SHADAAAAA!!!

Shada, before the 50th anniversary recovery the only Doctor Who video I ever legitimately purchased.  Douglas Adams, of course, and also the knowledge that they weren't ever going to broadcast it on NJN, I couldn't tape it off TV.

In some ways a paragon of my thoughts about "missing" episodes - what once irritated me about the Lost Media Wiki, their willingness to class as "lost" something that never existed in the first place, now seems prescient and holistic, toxic nostalgia shading into utopian visions.  Brian Wilson and Smile, except over there, the Beach Boys fans reject the legitimate completion as inauthentic.

It's 6 AM and I'm trying to write down part two of Xanadu without having written part one, with in fact a shameful lack of familiarity with the collected works of Olivia Newton-John.  Focus, Kate.  One step at a time, you were talking about Shada.

When I was twelve and I got a copy of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in paperback as an Easter present - back then while most people thought of Douglas Adams as an author, which he wasn't, I thought of him as the maker of computer games, which he emphatically wasn't.  Having seen the game once on an uncle's Apple II and failed to get out of the first room, failed to figure out what on earth an "analgesic" was supposed to be, I assumed that this was and always would be what computers were for and, having procured a computer, asked for a copy of the computer game.  In 1990.  As a child, I didn't know what was permanent and what was ephemeral, what was "cool" and what was so out of fashion you couldn't even find a copy.

I got the book and I liked it because he was British and he was clever.  I sort of figured all British people were clever based on my limited exposure.  I still like Douglas Adams, not because I liked him when I was twelve, but because over time I have tried to become more than clever and have realized that Douglas Adams was, in fact, far more than clever.

So Shada, which Douglas Adams dismissed as not his best work and then went on to cannibalize for the second Dirk Gently novel, which I should probably re-read - the legitimate completion Doctor Who fans don't want because he wrote Dennis and Carl out of it.  I didn't understand either of the Dirk Gently novels when I read them.  I will put them on The List.

This is, to me, the far more interesting subset of the Library of Babel, the books I plan on reading, the restaurants I plan on visiting, the TV shows I watch the trailers of, and never quite get around to.  The bits of the TV shows I watched that I fall asleep during, or that I give up on because I'm over-analyzing them or because they're too emotionally intense.

Shada, by accident, is the perfect "missing episode" for me, because the farther you get into it the more large chunks of it just stop existing.  There _are_ episodes five and six of Shada, they're just a lot thinner on the ground than episode one, which misses only a few minor scenes.

Doctor Who was broadcast, in omnibus format, at 9 PM on Saturday nights, which was past my bedtime.  I could theoretically stay up until 10:30 or 11:15 to when they started showing the old Flash Gordon serials, but I seldom made it as far as 10 PM, when they broke to do the lottery drawings, supervised by the accounting firm of Deloitte and Touche.  (None of the existing DVDs see fit to include these bits of the show for some reason.)

So this is my memory of Doctor Who, the Doctor and Romana sitting around chatting pleasantly in the TARDIS, the two of them wandering through a rock quarry, and a perfectly pleasant and coherent opening shades into incoherence.  None of the episodes seemed to have actual plots, if only because they developed at such a glacial pace that by the time they were willing to disclose what was happening my brain had shut down for the evening.

A reconstruction of a Doctor Who episode for me would therefore have to be surrealistic and fantastic.

Often I seek the surrealism and the fantastic outside the story.  What am I to make of the reason for the non-completion of Shada, the fight between two competing unions over the right to set a clock on a children's TV show (Doctor Who was certainly NOT a children's TV show) I have never seen?

Well these days I take it as a classic early Thatcher-era example of the largely successful attempt to discredit unions and workers' solidarity.  There was nothing to prevent the BBC from completing Shada, but by choosing not to, deciding it would be too "expensive", and blaming the unions, they scored an incredibly strong propaganda coup against the unions, portraying them as being selfish, parochial, and absurd.

