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)
"For the first time, in many years of wandering, he'd found something that could be called a home"
THE THREE DOCTORS
by Terrance Dicks
First published 20 November 1975 (1), between Pyramids of Mars and The Android Invasion (2)
Height Attack
‘it started to grow, swelling to the size of a man. As it grew, it changed, taking on roughly, very roughly, the shape of a man. A huge figure’ – is it the size of a man or huge?
Omega: ‘was a good seven feet tall’
More odd Time Lord factoids from Dicks. It appears they’re somehow connected with their planet, fuelled by an ‘energy’ (3) or ‘life-force’ (4), rather than say food and water, that can be ‘consumed’ (5) or ‘drained’ collectively. It also seems they’re more of a club than a species, duty-bound to assist one of their own when help is requested even by one of their exiled members (6).
And then there are Dicks’s odd ideas about regeneration. He clearly expects the reader to find it rather complicated, just like Benton (7), but grip on the concept seems more slippery than any reader’s: the first Doctor is called upon to keep the ‘impetuous youngsters’ that succeed him in line despite being the youngest of the three (8); the second Doctor assumes he’ll ‘wink out of existence’ if his successor dies (9); and the Time Lords view each Doctor as a splinter of the whole rather than as the same person at different stages of their life, stating that Omega can only be defeated by the Doctor’s ‘totality’ (10).
This only makes sense if the Doctors are connected to each other in parallel rather than in series, with each Doctor in fact the age of their incarnation rather than the cumulative age of themselves and their predecessors, but then, just as it looks like it all might make sense, they get clearly defined as predecessors and successors rather than facets: Troughton views Pertwee as ‘what he was to become’ (11) and Pertwee views Troughton as ‘an earlier version of himself’ (12). There’s even the sense that the third Doctor is a result of the second’s character, who displays ‘mannerisms that he himself had outgrown’ rather than that are totally alien to him.
Despite this, it’s the youngest and least experienced of the three who magically knows the answer to everything. ‘It's a bridge’, he says on glancing at a big jelly (13). How does he know? ‘One of you must stay […] the other must cross it’ (14), he decrees, taking instant command of his lower orders. To be fair, Jo seems to be a step ahead of the older Doctors too, explaining how they can use their wills to manipulate the antimatter world just as Omega does (15) and ‘inspiring them to run into even more danger’ in a way that will precipitate their defeat of the villain (16). Maybe inexperience is the key? After all, the threat in this story, to the Doctor and to the existence of all Time Lords, is the very first Time Lord, the one who can have the least experience of all.
That said, The Three Doctors actually veers rather close to Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders in suggesting Omega’s real problem is that he’s been at this lark too long. When he first arrived in his anti-matter universe, Omega was able to create rich, lush landscapes of ‘rolling fields [and] orchards in blossom’ but, as the ‘thousands upon thousands of years roll[ed] by, the strain [became] too great’ and ‘the beauty and the colour’ faded (17). Here might be another treatise on how everything must die to allow progress, hence Omega’s death providing the Time Lords with ‘a new power source’ just as his first (apparent) death had fuelled their ‘mastery over Time’ (18).
Such a reading doesn’t quite stick though. Omega’s still able to manifest a ‘towering castle’ with ‘Hundreds of towers and slender minarets’ (19) and, when later he tears that castle apart, he’s said to be capable of fixing it in an instant (20) – it remains ruined because ‘he had not bothered’ to fix it. The ‘featureless’ (21) world in which he lives seems to result more from a lack of effort than a failure in potency.
Indeed, Omega’s real problem seems to lie within his character. He’s presented as a sort of ancient Greek stereotype of the ‘oriental’ ruler, all ‘opulence’ and indolence, in love with himself, posing ‘like a Superstar in a spot-light’ (22), and utterly disinterested in anything but his own immediate surroundings, so he lives in a castle surrounded by dreary wasteland. He complains that he ‘should have been a god!’ (23) but, seeing as he’s living in a world composed of nothing but ‘his thoughts [made] real’ (24), he is one. Sadly, that’s resulted in a world that’s a bit shit – Jo’s immediate impression being that it’s ‘ghastly’ and like being in ‘some terrible dream’ (25).
