The Life And Opinions of Andrew Rilstone

III: Cliffhangers

A literal cliff-hanger. Romana is hanging from a cliff; at any rate, clinging to the side of a sheer rock. To her credit, she doesn't scream: but she calls out the Doctor's name. 

But the Doctor is also caught in a cliff-hanger. A less literal one, but a venerable Doctor Who situation. He's unconscious, chained to an altar-stone in the middle of a stone circle, and the leader of the local Druid side is about to stab him with a ceremonial knife. 

Rather ingeniously, Romana's peril is what saves the Doctor. He hears her shouting for help; and wakes up. He immediately cracks a joke.

"I hope that knife's been properly sterilised", he says. He's not a brave hero laughing in the face of doom. Either he doesn't understand the situation; all else he simply refuses to take it seriously. "You can catch all sorts of things off a dirty knife."

That is very much who the Doctor is now. It's of a piece with him breaking the fourth wall or celebrating the show's anniversary. However much danger he appears to be in, he refuses to take it seriously.

Emilia Rumford, an elderly archaeologist who's been studying the standing stones, arrives on her bike, and all the druids run away. The Doctor sends for K-9, and between them, they rescue Romana from the cliff. He uses his scarf to pull her up; which would have been even funnier if it really had been his new birthday present. 

But here's the funny thing.

The double cliff-hanger which the the Doctor and Romana escape from at the beginning of Episode Two is not the one they were left in at the end of Episode One. 

When we last saw the Doctor he had gone to The Big House. He met Leonard De Vries, the local squire and captain of the Druids. De Vries bashes the Doctor over the back of the head and announces "His blood is still warm! I know what to do!"

And then the action cuts back to Romana. The Doctor left her with the archaeologists at the stone circle and told her to wait for him. The archaeologists have gone back to their cottage for tea and sandwiches, but she is waiting for him as she promised.  

And here again, the Time Lines diverge. 

In the original script, the Doctor would have (surprisingly) returned to Stone Circle, as if nothing had happened. Romana would have (surprisingly) followed him over the Moor until they come to a sign saying "Warning: Dangerous Cliff". 

And then the Doctor would have pushed Romana into the sea.

It's the best kind of cliffhanger: one which doesn't ask "How will they escape?" so much as "What the heck is going on?" Has the Doctor been mind-controlled by the Druids? Blackmailed in some way? Has Romana been led astray by some kind of doppelgänger? Or is the Doctor playing a long complicated game, like he did with the Sontarans in Invasion of Time?

But of course, it's not the cliffhanger we actually saw.

Tom Baker refused point-blank to play the scene as it was written. He wasn't prepared to portray an evil or menacing Doctor. And Doctor Who was now such a star-vehicle that Graham Williams had to acquiesce. Doctor Who is Tom's show, in a way that it was never Jon or Patrick's show. It is more important that Tom be allowed to "do his benevolent alien thing" than that he follows the script.

And I am not saying he was in the wrong. Doctor Who really was a children's programme, and Tom Baker really had turned himself into an audience identification figure. The programme is the character and the character is the actor. But if Mary Whitehouse had said anything similar, she would undoubtedly have been denounced as a mad old biddy. "The kiddies might think their hero had really turned bad" and "The kiddies might think that their hero had really drowned" are the same kind of objection.

Until we saw the sign saying "Beware: Unexpected Cliffhangers", we didn't know that the action was taking place near the coast. The real Rollright Stones are located near Moreton in Marsh, about as far from the sea as you can get in England. There's no reason a stone circle shouldn't be near the coast; but it's odd for an area called "the moor" to be in such a location.

When we were talking about The Ribos Operation, we suggested that "dungeons" were a kind of concrete manifestation of "the plot": physical spaces which the hero can't get out of, and in which monsters, perils and members of the supporting cast can pop up without much explanation. In much the same way, the cliff is a physical manifestation of the structure of Doctor Who. There has to be a cliff, because there has to be a cliff-hanger. Romana has to fall, because she has to end the episode in Peril. It's not part of the geography of the moor; it's part of the metatextual geography of the TV show. 

