Tony gets entangled in
a game of who’s who.
Guy Burgess and Kim Philby
are infamous names in British history (Google is your friend).
Here, writers Robert Khan
and Tom Salinsky take us back to the pre-infamy days as students at Cambridge
for a First Doctor story that has the feel of a pure historical with just a
dash or two of Something Very Odd Going On, and a heaping tablespoon of alien
judgment on the human race.
Entanglement is a proper,
absurd, anything goes First Doctor story, with the Doctor and friends separated
from the Tardis while on a Cambridge college campus just a couple of years
before World War II.
There’s something
altogether irresistible about bringing the Doctor to Cambridge. In many ways,
it feels like exactly the sort of place to which several incarnations might
have retired, the First among them. A Cambridge college is almost, to this 21st
century day, a world in and of itself – in fact, you could even go so far as to
say it’s like a mini-Gallifrey, a place of quiet, patient study, with a wild
flood of youth undermining everything it stands for as they grow to understand
what it is, and then become a part of it themselves.
Anything could happen in a Cambridge college.
Here in Sedgwick College,
there is random deadly aggression which dissipates like a storm. There’s a camera
that really isn’t from around here. There’s a suspiciously missing Master of
the College, Sir Isiah Hardy, and a peculiar inability among everybody else to
remember how long he’s been gone. There are a pair of Proctors who make almost
comically little effort to disguise the fact that they’re not from round here
either. And there’s a contest. A contest to see who, in the continuing absence
of Sir Isiah, who will become the new
Master of Sedgwick – the sharp, driven Professor Lewis, played by Philip fox,
or the woolly, forgetful don, Professor Woolf, played by Richard Braine.
The opening sequence puts
the Tardis irritatingly out of reach, meaning the crew have to go about finding
ways to get it retrieved. That means mixing with the locals, and it’s not long
before both Vicki and Steven are reporting unusual goings-on, but this Doctor,
seemingly willing to take the universe at face value, tells them they’re
talking nonsense, and goes off, in the guise of a visiting professor from
King’s Lynn, to teach a class full of undergraduates.
That…doesn’t go as well as
he expects, and the Doctor joins them in their suspicions.
The odd thing about
Entanglement, and one that makes it agreeable, is that while its most natural
TV comparison would be with Shada, it actually has the feel of a pure
historical for much of the running time – there are mysteries aplenty along the
way, but it’s not until quite late in the day that we learn of the researches
in which Sir Isiah was engaged, and things start to get altogether more ‘aliens
out to destroy the planet’ than ‘The Doctor and friends do Cambridge.’
There is one scene that
will stick in your mind though – and in the age of #MeToo and the fightback
against male violence aimed at women and girls, it will leave a tinny, unpleasant
taste in your mouth. Because whatever is making Cambridge undergraduates into
rampaging mobs whose only wish is to tear each other apart also effects Steven
and Vicki. It remains to be heard whether Vicki can see Steven in the same way
she saw him before this adventure, but be aware, there’s a moment here that
will tighten your chest if you’ve ever been vulnerable. Episode 1 cliffhanger,
should you need a marker.
As the contest to become
the next Master of Sedgwick goes on, the Doctor throws in his lot with one of
the pretenders to the crown for reasons of his own, and Guy and Kim are ready
to stoke the student body to his cause.
Then, in case you didn’t
have enough to process already, things get weirder still when ‘the entanglement
machine’ – a nice touch of the Sixties basic-as-all-get-out style of
technobabble – is revealed, its power activated, and Sir Isiah discovered, at
least by one of the Tardis team.
That’s perhaps the oddest
thing about this story – it’s built of a large number of peculiar elements, (one
thing you can always guarantee of a Khan and Salinsky script is it’ll never be
short of elements! This script, for the initiated, is also crammed to bursting
point with references to the Alice adventures by Lewis Carrol) and sees Steven,
Vicki and the Doctor each take a storytelling strand, with two rival
professors, two dodgy proctors, two Cambridge students, two space MacGuffins, one
stranded Tardis and a field of intense vi-o-lennnnnce – and yet it flows for
the most part with the energy of a pure historical, the Doctor and friends
getting involved in things which no doubt shouldn’t concern them, riiiiight up
to the point where aliens want to destroy the world.
The ending is a game of
find-the-villain, with contender after contender seeming to fit the bill until,
right at the crisis point, the Tardis itself comes to the rescue, and Something
Clever traps all the potential villains together, the latest in a series of
First Doctor actions that have Steven and Vicki questioning the ethics of his
choices.
Entanglement is a story of
a kind which was rarely told back in the First Doctor’s time, but which this
particular Tardis team would be familiar with – alien interlopers hiding in
deep cover and preparing to Do Something Dreadful to the Earth. It has something
of the feel of The Time Meddler, in that it spends a while establishing the
normality of its world, and then pulls reveal after reveal that shows things
are not by any means normal here and need to be stopped.
More than anything, Entanglement
is an alien historical romp in a Cambridge college with something interesting
to say about the state of humanity, which flies by in very agreeable bites as
element after element is revealed. Brace yourself for the Episode 1 cliff-hanger,
and Entanglement is a wild pre-war ride among the Cambridge cloisters.
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