Power has turned out to be its own ‘prison’ (26) – sustaining it consumes Omega until ‘There is nothing left of [him]’ except his role as ruler. Of course he seeks freedom – the world he’s made is awful – but, like the strutting, preening tyrant he is, he can’t accept that ‘control’ and ‘escape’ are mutually exclusive options between which he must choose (27) and so vacillates, as Tat Wood points out (28), between wanting ‘freedom’ on the one hand and ‘revenge’ (29) and ‘universal destruction’ (30) on the other in a way that ensures he’ll achieve neither. When Omega asserts that ‘Power is the only freedom’ (31), he betrays his inability to appreciate the subtle difference between being free to do as he pleases and being free from his constraints (32). Considering that he’s seeking to escape a world that’s nothing but a reflection of him, the Doctor’s solution is plainly the only possible solution: ‘The only freedom he could ever have—utter annihilation’ (33).
In the context of the novelisations, this forms a nice parallel with the Doctor. He, at the end of this story, finally gets his freedom, released from his exile on Earth, and, like Omega, he’s faced with a choice– ‘friends’ and ‘home’ or ‘wandering’ (34). Like Omega, he chooses both; unlike Omega, it seems he’s able to (35). Or, at least, that’s how it looked on TV.
Shortly after proposing ‘Jo, the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, and his life as UNIT's scientific adviser’ as his new ‘home’, he starts wittering on about Metebelis Three (36), and, straight off the back of Doctor Who and the Green Death and Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, most Target readers will know exactly where that’s going. The Doctor’s inability to ever fully commit to Earth at least partly leads to Jo leaving him; the blue crystal he brings to Earth from Metebelis Three precipitates an adventure that leads to his death, giving way to a new man (not so much a successor but, considering Dicks’s view of regeneration, a replacement); and that new man, as was clear in Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and is about to be reiterated in Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, is fed up hanging around Earth and views being UNIT’s scientific adviser as something of a burden. Maybe the Doctor’s not a special case at all.
Tory Who
‘The Doctor picked Jo up bodily and carried her across to the window’ – what is Dicks’s obsession with people picking Jo up and throwing her about?
‘Jo Grant's contribution to the battle was limited. The recoil from her rifle knocked her flat on her back as soon as she fired it. Hugging her bruised shoulder, she decided to remain an observer’ – Seriously, what is his problem with Jo?
‘Jo struggled and protested, but at a nod from the Brigadier, Benton simply picked her up and stepped into the flame with her’ – It’s like a fetish
Dicksisms
‘With its usual groaning sound the centre column began moving up and down’
‘Funny chap, that. Still, you could never tell with soldiers. Peculiar lot’ – what is it with Dicks and soldiers?
Strangely specific firearms are back: ‘he simply opened fire at the nearest with his Sterling submachine gun’. And a new one: ‘Behind him came Benton, cradling a Bren-gun without its tripod’ (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bren_light_machine_gun) – Why does Dicks think this is necessary detail but knowing what a black hole or a nebula is is beyond the call of duty?
Just because I think it captures the first Doctor’s voice rather well: ‘Me? Through the black hole? Certainly not!’
‘he never found his victories a source of unalloyed pleasure. Somehow there was always too much sympathy for the defeated enemy’ – now there’s something the new series picked up and ran with. It is of course just a statement of what’s already been seen in several novelisations including Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Green Death, but it’s so well phrased. Dicks is very adept at rooting the show’s mythology
1 tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Three_Doctors_(novelisation)
2 http://epguides.com/DoctorWho/
3 ‘The Junior Time Lord lay sprawled across the floor at his feet, and in the nearby council chamber the members of the High Council lay slumped across the table, drained of all energy, drained almost of life itself’
4 ‘Like his fellow Time Lords he was in a protective coma, only the tiniest glimmer of life-force remained’
5 ‘We are being consumed, my lord, by a Force equal yet opposite to our own’
6 ‘He has asked for our help, and it is our duty to give it. Whatever his errors, he is still a Time Lord’ – are they the Masons or something?
7 ‘But the new Doctor, or as far as Benton was concerned, the old Doctor, Jo's Doctor Two’
8 ‘All we need is a presence, something to remind those impetuous youngsters down there of their duty’
9 ‘Doctor Two wondered what would happen to him if his other self were to be killed. Presumably he too would wink out of existence, and cease to be’
10 ‘All three are needed to defeat Omega—two not enough... must be totality’ – though that clearly wasn’t their plan in the first place, so when did they realise this?
