III: Cliffhangers
Episode Two of the Stones of Blood begins on a cliff-hanger.A literal cliff-hanger. Romana is hanging from a cliff; at any rate, clinging to the side of a sheer rock. To her credit, she doesn't scream: but she calls out the Doctor's name.
But the Doctor is also caught in a cliff-hanger. A less literal one, but a venerable Doctor Who situation. He's unconscious, chained to an altar-stone in the middle of a stone circle, and the leader of the local Druid side is about to stab him with a ceremonial knife.
Rather ingeniously, Romana's peril is what saves the Doctor. He hears her shouting for help; and wakes up. He immediately cracks a joke.
"I hope that knife's been properly sterilised", he says. He's not a brave hero laughing in the face of doom. Either he doesn't understand the situation; all else he simply refuses to take it seriously. "You can catch all sorts of things off a dirty knife."
That is very much who the Doctor is now. It's of a piece with him breaking the fourth wall or celebrating the show's anniversary. However much danger he appears to be in, he refuses to take it seriously.
Emilia Rumford, an elderly archaeologist who's been studying the standing stones, arrives on her bike, and all the druids run away. The Doctor sends for K-9, and between them, they rescue Romana from the cliff. He uses his scarf to pull her up; which would have been even funnier if it really had been his new birthday present.
But here's the funny thing.
The double cliff-hanger which the the Doctor and Romana escape from at the beginning of Episode Two is not the one they were left in at the end of Episode One.
When we last saw the Doctor he had gone to The Big House. He met Leonard De Vries, the local squire and captain of the Druids. De Vries bashes the Doctor over the back of the head and announces "His blood is still warm! I know what to do!"
And then the action cuts back to Romana. The Doctor left her with the archaeologists at the stone circle and told her to wait for him. The archaeologists have gone back to their cottage for tea and sandwiches, but she is waiting for him as she promised.
And here again, the Time Lines diverge.
In the original script, the Doctor would have (surprisingly) returned to Stone Circle, as if nothing had happened. Romana would have (surprisingly) followed him over the Moor until they come to a sign saying "Warning: Dangerous Cliff".
And then the Doctor would have pushed Romana into the sea.
It's the best kind of cliffhanger: one which doesn't ask "How will they escape?" so much as "What the heck is going on?" Has the Doctor been mind-controlled by the Druids? Blackmailed in some way? Has Romana been led astray by some kind of doppelgänger? Or is the Doctor playing a long complicated game, like he did with the Sontarans in Invasion of Time?
But of course, it's not the cliffhanger we actually saw.
Tom Baker refused point-blank to play the scene as it was written. He wasn't prepared to portray an evil or menacing Doctor. And Doctor Who was now such a star-vehicle that Graham Williams had to acquiesce. Doctor Who is Tom's show, in a way that it was never Jon or Patrick's show. It is more important that Tom be allowed to "do his benevolent alien thing" than that he follows the script.
And I am not saying he was in the wrong. Doctor Who really was a children's programme, and Tom Baker really had turned himself into an audience identification figure. The programme is the character and the character is the actor. But if Mary Whitehouse had said anything similar, she would undoubtedly have been denounced as a mad old biddy. "The kiddies might think their hero had really turned bad" and "The kiddies might think that their hero had really drowned" are the same kind of objection.
Until we saw the sign saying "Beware: Unexpected Cliffhangers", we didn't know that the action was taking place near the coast. The real Rollright Stones are located near Moreton in Marsh, about as far from the sea as you can get in England. There's no reason a stone circle shouldn't be near the coast; but it's odd for an area called "the moor" to be in such a location.
When we were talking about The Ribos Operation, we suggested that "dungeons" were a kind of concrete manifestation of "the plot": physical spaces which the hero can't get out of, and in which monsters, perils and members of the supporting cast can pop up without much explanation. In much the same way, the cliff is a physical manifestation of the structure of Doctor Who. There has to be a cliff, because there has to be a cliff-hanger. Romana has to fall, because she has to end the episode in Peril. It's not part of the geography of the moor; it's part of the metatextual geography of the TV show.
