulphur clouds; and the rain. Oh, how it missed the rain! The warm, sweet, sulphuric acid rain of home’
86. ‘whilst undoubtedly the most beautiful planet in any galaxy, with its red skies and yellow sulphuric acid clouds and indigo beaches, was not rich in vegetation. In fact there was no vegetation left at all—just millions and millions of hectares of gently rolling sand and fine ground mineral ores’
87. ‘Organon made a mental note that, in the event of space travel ever becoming possible for Chlorissians, he would give Tythonus a wide berth’
88. ‘Tythonians lived for about forty thousand Chlorissian years—longer, if they avoided any physical activity, like movement or worry, and devoted themselves exclusively to music and poetry’
89. ‘the Tythonians were a peace-loving race. They had not fought a war for over a million years. They didn’t need to, because they had developed the supreme doomsday weapon. Their power of retaliation was so enormous no adversary was prepared to risk total annihilation’
90. I mean, he does warn her: ‘I did warn the Lady Adrasta […] that if I, as Tythonian Ambassador, was in any way harmed, then she would face retaliation on a scale she could not conceive. Unfortunately she was a very stupid woman’ – but even his warning concedes she’s unlikely to understand what he’s threatening, plus he’s perfectly aware that she’s ‘very stupid’ and so even less likely to understand
91. ‘That’s the trouble with neutron stars—once you’ve started them on their way you can’t stop them’
92. ‘Great accuracy was not required. All the neutron star had to do was to brush the surface of a sun and...’
93. ‘The total destruction of this solar system’
94. ‘Greed she understood. You could always handle greed. Stupidity was apt to be dangerous, though’
95. ‘Ainu was greedy, Edu stupid’
Are You Sitting Comfortably..?
‘The guards, as guards will, conferred’
References I Didn’t Get
‘refractory’ – ‘stubborn or unmanageable’ according to languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en
‘integument’ – basically tough skin according to languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en
‘cupidity’ – ‘greed for money or possessions’ (languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en)
‘hoarfrost’ – a sort of icy dew according to britannica.com/science/hoarfrost
‘At great length and in rolling periods, reminiscent of Macaulay at his worst’: thanks to Google, I’m assuming the long-winded Macaulay is Thomas Babington Macauley (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay) whose book The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_England_from_the_Accession_of_James_the_Second), the Wikipedia entry for which describes it as ‘famous for its brilliant ringing prose’ but also reveals it devotes five volumes to the history of less than one country over just 17 years, probably explaining Fisher’s clear opinion on it
Fisherisms
Trading in on all of Dicks’s hard work: ‘They heard the familiar sound of the TARDIS de-materialising’
Miscellania
Erato: ‘It was huge and filled every corner of the mine, like some vast earthworm’ AND ‘A rush of foul, fetid air surged up the mineshaft. The Creature must be enormous, he realised. It was acting like a giant piston, filling the shafts and corridors of the mine, driving the exhausted air upwards’ AND ‘It was an amorphous mass that oozed through the tunnels like jelly’ AND ‘a real live monster oozing like toothpaste around the tunnels of what appeared to be the only mine on the planet, gobbling up failed engineers like so many cocktail canapes’
What a title for the last chapter: ‘Wrapping Up’
I just like the turn of phrase: ‘The Doctor was enjoying the luxury of being read to’
A wonderful verdict on the Doctor: ‘The man was absurd; a charlatan of some sort’
The Doctor: ‘It was the story of his own life: overelaboration; never knowing when to stop; always going that bit further even when caution and good sense said you had gone far enough. How much trouble had he got himself in to doing just that? A wise man would know when to call a halt. On the other hand, he reflected, a wise man could get bored out of his mind’
‘“Always leave them happy or bewildered,” observed Organon sagely. “Ideally the latter”’ – rather cements his status as Doctor surrogate
‘The guards’ immediate reaction was to raise their harpoon guns’ is following in the next paragraph by ‘Their muskets made a deafening noise in the confined space’ – I guess they could be carrying both…
‘Suppose there are no homo sapiens where it comes from. So it doesn’t realise what a very fragile species we are’ – what’s this ‘we’?
A wonderful description of the Tardis: ‘parts of it tended to exist in various times and in different dimensions. You might clear out a cupboard now and five minutes later find it full of the most outlandish objects which had appeared from you had no idea where (or when): like this cardboard box, labelled “Toys from Hamleys”’
Another lovely turn of phrase, this time via Romana: ‘I think what you heard was just my mind boggling’
And a lovely bit of incomprehension on the part of Erato: ‘it was clear that something about his personal appearance was offensive to the local inhabitants. But even now he could not conceive of what it could be. On Tythonus he was regarded as extremely handsome’