Written by Russell T Davies
Utopia broadcast 16th
June 2007
The Sound of Drums broadcast 23rd
June 2007
Utopia
Utopia
began the first true three-part story (equivalent to a six-parter in Classic Who)
of the New Who era. Beginning in Cardiff
For all
that, once the story has kicked off with Captain Jack clinging to the outside
of the Tardis all the way through the vortex – as the Doctor says, ‘it’s very
him’ – things do go a little bit silly and light on the details that should
perhaps underpin the spectacle.
Futurekind,
a kind of regressive, savage tribe of flesh-eaters who may or may not be what
humans are destined to evolve into if they don’t reach Utopia (given the events
of subsequent episodes, we’re going to say not), seem to be there to provide a
couple of chase scenes and get our heroes from A-B in a big hurry, and add a
kind of apocalyptic hurry to the events of the episode’s end.
The history
of Chantho’s people remains largely a mystery, though it seems they were the
locals until the humans moved in – rather suggesting the humans annihilated
them, given Chantho’s singularity in the story, and throwing quite an
odd-tasting light on her adoration of the Professor at the end of the universe.
And that idea itself – that they’re at the end of the universe, with nothing but
death and blackness to look forward to unless they reach Utopia – seems
bizarre, a triumph of chirpy optimism over the realities of physics: the last
survivors at the ‘end’ of the universe will most likely be congregating
somewhere towards the point of the original Big Bang, if the encroaching
blackness is to be taken seriously as a threat. That would mean there’s nowhere
to actually go – certainly not in a rickety rocket held together with spit and
string and shoelaces.
But to
insist on garish reality is to miss the point spectacularly – as Professor Yana
candidly admits, the signal for which they’re aiming may be nothing, may be
everything, but either way ‘it’s worth a look, don’t you think?’ That’s the
point of Utopia – you never quite know whether you’re watching something
worthwhile or hopeless, but at the very least, it’s the spirit of hope that
keeps everything in motion. And if hope is what survives of the human spirit
till the end of time, it’s really not a bad legacy at all.
But there’s
more to Utopia than hope, of course. There’s Derek Jacobi as Professor Yana,
Hartnelling it up for all he’s worth – and he’s worth really rather a lot. He’s
the lynchpin in a story that has several threads – the man who built the rocket
to give humanity hope of somewhere to go, a genius to match the Doctor’s own, a
savior, and a spectacular positive force, holding off the blackness and the
drumming in his head.
The irony
being of course, he, like the hope of Utopia, is a fiction, a nothing, a lie.
If there’s a fundamental point at the heart of Utopia, it’s that things and
people have no inherent value – but that in being there, and choosing an
optimistic path, they can deliver value beyond themselves. Yana
may be a fictional construct, but while he exists, while he works to give the
human race hope and to stave off the drumming in his head, the good he does is
by no means artificial: it brings purpose and aspiration to the last human
beings alive. When the drumming overwhelms him and he opens up his watch, the
good Professor Yana is the first of the Master’s new kills, the savior nailed
into nothingness by the emergence of the serpent inside. The idea of Utopia
seems to be inherently ridiculous to the reborn Master, the hope he inspired
nothing but a laughable idiocy. And, as we go on to find out, the hope for
humankind is a lie, turned ultimately into the perverse and genocidal paradox
of the Toclafane. But the story’s actually a parable of approach, and choice.
Choose hope and good things can happen even in the darkest of hours. Choose
hopelessness, choose to manifest the Master, and all that comes is bitterness,
destruction and disappointment.
There is a
genuine case of redemption in Utopia too – coming in one of the quietest
moments in the story, when Jack is repairing a system that it should be
impossible to repair, the Doctor makes peace with Jack ‘the impossible thing,’
the unkillable man he became thanks to the actions of Rose the Bad Wolf. It’s a
touching, candid moment that shed new light on both men, while setting up a
reconciliation and a future in which the two will be more able to work together
again.
But the
pacing of the story means that despite scenes of excellence and quiet between Yana and the Doctor, and between the Doctor and Jack,
we’re actually egging on the moment of destruction. From the time we start
hearing the drums in Yana’s head, with their half-heard, at-first-indistinct
voices shouting over them, we get a sense of what and who Yana
is, and such is the nature of humanity that we want him to fall.
We like
Professor Yana, he seems like he could be a great friend of the Doctor’s – but
we know that’s not the truth, and we know the revelation of that truth is
inevitable. And when it comes, setting the seal on the whole Chameleon Arch
invention that brought Human Nature to the screen earlier that season, it is
glorious. Dark, and horrible and inevitable, but glorious – The
Master…Reeeeeboooooorn shows why you should always entrust the best baddies to
the best actors, Jacobi’s eyes turning blank and empty, then contemptuous and
filled with rage and fury as the Master sweeps away the infantile fantasy of
Yana as a good man – killing his friend, letting in the Futurekind, condemning
anyone left on the planet to death and planning his escape in the Doctor’s
Tardis. It’s a truly masterful five minutes that only serve to highlight how
nuanced the performance of the last forty minutes have been. If you don’t know
the ending in advance, it makes you thrill to see the Jacobi Master and hope
the casting sticks for years.
And then –
wallop. Bang. One last shot, one act of redemption from Chantho, and the Jacobi
Master is stolen from us immediately. It’s a moment of bizarre bravura and
mixed emotions – just as we begin to relish the idea of a Jacobi Master terrorizing
time and space with those eyes and that voice, he’s gone, but what comes next
is, better, more exciting, more ‘right’ somehow, because John Simm bows the
doors off his first five minutes in the role and reinstates the Master in the
Pertwee-Delgado mold of an Anti-Doctor, as he matches Tennant moment for
movement and note for note, then leaves our heroes in the kind of impossible
lurch from which only an impossible ‘…and this is how we escaped from that!’
beginning to the next episode will suffice to extricate them – which is
presumably why that’s exactly what we got at the start of The Sound of Drums.