So. Romana hears the Doctor's voice and follows it through the woods to the edge of the cliff. Whereupon she falls over the edge of the cliff for no reason whatsoever. And there is never any explanation.
Go back and watch the end of Episode One.
And then do what no-one could possibly have done before 1995: watch Episode Two straight afterwards.
Something is clearly amiss.
Romana topples; she tries to reach out for the edge of the cliff; touches it; but continues to fall.
It's the same predicament that the Doctor was left in at the end of Pirate Planet Episode 3. We have seen the hero fall, presumably to their death. In Pirate Planet, the solution was far-fetched, but elegant: the person who fell was not the Doctor, but the Doctor's holographic double.
The solution here is much simpler. What we saw at the end of Part One is not what really happened. Romana didn't topple from the top of the cliff. She slipped a short way down it, and is now clinging on for dear life.
Call it cheating if you like. There were no DVDs in the 1970s. No repeats. Doctor Who took shape only in our memory.
The music fades out. The blue space tunnel comes to an end. We reach for our crumpet and are cocoa, or crouch down behind the settee.
"Ah yes" we say "I remember. Romana was clinging to the cliff; and the Doctor had been chained to an altar." (He hadn't, of course. The last we saw of him, he'd been biffed over the back of the head.)
It's the Doctor's birthday. He didn't get his cake; but he did get to go to his favourite planet. And David Fisher is offering up a witty pastiche of the Doctor Who's most prevailing cliches. Cliff hangers. Druids. Human sacrifice.
Or else writing a genuinely derivative and unimaginative story.
IV: The Bullfighter
All long running TV shows change over time. Many of them are periodically relaunched or rebooted. Some have moments when characters jump over real or metaphorical sharks. But Doctor Who is more than usually split into eras. And you know the exact moment when one era goes away and the next era comes along.
"It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for."
"I think this old body of mine is wearing a bit thin."
"Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice."
Well then. I believe I have identified the precise moment at which The Alien One, played by Tom Baker, regenerated into The Silly One. Also played by Tom Baker.
The Doctor and Emilia (the archaeologist) are in the secret crypt of the Big House. Emilia has a companion and assistant named, and if there is any sniggering there'll be trouble, Vivien Fay. Down in the secret crypt are oil paintings of the six previous owners of the Big House and SPOILER WARNING they all look exactly like Vivien. Ergo, Vivien must be at least four hundred years old. Ergo, she herself must be the Celtic goddess to whom the Druid team are in the habit of sacrificing Time Lords.
Some eighteen months before Stones of Blood, ITV had shown a kids mystery serial called Children of the Stones. It was fairly obscure at the time, but has since passed into legend as the scariest children's TV show ever made. It certainly stands up pretty well; averagely good child actors are carried by a cast of first-rate grown-ups, including Gareth (Roj Blake) Thomas and Ian (Garron) Cutbertson.
The plot is a wonderful network of clues and hints and narrative ley-points, which never cohere into complete sense. Fifty years on I am still not sure if I fully understand it. Why does the old poacher have a stone amulet just like the one in the local museum? Why was there a painting of the mysterious stone circle in a London junk shop? Why are the kids in the local school all maths geniuses? What happens when villagers are called to tea in the sinister squire's observatory?
It may be that David Fisher is trying to achieve a similar effect here. And there could very well have been a folk-horror story in which "Why do all the owners of the Big House look like the archaeologist's assistant?" was one layer of a gradually unpeeling narrative onion. But Stones of Blood is using Scooby Doo as a model much more than it is Children of the Stones. "Clues" are simply elements in a treasure hunt, arrows that point to the next clue and eventually to the conclusion. Once the Doctor sees the paintings, the whole plot is revealed. Vivien is an alien. The druids think she is a goddess. The stones in the circle are silicon based aliens who subsist on human blood. All sorted out and we haven't even got to the end of Episode Two.
The Doctor and Emilia don't have long to digest the new information. One of the Monoliths from the stone circle appears in the doorway, blocking off their exit. How it got down the stairs, no-one can say.
