I want to propose that Leela worked better in her season under Graham Williams than in her three Hinchcliffe stories.
I don't know if this is a particularly controversial take, but the opposite is ostensibly easier to argue. According to Lawrence Miles & Tat Wood in About Time 4 (p.156), Leela was created 'to appear for three stories only', two of those by her creator and the other by the sitting script editor. On top of that, Hinchcliffe, who seems to have had a big hand in designing the character to balance the traditional Doctor Who-companion role of needing explanations with a desire for a more centre-stage, heroic female lead (John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text; p.213), will obviously have left by the time of her fourth story.
As well as the presence or absence of specific creative personnel, a preordained three-story run lends itself easily to a character arc, in which, as Elizabeth Sandifer, writing about 'The Face of Evil', observes, 'The Doctor wants to change Leela to be more to his liking, and Leela is resistant to changing'. There was certainly no way 'Talons' was going to clumsily end with Leela grabbing the hand of the nearest youngish male with sudden dreams of settling down, even if I could think of any possible candidates in that story.
However, there's a couple of problems with this reading of Leela's first three stories. Firstly, 'The Robots of Death' reveals that the creative team and writer didn't exactly have a three-story character arc in mind - as Elizabeth Sandifer explains, 'Robots' contributes to Leela's development by revealing new roles for the Who companion, not by showing her change as a character: 'Boucher pulls that off beautifully by having her figure out what's going on with Poul episodes ahead of everyone else but be unable to frame her insight in terms that everyone else understands [...] Leela has spent the entire story ahead of the game'. Secondly, that would involve Leela's character arc culminating in the Eliza Doolittle-inspired horror of 'Talons'.
Toby Hadoke gets to the heart of the matter writing about 'The Invasion of Time' (part six) (Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2): 'whatever the potential pitfalls in her conception, in execution Leela stands out as one of the series' truly great regular characters'. In other words, the idea of Leela, whilst potentially great, was never actually that good; it's Louise Jameson who was sublime.
My argument then is that the series is much better served by just letting Louse Jameson get on with it than it ever was by carefully and skillfully writing stories that explore Hinchcliffe, Holmes and Boucher's concept of a futuristic, tribal hunter-cum-child (by which I mean a childlike hunter, not... anything else). There are potential pitfalls here (Elizabeth Sandifer on 'Horror of Fang Rock': 'Leela continues her frustrating fade-out, in which it's obvious that she's not being allowed to develop as a character so that she can keep being pushed into comic relief situations, which is even more demeaning than "educating" her was'), but I'd argue, whatever's going on in the scripts, Louise Jameson
sidesteps them. Rob Shearman's take on the same story as El Sandifer's statement (Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2 on 'Horror of Fang Rock' (part one)) is that 'There's a difference to Leela here as well, a new authority [where] Last year she played Leela most often as a naif, needing to be educated'. That sounds an awful lot like the final step in creating 'the only female companion who ever challenged the Doctor for heroic identification’ of which John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado wrote (Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text; p.213).
It doesn't sound like a strong argument (if, indeed, it is an argument at all), but it has a basis in what I remember loving about Leela as a kid. That initial three-story run made very little impression on me at all, but I do remember loving the way she and the Doctor endlessly ended up on top of each other in 'Image of the Fendahl' as somehow indicative of both their childlike friendship, how they'd struggle to keep each other safe and their joy at rescuing each other; I
remember adoring how well she seemed to work with K9, the only character who ever seemed consistently comfortable being physically at his level, sitting rather than crouching, and the joy with which she greeted his induction to the Tardis, almost begging the Doctor to let him onboard; I remember her little bits of business in the part one openings, like practicing how to write on a blackboard, which were on a par with all Tom Baker's goes at learning to paint
or losing to K9 at chess; most of all, I remember her employing the Doctor's accessories almost as much as him, something that even extended to the publicity material. With all due deference to the Hartnell-Barbara and Troughton-Zoe dynamics, I'm not sure the
show had ever before managed to pull off a relationship of such equals, with such clear yet distinct plot functions, each visually striking, maybe even iconic, in their own right, who felt like friends out adventuring together - and that works just as well as a pair or if you throw K9 in and think of them as a trio. Interestingly, I think Williams pulls it off once more in Season 17 and then the show doesn't manage it again until Ace turns up.
Anyway, Doctor Who and the Face of Evil...
Comments