Meglos

DVD extras, of course, have an unusually important place in the Doctor Who mythos.  One of the breakthrough episodes of the new series, "Blink", was based around the conceit that the Doctor, stranded in time, could only interact with the cast through a series of well-hidden DVD "easter eggs".  The show actively incorporates ephemera and deuterocanonical material; while Star Wars wiped its extended universe when taken over by Disney, a side episode to the 50th anniversary special went out of its way to confirm as canon not only the failed 1996 attempt at reviving the series, but all of the books and audio plays featuring the lead actor in that attempt.  Included in those audio plays is a one-episode story which is presented as DVD commentary, featuring the Fifth Doctor as a guest, on a low-budget 1970s cult film which may possibly have involved some actual supernatural occurrences...

(Sedric, I'm sorry to bring this up; I'm sure this was a story idea you must have had at one point, and it's probably a little demoralizing to learn that it's already been done.  This is why I tend to shy away from writing Doctor Who fiction.)

So I have, honestly, been long overdue for purchasing the commercial releases of the old Doctor Who stories.  Mostly this is a function of stubbornness.  The approach taken with the old Who episodes was, in contrast to the shovelware approach of so many DVD releases of old TV shows, to take great care to restore the episodes to the best possible quality and to release individual stories, complemented by lavish DVD extras, at the price of a Hollywood film.

I love Doctor Who, and I love that it is once more considered to be a commercially viable show, but at the end of the day I have trouble spending money on individual episodes, no matter how much care and attention to detail is put into them.

So when whoever puts out the videos finally gave into the pressure and started putting out complete season box sets on Blu-Ray, I jumped on the opportunity, despite not actually owning, or planning to own, a Blu-Ray player at the time.  I'm not sure I can explain why.

What I can say is that upon getting a Blu-Ray player, with box sets of four fairly good seasons of Doctor Who to choose from, the first episode I decided to put in is an episode called Meglos.

This is not a good Doctor Who story.  No, no, that's overselling it.  This is a _terrible_ Doctor Who story.  It's really fucking bad.  When fans of the new series talk about how intimidated they are by the old series, I don't know how to explain a story like Meglos to them.  I don't watch it to gain insight into the character or the mythos.  I don't watch it looking for good television.  I don't even hate-watch it, really.  I watch it because it's one of those episodes where all the different things Doctor Who was come crashing into each other, and what's left is something so ridiculous it defies parody.

This is the episode where an evil cactus impersonates Doctor Who in a fiendish plot to... well, I'm still not entirely sure what, exactly, the cactus was planning, and I just finished watching the story.  Twice.

Doctor Who changes its nature sometimes more often than its lead character changes her face, but in the past this transition was not always smooth.  Here, for instance, there had just been a pretty complete change-over of the behind the scenes production team.  There was a new script editor (a position with unusual power in the show of that era), with Douglas Adams, whose taste tended towards the absurd and whimsical, being replaced by Christopher H. Bidmead, who wanted Doctor Who to be Serious Science Fiction, hired by the new show-runner, John Nathan-Turner, who wanted approximately the same, along with a lot of other things we may possibly get into later.

Before they could do that, though, they had to film what they had.  Which was a script about an evil cactus impersonating Doctor Who.  A very bad script, as it turned out, because Douglas Adams was briliant at throwing parties, an excellent observer of the human condition, but was, honestly, a fucking rotten script editor.

I couldn't excuse spending twenty dollars on a DVD release of this, but forty dollars on a Blu-Ray set containing this and every other episode from the season?  I had to delve into the social history material.

This was not one of the first stories to be prepared for DVD.  The story being an awful one which nobody particularly liked, and which was expected to be bought only by those hardcore fans who would buy literally anything with the Doctor Who name on it, probably had something to do with this.  This is of no uncertain benefit.  The commentary was put together by people who had a tremendous amount of experience with DVD commentaries, who knew the secret that eluded so many of the DVD commentary era: How to make a commentary actually worth listening to.