And then there is the matter of the competing reconstructions.  The audio-with-Macromedia-Flash reconstruction with Paul McGann.  The reconstruction spearheaded by the Great Beast of Doctor Who fandom, Ian Levine, who spent a certain portion his years puppeteering vulnerable second-string actors into being his living dolls, re-enacting stories nobody in their right mind would care about like "The Urge to Survive".  The _other_ animated reconstruction where they got the actual Tom Baker on board and didn't have to settle for a Tom Baker impersonator.  (I wonder which.  I wonder if it was the person who used to make prank calls as Tom Baker on Dead Ringers.)  The belatedly actually authorized novel by Gareth Roberts, who is what Douglas Adams would be if Douglas Adams really had been nothing more than clever.  The unabridged audiobook version of same read by Lalla Ward, which is on The List.  And, yes, the VHS release, featuring Tom Baker in full goggle-eyed camp mode.

I was a little embarrassed, I will say, at how over the top he was on that release.  A little cringe.  I'm over it.  The struggle here... we'll get back to it, because first I have to talk about Shada, and about Skagra.

Aside from the bit most of us saw first, the Doctor in wading boots and Romana in a straw hat and a lovely long skirt engaging in silly banter while punting on the river Cam, my memory of Shada is of Skagra, the way he looked.  Christopher Neame, whose acting in this I very much like I've decided, striding along the streets of Cambridge imperiously in flares and a silver cape, the hat he used to hide his thinning hair long gone, menacing passersby with the portable version of Rover from the Prisoner and stealing a bicycle while he's at it.  This is my platonic idea of the Doctor Who villain, as much as Robert Wyatt's half-brother ripping off a bad rubber mask of his face and, while he's at it, nearly pulling off the bad rubber mask of an alien face underneath it, you know what close enough that's a take.

What delights me, what has me thinking about Shada at three in the morning when I should be sleeping and I've just read a New York Review of Books essay critiquing the sexual perversion inherent in the collected works of Gary Lutz, is that Adams here has an exceptional insight into the totalitarian mind.  My own tyranny, my own alleged desire for domination... I can understand through Skagra, I can understand through Burroughs' Talking Asshole.  The ultimate goal of colonization is to take over the host entirely, to kill its soul.  Lebensraum of the mind.  For a truly honest tyrant, power and immortality are two sides of the same issue.  I didn't want to magnify the self, but I grew up painfully aware (and not willing to admit it) of the limitations and deficiencies of my own body, of the things I could not do.  To be able to have a new body... not in the way Doctor Who did but like Romana did, in the first Doctor Who episode I ever saw (May 16, 1987) - she was able to choose her own body!  Of course she was only able to do it in order to please the Doctor.  And... wait... how did she please the Doctor?  Through subterfuge, by _pretending to be him_.  Douglas Adams had to have written that scene, right?  It wasn't on purpose, no, but he was more than clever.

The alternative is not so much a fictional alternative, but a lived alternative.  Tom Baker dealing with his curse.  He's served as sort of, I suspect, an object lesson to all subsequent actors playing the role.  Don't do it for more than three years or you'll wind up like HIM.  I suspect they mean "unemployed" more than "miserable" - Baker's years of struggle against self-torment and despair, I suspect, had more to do with his being raised Catholic than his once playing the khlysty Rasputin on film.  Here's where we get back to my disagreement with the thesis of another master self-tormentor, Kurt Vonnegut.  The moral of his "Mother Night" is "We are who we pretend to be (so we must be careful who we pretend to be)."  Almost right, I think.  Almost right.  We _become_ who we pretend to be.  Over seven years, Doctor Who became Tom Baker, which was easy enough for him.  The much harder part was for Tom Baker, over the next decades.  All that pressure to be someone _other_ than Doctor Who.  The impression I get is that he's over that now.  He is Doctor Who, Doctor Who is him, in a way that nobody else ever will be.  Happy ending.

I know Sedric likes to keep it light.  I try!  But it's hard.