So. Romana hears the Doctor's voice and follows it through the woods to the edge of the cliff. Whereupon she falls over the edge of the cliff for no reason whatsoever. And there is never any explanation.

Go back and watch the end of Episode One.

And then do what no-one could possibly have done before 1995: watch Episode Two straight afterwards.

Something is clearly amiss.

Romana topples; she tries to reach out for the edge of the cliff; touches it; but continues to fall. 

It's the same predicament that the Doctor was left in at the end of Pirate Planet Episode 3. We have seen the hero fall, presumably to their death. In Pirate Planet, the solution was far-fetched, but elegant: the person who fell was not the Doctor, but the Doctor's holographic double.

The solution here is much simpler. What we saw at the end of Part One is not what really happened. Romana didn't topple from the top of the cliff. She slipped a short way down it, and is now clinging on for dear life.

Call it cheating if you like. There were no DVDs in the 1970s. No repeats. Doctor Who took shape only in our memory.

The music fades out. The blue space tunnel comes to an end. We reach for our crumpet and are cocoa, or crouch down behind the settee.

"Ah yes" we say "I remember. Romana was clinging to the cliff; and the Doctor had been chained to an altar." (He hadn't, of course. The last we saw of him, he'd been biffed over the back of the head.)

It's the Doctor's birthday. He didn't get his cake; but he did get to go to his favourite planet. And David Fisher is offering up a witty pastiche of the Doctor Who's most prevailing cliches. Cliff hangers. Druids. Human sacrifice. 

Or else writing a genuinely derivative and unimaginative story.

IV: The Bullfighter

All long running TV shows change over time. Many of them are periodically relaunched or rebooted. Some have moments when characters jump over real or metaphorical sharks. But Doctor Who is more than usually split into eras. And you know the exact moment when one era goes away and the next era comes along.

"It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for."

"I think this old body of mine is wearing a bit thin."

"Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice."  

Well then. I believe I have identified the precise moment at which The Alien One, played by Tom Baker, regenerated into The Silly One. Also played by Tom Baker.

The Doctor and Emilia (the archaeologist) are in the secret crypt of the Big House. Emilia has a companion and assistant named, and if there is any sniggering there'll be trouble, Vivien Fay. Down in the secret crypt are oil paintings of the six previous owners of the Big House and SPOILER WARNING they all look exactly like Vivien. Ergo, Vivien must be at least four hundred years old. Ergo, she herself must be the Celtic goddess to whom the Druid team are in the habit of sacrificing Time Lords.

Some eighteen months before Stones of Blood, ITV had shown a kids mystery serial called Children of the Stones. It was fairly obscure at the time, but has since passed into legend as the scariest children's TV show ever made. It certainly stands up pretty well; averagely good child actors are carried by a cast of first-rate grown-ups, including Gareth (Roj Blake) Thomas and Ian (Garron) Cutbertson.

The plot is a wonderful network of clues and hints and narrative ley-points, which never cohere into complete sense. Fifty years on I am still not sure if I fully understand it. Why does the old poacher have a stone amulet just like the one in the local museum? Why was there a painting of the mysterious stone circle in a London junk shop? Why are the kids in the local school all maths geniuses? What happens when villagers are called to tea in the sinister squire's observatory?

It may be that David Fisher is trying to achieve a similar effect here. And there could very well have been a folk-horror story in which "Why do all the owners of the Big House look like the archaeologist's assistant?" was one layer of a gradually unpeeling narrative onion. But Stones of Blood is using Scooby Doo as a model much more than it is Children of the Stones. "Clues" are simply elements in a treasure hunt, arrows that point to the next clue and eventually to the conclusion. Once the Doctor sees the paintings, the whole plot is revealed. Vivien is an alien. The druids think she is a goddess. The stones in the circle are silicon based aliens who subsist on human blood. All sorted out and we haven't even got to the end of Episode Two.

The Doctor and Emilia don't have long to digest the new information. One of the Monoliths from the stone circle appears in the doorway, blocking off their exit. How it got down the stairs, no-one can say. 