11 ‘He was thoroughly tired of being harangued by this tall, elegant version of himself. If that's what he was to become, he thought illogically, he'd sooner stay as he was’
12 ‘The Doctor found it difficult to realise that this scruffy, rather comical figure was an earlier version of himself. He felt this second Doctor was like a sort of younger brother, with a number of rather irritating mannerisms that he himself had outgrown’
13 ‘Then I'll tell you. It's a bridge’
14 ‘One of you must stay to keep an eye on the situation here, and the other must cross it’
15 ‘if he can think up a cell, why can't you think up a door? You're a Time Lord, aren't you? In fact you're two Time Lords. Surely your wills combined are a match for his? Why do you think the two of you were sent here?’ – Was that the Time Lords’ plan??? It would tie in with the need for the Doctor’s ‘totality’ but not with their reluctance to call on more than one of him in the first
16 ‘She had given them the confidence to escape from the cell. But she had also inspired them to run into even more danger’
17 ‘“a beautiful green landscape, rolling fields, orchards in blossom, great stretches made colourful with trees, grass and flowers. Just such a world did I create when I first came here. But the beauty and the colour demand much effort from the will. As thousands upon thousands of years roll by, the strain becomes too great.” As Omega spoke, the colour drained from the landscape, the vegetation faded away, until only rolling grey dunes were left. “You will end, as I did, with the simplest elements—sand, sea and sky”' – ‘thousands upon thousands of years’ of years is odd. There’s no suggestion of time travel or time dilation or similar in the story, which means that’s the length of time to contemporary Gallifrey from the dawn of the Time Lords, when Omega first enabled them to travel in time. That’s not a long time. In fact, I’d argue it strongly implies a length of time shorter than a million years. Considering the Doctor’s 725 in Doctor Who and the Green Death, that’s within a lifetime – not just for Omega but potentially for people on Gallifrey too. It’s never suggested that Omega is from the Time Lords’ ancient past anywhere in the story but it still seems odd to me that there’ll be the odd Time Lord around in the Doctor’s time who remembers pre-time travel Gallifrey and may have even gone to school with Omega
18 I’m not entirely clear how true this is but, as I can understand it, the source of the Time Lords’ power is the Veil Nebula, the remnant of a solar system (?!) which Omega destroyed: ‘The Doctor knew he was looking at the Veil Nebula, an enormous mass of gases and cosmic dust […] “Without me, there would be no Time Travel” […] Omega gestured towards the Nebula. “Once all this was a star, a sun with planets, until I arranged its detonation […] I was to be the one to find and create the power source to give my people mastery over Time itself […] I was the sacrifice to that supernova. Blown out of existence into this world of anti-matter”’. There was a supernova, in which Omega appeared to perish, but now there’s just gas and dust, so presumably the power of the Time Lords is the finite amount they collected from the supernova. Incidentally, there’s no black hole in the Veil Nebula, it’s a completely separate concern (Omega: ‘I created the black hole. It is draining cosmic energy from their universe into mine’). And then, when that black hole dies because of a matter/anti-matter explosion it’s ‘Converted into a new power source’, which is apparently another supernova: ‘Black hole into supernova—once again Omega has provided. You really ought to be grateful to him’. Does that mean time’s rolled backwards across it? And does that mean all the Time Lords do is harvest stars? Shouldn’t that be really easy with time travel?
19 ‘a towering castle. It seemed to have been beaten from solid brass. Hundreds of towers and slender minarets glinted dully beneath the lowering purple sky, giving the whole place a look of oriental opulence, like the Arabian Nights castle of some Caliph’
20 ‘The Doctor knew that by simply willing it so, Omega could have brought it back to perfect repair. It was a measure of the depth of Omega's despair that he had not bothered to do even that’ – ‘even that’! That’s how little effort it would have taken him
21 ‘Wasn't there a place called Limbo, a featureless nowhere between Heaven and Hell? “Doctor, we're not—dead, are we?”’
22 ‘At the end of the hall, framed in a patch of brilliant light (like a Superstar in a spot-light, thought Jo irreverently), stood a huge, imposing figure’
23 ‘“A hero?” This time the voice was full of bitter scorn. “I should have been a god!”'
24 ‘the Point of Singularity wasn't really an enormous flame. But that was how Omega thought of it, and in this world of Omega's creation, his thoughts were real’
25 ‘The ghastly sameness of the featureless dunes meant that they didn't even feel they were getting anywhere. It was like walking endlessly on the spot in some terrible dream’ - I really like the detail the it ‘didn’t even feel they were getting anywhere’, which cements the sense of dreariness
26 ‘“There is nothing left of you—except your will […] you can exist only in this world.” Doctor Two nodded. “You have built your own prison. You can never leave it”’
27 ‘the moment you abandon control, you cannot escape. And you cannot escape without abandoning control?’