The first key is to make what you can out of what you have.  The people providing this story's commentary were Lalla Ward, who played the Doctor's companion in the story, and who was an old hand to fandom and to commentaries by this point.  She is also, it happens, the ex-wife of Tom Baker, who played the Doctor in the story.  Joining her are one of the authors of the story, John Flanagan, who has a staggeringly inflated estimation of his skills as a writer, Peter Howell, who wrote the music for the show, and Christopher Owen, who played one of the minor characters in the story, who has no idea what Doctor Who even is, and who would much rather tell stories about his grandkids.

The results are, I would say, more interesting than the story itself, a work of absurdist drama and high psychological tension staged as a DVD commentary to a low-budget children's science fiction series.  Flanagan starts by denouncing the script editor, not present here, for taking credit for introducing a "chronic hysteresis" into the story line.  This was Bidmead's attempt to introduce serious sci-fi into a very silly script, or at least to disguise the fact that the writers had written another fucking time loop plotline into the story.  Flanagan, on the other hand, seems to believe that he has invented the concept of the "Time Loop".  He grouses about the film "Groundhog Day" having ripped them off.  He talks about how it was his brilliant idea to trap the Doctor, who is a TIME Lord, in a TIME loop!  Yes, John, pure genius.

Over the next few episodes things develop along these lines.  Lalla complains about her costume for the episode, though she does grant that she did insist that she needed to be dressed like a late Victorian moppet in every story.  She just wasn't much taken with this _particular_ model of late Victorian moppet.  John talks about how his story is based on the tension between science and religion.  Lalla, who is married to Richard Dawkins, one of the most strident of the New Atheists, commends his prescience.  Peter Howell talks about his approach to composing, which at this point in his career is to use a vocoder everywhere and on everything, to the point where asking him what his approach to a particular bit of music was becomes a running joke.

Everyone points out that Christopher Owen doesn't do shit over the course of the story.  Occasionally someone ventures an opinion on Tom Baker, a topic on which Lalla Ward has extensive personal experience and forty years' worth of arch putdowns.  John Nathan-Turner's inability to notice that Howell had, as a joke, scored one supposedly dramatic scene as a tango is brought up.  "Yes, well, he probably had other things on his mind."  "Oh, yes, certainly."  This is an allusion to the knowledge, common among fans, and certainly known to everyone involved with the show, but seldom stated as such, that Nathan-Turner spent much of his time and energy as show-runner procuring boys beneath the age of consent for what Craigslist would term "casual encounters".  (To be clear, since this was the era of the dual standard in the age of consent that inspired Bronski Beat's landmark album "The Age of Consent", they would have been beneath of the age of consent even were Nathan-Turner seeking heterosexual liaisons.)

The episodic nature of the story likewise divides the conversation up into acts, and the concluding one is a doozy.  It is mentioned that the fourth episode runs unusually short for a Doctor Who episode.  "You'd think the episodes would have a standard running length," someone remarks.  "A lot of people don't know this," responds John, clearly aware of the growing tenor of the room, the accumulation of unspoken judgements his companions, "but the writers aren't actually responsible for making sure the episode is long enough."

Lalla takes this as her cue for a lengthy series of artfully phrased questions about John and his absent partner's writing process, expressing her curiosity about what inspired their approach to this particular story.  She points out, in ways more subtle than I can aptly summarize here, that a lot of the actors (who are, John agrees, fine actors, and he deeply regrets having named one of the characters as a hilarious anagram of "bad actor" as that actor is in fact an excellent actor, truly) seem to almost be playing their undoubtedly serious science fiction script as broad comedy.  It is a delightful and much-deserved comeuppance.  John desperately tries to save face during the closing credits by pointing out (after saying how genuinely sorry he is for misremembering her character's name) that Lalla's professional name is taken from the way she pronounced her given name, Sarah, as a toddler.  It doesn't help him any.

Stuff like this goes a long way to explaining why I love Doctor Who so much.