I don't propose to take the mickey out of the silliness of the monster. Silly monsters are very much Doctor Who's stock in trade. The idea of sentient standing stones (hiding in plain site among actual standing stones) is not the silliest thing ever to appear on Doctor Who. (It's not even the silliest thing to appear in Stones of Blood.) A planet populated by swamp dwelling vampire boulders even has a certain Adamsian poetry to it. You can imagine them hanging out in a cantina with super-intelligent shades of the colour blue, uniquely biroid forms of life and indeed flolloping mattresses.

I don't find that stones which appear to glow with golden light automatically makes me think of urine. If anything, it makes me think of the cover of Quicksilver Heritage. 

So the Doctor and Emilia run away. They run out of the Big House, and along a country lane, chased, very slowly, by the moving monolith. Baker delivers a few choice Bakerisms. There is some wilful cross-purpose misunderstanding, delivered dead pan:

"That thing is made of stone" says Emilia

"Yes, and it's closing on us fast" says the Doctor.

"But that's impossible"

"No it isn't, we're standing still."

And there is that infuriating, endearing, wide-eyed innocence; where the Doctor pretends to be an idiot so everyone can see how clever he is:

"I meant a silicon based life form is unknown, unheard of, impossible" says Emillia. 

"Maybe it doesn't realise that"  says the Doctor. 

The Doctor's relationship with Emilia is not that far removed from his relationship with Romana: the person who thinks she knows everything coming up against the person who actually does. It's quite funny: Beatrix Lehmann is (no disrespect) a very much better actor than Mary Tamm. You could imagine her staying on the TARDIS and becoming an ongoing companion. In fact, you could imagine her as the first female Doctor.

I recall a heartwarming episode of Little House on the Prairie in which Laura heartwarmingly befriends the mean banker (who heartwarmingly turns out to be not so mean after all) because they both share a heartwarming love of fishing. He tells her that his angling books indicate that she is using the wrong kind of bait: she heartwarmingly replies that the fish may not have read the books.

The Doctor is making the same kind of joke. Maybe the silicon based lifeform doesn't know that silicon based lifeforms are impossible. His experience trumps Emilia's book learning. His wit is the wit of a smart-alec school boy, which is why smart-alec school boys were so devoted to him. At least he doesn't mention bumble-bees. 

We're clearly in a cliffhanger situation; so we go straight back to the cliff that Romana was dangling from at the beginning of the episode. There is no reason for them to run there: when the Doctor needs to be in peril, the cliff just pops up in front of him.

And now, watch.

The quite silly monster advances towards the Doctor and Emilia cries out "we're trapped".

Up to this point, the incidental music has been happily going "tum tum tum" in the background; harmless and so unintrusive you hardly notice it is there. But suddenly it changes to a melody: to, in fact, a fanfare. 

And the Doctor takes off his coat....and holds it in front of him....and the creature advances towards the coat....and falls off the cliff. 

What saves the day is not cleverness, but clowning. The Doctor pretends to be a bullfighter.

It isn't very funny, but it is very, very silly. It isn't just Tom Baker fooling around: the show itself has become foolish. Without the incidental music, it would seem as if the Doctor was simply being an idiot. But the fanfare tells us that we are now in the kind of universe where, if the Doctor decides to play at being a bullfighter, then The Plot will rearrange itself around him.

There could have been an explanation. Maybe the Doctor happens to know that silicon based life forms are attracted to the colour red. (Bulls are, incidentally, colour-blind.) It could have been foreshadowed. Maybe we could have seen Vivien using a red flag to communicate with the Ogri, giving the Doctor the clue that they like the colour red.

But no. That's no longer how the show works. 

The Doctor and Emilia look over the cliff edge, and look up again in perfect unison. It's a purely comedic shot; straight out of a silent comedy or a cartoon show. It's very well carried off: Tom Baker and Beatrix Lehmann are fine actors who are obviously having a great time. 

But we have crossed a rubicon. Doctor Who is no longer even pretending to take itself seriously.

True Fact: The BBC repeated the Star Trek episode, Devil In the Dark on the Tuesday after the final episode of Stones of Blood. Tom Baker doesn't take the opportunity to say "I am the Doctor, not a bricklayer" which is a bit of a shame. 

 I: Introduction

"And so", concluded Andrew, "the Key to Time is a metafictional debate about what Doctor Who is going to be like going forward.  A search for balance between what the Troughton and Pertwee years were, and what the remaining Baker years are going to be."