28 Tat Wood rather nicely articulates exactly how impossible Omega’s desires are: ‘Omega wants revenge against the Time Lords for abandoning him, and he’s found a way of draining off their energy and bringing them to their knees. But while this scheme is in progress, he abruptly decides to surrender his power in the interest of leaving his anti-matter realm. How, then, does he plan on exacting his vengeance once he’s regressed to just being him?’
Tat Wood, About Time 3 (expanded 2nd edition)
29 ‘If I cannot have my freedom, I shall have my revenge. I shall be satisfied’
30 ‘One minute Omega talks about his freedom, the next he's threatening universal destruction. I don't think he knows what he wants’
31 ‘Power is the only freedom’
32 Just as a lovely example of how escape is a rather open-ended wish that doesn’t necessary satisfy, there’s a lovely moment after the Brigadier leads all the humans out of Omega’s castle: ‘Confronted with freedom, everyone realised they had no very clear idea what to do next’
33 ‘I didn't really trick him. I promised him his freedom, and I gave it to him. The only freedom he could ever have—utter annihilation’
34 ‘Now that the ability to take off in the TARDIS was once more within his power, he wasn't sure he wanted to go. He knew he'd miss his friends, Jo, the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, and his life as UNIT's scientific adviser. For the first time, in many years of wandering, he'd found something that could be called a home, and he didn't want to give it up. Not completely’
35 Now, it’s possible that the Doctor is a special case. When Omega made a point of selecting him for his plans, it’s clearly because of the irony involved in using someone the Time Lords imprisoned on Earth (just as he felt he’d been imprisoned in the black hole) as catalyst to their collapse (‘It amused me—to use you against them’). However, it’s also possible the other Time Lords wouldn’t suffice. The Doctor was clearly unaffected when the Time Lords on Gallifrey were all being drained of energy in conjunction with their planet and this might mean only he could survive the act of sustaining Omega’s world. It’s also possible this makes him uniquely untethered to the Time Lords’ home planet, as even Omega still relies on them for his identity - he is ‘a Force equal yet opposite’ to Gallifrey and ‘His imprisonment was the price of our freedom to travel in Time’. The Doctor, meanwhile, declares (in terms made balder by Dicks than ever on TV) his ‘home’ to now be Earth
36 ‘“when the TARDIS is ready, I'll take you on a trip. Did I ever tell you about Metebelis, the famous blue planet of the Acteon galaxy? Lakes like great sapphires, mountains of blue crystal...”' – I really have had my fill of Metebelis III now
Are You Sitting Comfortably..?
‘For an adventure that was to be one of the most astonishing of the Doctor's very long life, it all began very quietly’
‘It all ended very quietly, just as it had begun’
References I Didn’t Get
‘I've no time to listen to paratiddles on your piccolo!’ – he might mean paradiddles, which are a drumming sequence (www.dictionary.com/browse/paradiddle)..?
‘shalamy-galamy-zoop’ – still don't get it
Miscellania
‘Doctor Two’ doesn't quite feel right, mostly because it just sounds like Doctor Who
There might be no Gel Guards, but the first Doctor strangely refers to Jo as a ‘Gel’ at one point – I don’t remember him being that posh
‘The sky was a threatening purple’ - !!
‘The Brigadier strode briskly across the dunes, trying to persuade himself that UNIT H.Q. had merely transported to some lonely part of Norfolk on a very nasty day. He wasn't having much success. They didn't have dull grey sand in Norfolk, as far as he knew. Or a permanently purple sky. Or a strange eerie quality of light, and an uncanny silence. Slowly he was being forced to accept that he'd travelled a very long way’ – this is a slight improvement on the TV episodes. At least it’s clear his resistance to what’s really happening is an active attempt to deny the evidence of his eyes rather than an inability to see
‘The Brigadier gave him a rueful grin. As a young subaltern he had often dreamed of ending gloriously in some forlorn hope’ – he’s got a death wish?
‘Thanks to the Doctor's many improvements, which included a 'Superdrive', 'Bessie' was not only a very fast little car, but a supremely nippy one. She could spin round in her own length, and hills didn't bother her at all. The Doctor always said that he could 'drive her up the side of a house’’ – Are speed and power enough to drive vertically? Surely grip must be involved? And torque. What is torque?