Utopia has
its moments that shouldn’t be examined too closely for fear of Taking Doctor
Who Too Seriously. If you let them flow by you like star systems into the void,
it’s still, five seasons on, one of the most thrilling, intensely-paced hours
of modern Who there is, driven along endlessly to the sound of the drums in
Professor Yana’s head. It’s a story of hope in adversity, the falseness of
those hopes in the face of undeniable reality, but their value nonetheless. And
it’s a story that clearly shows us two contrasting ways to be, and recommends
the better path, while all the while driving us on as an audience that loves
the way of the Dark Side. It both has its allegorical cake and eats it, and
we’re right there gulping down every morsel of its mad, layered, superbly
played joy.
The Sound of Drums
The Sound
of Drums is a very special episode of Doctor Who. Not only does it give Utopia
the point of all its pounding, ominous undercurrent – the Master Reborn and
rampant, but it’s pretty much the epitome of all the Pertwee Master stories.
This is the story of what happens if the Master was here, and now, and real,
and this is the story of how he wins.
Be honest –
you want to go and watch it again right now, don’t you?
The curious
thing is that while The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords are a
tight two episode arc, and The Last of the Time Lords is the one that shows the
blasted heath of a world the Master would leave us with, we don’t get the sense
of that world so much as we do the world of The Sound of Drums, because The
Sound of Drums takes place pretty much in our world, the world we know, and it
shows the lengths and depths to which a truly contemptuous person could go to
rub our noses in our own fallibilities and failings. The idea that after all
the plans and disguises, the crazy schemes and the monster of the week
alliances, with just a little satellite tweaking the human race (and more
specifically, the British people) would vote for the Master to lead them is a
delicious bit of social commentary and democratic satire.
But the
Master in The Sound of Drums is also the Master at his most mad to that point,
his most whimsical and dangerous. This is the Master who pulls faces in the
Cabinet, then sits down and gases every one of his ministers. This is the
Master who oozes down the phone at the Doctor about Gallifrey and what it must
have felt like to destroy it, then turns rough, demanding the Doctor and his
band of miscreants run. The Master who casually tells the Toclafane to
obliterate the American President, who laughs and claps and dances, who tells
sweet lies and dark truths to a reporter, then locks her in a room to be sliced
and diced to death. The Master who orders the decimation of the planet’s men,
women and children, without exception, and who thinks it good.
Without
overselling the point, this is the Master we waited decades for. Delgado could
have played this Master, beyond a shadow of a doubt, though his would always
have been more refined by his physicality, but oh yes, given the script he
could have played the Master who won. Ainley could too if he’d channelled the
joy of performances like Logopolis, The King’s Demons and The Five Doctors. But
Simm was hired to play a very particular kind of Master, and he blows it out of
the water. It’s a powerhouse performance and it not only dominates the episode,
it redefines the Master for a generation of Who fans.
Against the
Simm Master in The Sound of Drums, very little can stand – we see him quickly
taking power in the UK, announcing a unilateral deal with alien life forms,
destroying the President and taking over the world in quick succession, and all
while the Doctor, Jack and Martha are public enemies number one, two and three.
Their time on the run changes the dynamics between them significantly: Jack and
Martha come to an understanding that they’re in the same position when it comes
to the Doctor, loving him when he doesn’t know they’re there; the Doctor
discovers Jack’s involvement with Torchwood, and we get the official on-screen
reason for its existence – it’s a love token to the Doctor’s way of doing
things, a way to atone for past wrongs, real and imagined. But most importantly,
Martha sees the things that happen around the Doctor when he’s winging it and
out of control of the situation – people close to him can die. People they care
about can be tortured for his sake, in his name and in his place, because he
dares to stand up to the bullies of the universe, and they know the way to get
to him is through the people standing close.
It’s the
beginning of the end of her hero worship of the Doctor, and the world that
comes to pass here is the one that demands Martha become the woman who walks
the Earth, telling her story and ultimately saving the people of Earth. Funny, the things that blowing up your flat
and torturing your family will do to you.
The Sound
of Drums is a superb episode of Doctor Who – better by far than the slightly
mushy The Last of the Time Lords, because it’s under no obligation to give us a
happy ending. Quite the reverse – it puts the hammer down on the simple concept
of the Master victorious, it shows how it could have happened, in all Pertwee
stories, and how it could only happen here and now. It gives the John Simm
Master by far his finest hour, unrestrained by having to be defeated or
hampered by plot-elements that render him animalistic. If the Production Team
were going to bring the Master back in 21st century Who, the story had to
deliver contemporary shocks, things we’d never seen before, and a Master around
whom we never ever felt safe because he’d been defeated so many times before.
The Sound
of Drums delivers that in spades, and it makes the Master relevant in the
annals of Doctor Who villainy for a whole new audience of fans. It’s a story
that never gets old because every time you watch it, there’s something new to
think about or something that you’ve known before strikes you in a brand new
way and makes you gasp. The Sound of Drums will stand the test of time and it
certainly cemented John Simm firmly into place as one of the most memorable
incarnations of the Master ever to be seen (or heard) in Doctor Who. Stick it
in your DVD player today, and relive The Sound of Drums.
No comments:
Post a Comment