Fight the power, says
Tony.
The Suffering is a brave,
epic undertaking of empathy, feminism and balance from writer Jacqueline
Rayner.
Taking the second
fully-new Tardis team of Peter Purves’ Steven Taylor and Maureen O’Brien’s
Vicki to England in 1912, Rayner picks a couple of period-specific story
elements, and blends them well into a story that opens up to explore much wider
issues than Sixties Doctor Who was used to overtly doing. England in 1912
allows Rayner to use the discovery at Piltdown of a so-called (and eventually
disproved) ‘missing link’ in Darwin’s still not entirely accepted theory of
evolution by natural selection, and the very much still active fight for women’s
suffrage, for the right to vote in a world governed by men in a mostly
paternalistic, patriarchal society as the fundamental planks in a story that
shows both a kind of avatar for the way men have used and treated women in our
own history, and the very specific hardships, fears and violence inflicted on
the Suffragettes who suffered for what, to the time travellers, seems like such
an obvious equality.
Landing in a gravel pit
(touche, Madame Rayner), the travellers find a jaw bone that, while looking
distinctly simian, the Doctor assures them is entirely alien in its origins.
Vicki comes over all peculiar, requiring medical aid and driving the three of
them into the affairs of the natives when they go and look for help. This is
territory that Doctor Who would later explore on-screen in the time of the
Fourth Doctor – fossilised hands needing to live again, ancient skulls linked
to alien essences and so on – but Rayner here keeps a firm grasp of both the
period of Who in which she’s playing, and the elements she has to work with –
jawbone, alien presence, Piltdown Man, Suffragettes. Thrusting the travellers
into the world of paleontology at this point in Earth’s history, and meeting
members of the Suffragette movement keeps Rayner’s story focused and moving
along, and particularly in how they interact, she throws problem after problem
into the path of the Tardis crew, an endless line of things to do studding the
episodes from start to finish.
In a very palpable way,
it’s this progression of problems that makes this six-part story feel very much
of the first Doctor’s day. As a story, The Suffering could work as a
four-parter, but here there’s little in terms of cut-aways. When the Doctor and
Steven have to go and steal a particular skull from the home of a noted
palaeontologist, leaving Vicki asleep for much of a couple of episodes, we go
with them, first by daylight to get the lay of the land, and then again by
night, waiting till the house goes dark, breaking in, finding the skull,
battling with an alien force that aims to do them deadly harm, comforting a
maid who gets possessed along the way and so on. When, subsequently, they need
to go on a wild goose chase all over London, buying a replacement skeleton and
some other items, there are only a few short-cuts taken as we follow Steven, in
top hat and false moustache as he wanders along the streets with a carpet-bag
full of bones, getting grief from the local constabulary and pulling a bus-top
switcheroo. This is more or less exactly how the story would have played out in
black and white if there had been six episodes to fill, and the pacing to allow
for all this toing and froing brings some comedy with it – besides Steven’s
adventures in pre-war London, there’s an extremely extended section of the
First Doctor driving a vintage roadster, rigid suspension, driving goggles and
series of increasingly comical collisions to boot.
While the paleontological
palaver is a well-rendered way into the story, it’s very much the minor theme.
Far more intensely rendered is the feministic, empathic angle – the alien
presence needs to make contact with females in this time and space, and feels a
surging antipathy towards males of any description, dividing its motivations
along lines of gender. As the story surges towards its climax, Rayner, and
director Lisa Bowerman, give us insights into the history of women on our own
planet through the history they endured on the world of the alien force whose
jawbone kicks the story off. It's a history of abuse, of forced usage and
reproduction, of beatings, and pain, and degradation. The alien, which remains
nameless throughout as an avatar of Everywoman, tells a story of horror that
embodies the war between the historically-recognised sexes on a planet ruled by
and for the whims of men. Awakening in England in 1912, it’s telling that the
alien cannot see much difference between her own world and ours, especially as
Rayner dips us into the emotional experiences of the Suffragettes: the
beatings, the force feeding, the disgrace and indignity heaped on them, the
monstrous things done to ensure that women ‘knew their place.’ It takes Vicki,
with her knowledge of the Doctor and Steven, knowledge that, to coin a slightly
depressing phrase, #NotAllMen are like that, certainly going forward in Earth’s
history, to argue that destroying most of the men in the world is somehow a bad
idea. It’s arguably a soft conclusion, but it’s also one that acknowledges that
while institutions and society are as misogynistic as they’re allowed to be by
those at the top, if it came to a black and white choice – kill all men for their
crimes against women, or don’t - the truth of there being at least some groovy
males on the planet at any given moment is a loophole that would allow men to
survive.
The structure of the story
is unusual in Big Finish Who stories, breaking some walls of involvement by
having Steven and Vicki determined to ‘record’ the story for posterity, in case
the alien comes back – a fear given some reality late in the course of the
story. It’s a technique that adds minutes to the run-time, and feels like an
experiment in form for its own sake, as Vicki puts on voices and is interrupted
by Steven, though it does bring some of the first and oldest Target
novelisations to mind in phrases like ‘the mysterious time and space machine
known as the Tardis,’ ‘handsome space pilot Steven Taylor’ and ‘plucky orphan
Vicki.’ In hindsight, this feels like one double-underlining of the period too
far, and combined with the use of essentially the same cliff-hanger for the
first two episodes, both immediately undercut by the ‘current’ speech of the
companions bickering over who should tell the next part of the story, it begins
to make The Suffering feel more clunky than it should, or indeed does once the
story really gets going.
Vicki’s journey within the
story though, learning about the need for women’s suffrage – as she remarks,
‘what possible reasons could there be why women don’t have the vote?’ –
and then feeling everything the Suffragettes go through as a part of the fight,
finding a kind of communion with the rest of womankind in 1912 England – is the
really important element of the story. Even the alien to some extent is
subservient to those lessons, acting as a key, a conduit into the fears, the
feelings, the pain and suffering of our women, as much as her own, in our all
too recent past. It’s this braveness in the storytelling, this truth revealed,
that makes The Suffering the kind of story which, despite its six episode
length, despite its funny toing and froing with the Doctor and Steven in
London, despite Vicki spending a couple of episodes asleep, stays with you and
makes you want to recommend it to your friends.
In 1912 in England, women
couldn’t vote, because as is mentioned in this story, men in power believed
women didn’t have the mental capacity to understand the questions on which a
vote would be necessary, that their lives were best spent breeding and raising
children, that their dress should be dictated by their femininity.
In 2017, the greatest
power in the Western world (which England was in 1912), has recently allowed
the restriction of female bodily autonomy, so female-specific healthcare cannot
be granted without the permission of a male relative. It has expressed the
opinion that women should be ‘punished’ for espousing healthcare options that
make them the equal of a man. And the leader of its government has said he
wants women within that government to dress ‘like women’ – meaning according to
his tastes, rather than their own.
Perhaps – just perhaps –
it’s time for a follow-up story, of the kind heavily hinted at towards the end
of the original. Return of the Suffering, Big Finish?
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