I don't propose to take the mickey out of the silliness of the monster. Silly monsters are very much Doctor Who's stock in trade. The idea of sentient standing stones (hiding in plain site among actual standing stones) is not the silliest thing ever to appear on Doctor Who. (It's not even the silliest thing to appear in Stones of Blood.) A planet populated by swamp dwelling vampire boulders even has a certain Adamsian poetry to it. You can imagine them hanging out in a cantina with super-intelligent shades of the colour blue, uniquely biroid forms of life and indeed flolloping mattresses.
I don't find that stones which appear to glow with golden light automatically makes me think of urine. If anything, it makes me think of the cover of Quicksilver Heritage.
So the Doctor and Emilia run away. They run out of the Big House, and along a country lane, chased, very slowly, by the moving monolith. Baker delivers a few choice Bakerisms. There is some wilful cross-purpose misunderstanding, delivered dead pan:
"That thing is made of stone" says Emilia
"Yes, and it's closing on us fast" says the Doctor.
"But that's impossible"
"No it isn't, we're standing still."
And there is that infuriating, endearing, wide-eyed innocence; where the Doctor pretends to be an idiot so everyone can see how clever he is:
"I meant a silicon based life form is unknown, unheard of, impossible" says Emillia.
"Maybe it doesn't realise that" says the Doctor.
The Doctor's relationship with Emilia is not that far removed from his relationship with Romana: the person who thinks she knows everything coming up against the person who actually does. It's quite funny: Beatrix Lehmann is (no disrespect) a very much better actor than Mary Tamm. You could imagine her staying on the TARDIS and becoming an ongoing companion. In fact, you could imagine her as the first female Doctor.
I recall a heartwarming episode of Little House on the Prairie in which Laura heartwarmingly befriends the mean banker (who heartwarmingly turns out to be not so mean after all) because they both share a heartwarming love of fishing. He tells her that his angling books indicate that she is using the wrong kind of bait: she heartwarmingly replies that the fish may not have read the books.
The Doctor is making the same kind of joke. Maybe the silicon based lifeform doesn't know that silicon based lifeforms are impossible. His experience trumps Emilia's book learning. His wit is the wit of a smart-alec school boy, which is why smart-alec school boys were so devoted to him. At least he doesn't mention bumble-bees.
We're clearly in a cliffhanger situation; so we go straight back to the cliff that Romana was dangling from at the beginning of the episode. There is no reason for them to run there: when the Doctor needs to be in peril, the cliff just pops up in front of him.
And now, watch.
The quite silly monster advances towards the Doctor and Emilia cries out "we're trapped".
Up to this point, the incidental music has been happily going "tum tum tum" in the background; harmless and so unintrusive you hardly notice it is there. But suddenly it changes to a melody: to, in fact, a fanfare.
And the Doctor takes off his coat....and holds it in front of him....and the creature advances towards the coat....and falls off the cliff.
What saves the day is not cleverness, but clowning. The Doctor pretends to be a bullfighter.
It isn't very funny, but it is very, very silly. It isn't just Tom Baker fooling around: the show itself has become foolish. Without the incidental music, it would seem as if the Doctor was simply being an idiot. But the fanfare tells us that we are now in the kind of universe where, if the Doctor decides to play at being a bullfighter, then The Plot will rearrange itself around him.
There could have been an explanation. Maybe the Doctor happens to know that silicon based life forms are attracted to the colour red. (Bulls are, incidentally, colour-blind.) It could have been foreshadowed. Maybe we could have seen Vivien using a red flag to communicate with the Ogri, giving the Doctor the clue that they like the colour red.
But no. That's no longer how the show works.
The Doctor and Emilia look over the cliff edge, and look up again in perfect unison. It's a purely comedic shot; straight out of a silent comedy or a cartoon show. It's very well carried off: Tom Baker and Beatrix Lehmann are fine actors who are obviously having a great time.
But we have crossed a rubicon. Doctor Who is no longer even pretending to take itself seriously.
True Fact: The BBC repeated the Star Trek episode, Devil In the Dark on the Tuesday after the final episode of Stones of Blood. Tom Baker doesn't take the opportunity to say "I am the Doctor, not a bricklayer" which is a bit of a shame.
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