Tony gets deadly.
Gallifrey, Gallifrey,
Gallifrey.
From the very beginning of
Doctor Who, the Doctor’s home planet had been shrouded in mystery, though clearly
it was a place of unimaginable power, where time travel was commonplace, and
which, after the Doctor turned from a white-haired old man into a mop-topped
would-be clown, clearly had other magnificent secrets up its sleeve too.
Then The War Games
happened, and the Time Lords were finally revealed, not to mention named. And
as far as it goes, The War Games manages to maintain a bit of Sixties mystique
about these ancient powerful beings who can stop the Doctor’s wanderings, and
can, with little more than a word and a wave, wipe the threat which had been
monopolising the screen for the last ten weeks entirely from existence.
Colour wasn’t kind to
Gallifrey though. The Three Doctors showed them as little more than inter-temporal
police in dodgy robes, and, by creating Omega as one of their illustrious
forebears, it actually succeeded in lessening the grandeur of the Time Lords.
Then came The Deadly
Assassin. Robert Holmes, bless him, was a free interpreter of material from
elsewhere, and The Deadly Assassin, as has been said ad nauseum, was his
version of The Manchurian Candidate – political chicanery at the highest levels
of Time Lord Society.
Whatever you think of The
Deadly Assassin as a Doctor Who story, it cemented its place well and truly
into the show’s mythos, in almost too many ways to count. The Matrix, the Eye
of Harmony, the this, that and the other of Rassilon, the way in which a Time
Lord gets invested with the Presidency, big Time Lord headpieces, the chapters
of Time Lord society (including the one into which the Doctor fits), and, oh
yes, we knew there was something else – the number of regenerations a Time Lord
can have, just lightly tossed into conversation, like a man-trap waiting for
the future to find a way around (at the time of course, during only the Fourth
Doctor’s era, it was practically inconceivable that the show could work its way
through thirteen Doctors and ever actually come to a natural end – surely it
would burn itself out at some point before that?).
Looked at one way, The
Deadly Assassin is a complete anomaly, unlike everything else around it – just
the week before, a golden era of Who had ended with the ghastly, almost
peremptory dismissal of Sarah-Jane because the Doctor had received a message
from the Time Lords. Just the week after, a new golden era would be born with
the arrival of Leela. But for four weeks between those companions, the Doctor
was alone, himself, unfettered by companions and walking around the corridors
of power on his own home planet. This was Doctor Who like there had never been
before, and to give Tom Baker his absolute due, he pulls off the presence the
Doctor needs in such circumstances with an aplomb that actually lends some
credence to his idea at the time that he didn’t in fact need a companion.
Looked at entirely another
way, The Deadly Assassin is the progenitor of practically every Gallifrey story
that would follow it. It was the end of the idea of the Time Lords as aloof and
incorruptible. After The Deadly Assassin they were brought almost literally
down to Earth, shown to be just as duplicitous as we could be, a political,
conniving nest of vipers, and, let’s not forget, oh so dull. To some degree,
The Deadly Assassin gave logic to the Doctor’s running away, by painting the
Time Lords not as omnipotent gods of time and space, but a lot of stuffy academics
and a political class always jostling for power and influence. And The Deadly
Assassin lays the fundamental groundwork for future generations of Gallifrey
stories. Every time we go back to Gallifrey from here on out, there will be a
traitor in the midst of the High Council (The Doctor himself and Castellan Kelner
in The Invasion Of Time, Hedin in Arc of Infinity, Borusa in The Five Doctors,
seemingly the entire High Council in The Trial of A Time Lord, conniving with
the Valeyard, Rassilon in both The End of Time and Heaven Sent). There will be
people falsely accused, there will be stand-offs and intrigues, and often the
death of innocents on the road to the villain’s goals. From mystery to
judiciary to innocents doing all they could in The Three Doctors, The Deadly
Assassin marks the moment when the Time Lords became capable of routine
chicanery and darkness, rather than those being attributes of merely the
occasional aberration like the Master.
Let’s not, by the way,
dismiss the Master – The Deadly Assassin was a brave story in that with the
tragic death of Roger Delgado, the original Master disappeared from the
Doctor’s life in a distressingly brief way after a final glorious performance
in Frontier In Space. Rather than bring him back in the way that everybody
understood the Master to be – urbane, witty, elegant – Holmes chose to go to
the polar opposite end of the spectrum and deliver ‘the Master in desperation,’
a cowled, burned, horrifying, skeletal figure, determined to do anything to
survive. In Peter Pratt’s performance and the visual of the character in The
Deadly Assassin, Holmes showed us ‘who the Master really was, all the time,’
and it was shocking and right, distancing the character from the Delgado version
so as not to tarnish the original by imitation (only for all that good work to
be undone at the end of The Keeper of Traken, when Anthony Ainley was brought
in to play, at least visually, something of a Delgado-a-like Master throughout
the rest of the Eighties). Pratt’s Master was a raw and wounded animal, a
reminder than quite literally beneath the surface of the urbane academic
sophistication of the Time Lords lay physical creatures that, if pushed, could
go to quite extraordinary lengths of brutality.
Brutality that saw The
Deadly Assassin fall foul of the self-appointed censors in the National Viewers’
and Listeners’ Association under the steely gaze of Mrs Mary Whitehouse. To be
absolutely fair, there were things in The Deadly Assassin which had never
really been a part of Doctor Who before, particularly the mad surrealistic
nightmare of the Matrix sequences, and the realistic violence of Chancellor
Goth (played by Bernard Horsfall) seeming to drown the Doctor by force. While
Philip Hinchcliffe would continue to flirt with the censure of the NVALA
throughout his time as Producer on the show, it was The Deadly Assassin that
drew most complaints for violence, after which Doctor Who wouldn’t go down the
same road again until the time of Colin Baker – with similar, but less
exceptionally worthwhile results.
As we said earlier,
whatever you think of The Deadly Assassin, and there are arguably plenty of
reasons to dislike it (the cheapening of the mythos of the Time Lords,
godawfully ‘futuristic’ – which is to say cheap and plastic – baubles of
statecraft, a tautological title, the violence, the over-extended Matrix
sequence of sheer weirdness, the plot which with the best will in the world
baaaarely hangs together etc), there’s no getting away from either its
uniqueness as a Tom Baker tour de force, its impact in terms of changing
forever our view of the Time Lords and what they were capable of, or the casual
delivery of so much Time Lord backstory that it would change and shape practically
everything that came after it. For all those reasons, plus Peter Pratt’s
bravura Master with the ping-pong ball eyes and Horsfall’s rather more
grounded, misguided accomplice, it’s worth a re-spin once in a while, just to
revel in the sheer force of creativity that went into mid-Seventies Who.
No comments:
Post a Comment