"I have a question"  said someone in the back row. "Well, it's not really a question, so much as a comment. This is all jolly clever, but there is no way you can spin it out over another four essays. Sure, every Key To Time story is either a traditional Doctor Who story, or not a traditional Doctor Who story. But whichever side of the line a story falls out on, you can say that it proves your point. It's time to move on and talk about something else. Like, Stones of Blood as a metaphor for Marxist economic theory; or how Androids of Tara illuminates the UNIT dating problem."

"Well, I'm glad you asked me that question" said Andrew. "Made that comment, I mean. It's a valid point, and one with which I am not entirely unsympathetic. But let's use Stones of Blood to test the hypothesis one last time, shall we?"

He started to write on the blackboard.

Chalk board.

White board.

One of those projector thingies where you scribble on slides with transparent pens. 

"Consider the following. 

"1:  Stones of Blood is the weakest story in the sixteenth season; and, if you are asking for my opinion -- which, considering I am writing both sides of the argument, you presumably are -- the worst story in the entire Tom Baker era thus far. 

"2: Stones of Blood doesn't even pretend to fit into the Key to Time story arc. Yes, the villain does have a necklace, and yes, she did steal it from the Boney King of Nowhere. It may even give her shape shifting powers. The Doctor takes it off her in Episode Four, and it turns out to be Segment Three. But it makes no difference the to story. The Doctor would have got just as involved, and involved in just the same way, if it had just been a shape shifting emperor's magic pendant and not the Key to Time at all.

"3: There is a very odd prologue in which the Doctor restates the Quest for Romana's benefit, and in which the a magic voice warns them about the Black Guardian. Which would make complete sense if the Black Guardian were in the story: but he isn't. It's as if the scriptwriter puts in a prologue saying 'This is part of the Key to Time Saga' because otherwise it wouldn't be.

"4: The actual story is pretty much a collection of Doctor Who tropes and cliches and nothing else. There's a set of chanting robed mystics (we had one of those last week); there's a cargo cult (we had one of those last season); there's a gothic mansion (we have one of those every season); there's a feisty lady scientist; there's an unconvincing model spaceship and there is, you guessed it, an execution. There is an actual cliff which seems only to exist so people can hang off it. And some of the tropes are treated so ineptly that it is impossible not to think that they are being deliberately subverted -- or at any rate handled by someone who actively hates the show."

"And" concluded Andrew, with the air of someone pulling a rabbit out of hat, or possibly a wig out of a pocket "Members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society votes Stones of Blood their favourite story of the entire Key to Time saga. They chose a David Fisher script above a Robert Holmes script and a Douglas Adams script. And, come to that, above a much better David Fisher script.

"And the reason is not hard to see. Stones of Blood is a terrible Doctor Who story. But it is, at least, clearly a Doctor Who story.  The DWAS members could see that Pirate Planet and Ribos Operation were taking the programme off into new territory; and they cast their vote clearly in favour of old territory.

"Which is ironic. Because either Stones of Blood is a genuinely terrible Doctor Who story by someone who doesn't much like Doctor Who. Or else it is a deliberate parody of Doctor Who. And that's what Doctor Who is, in fact, going to become: a self-parody. Stones of Blood is the story where the metatextual weirdness fully takes hold.

"I'm not going to attempt to summarise the plot, because basically there isn't one. But I am going to have a look at half a dozen defining moments in the serial."

"I have another questions. And it really is a question, as opposed to a comment. Are you going to keep this device going for the whole essay?"

"Probably not. Could I have the first slide please?"

II: Cake

In the opening scene of Stones of Blood, Romana throws a surprise party for the Doctor. 

It is his 759th birthday. She provides the cake. It isn't clear if she baked it herself; or if the TARDIS food machine can produce candles and sponge and pink sugar icing to order. She also gives him a present. And only then do they resume their mission -- which happens to be on the Doctor's favourite planet. And to revisit many of his favourite cliches. So the Stones of Blood is a kind of birthday treat. 

Looked at diegetically (from a Watsonian perspective) the scene is a bit of a problem. For one thing, it ties the Doctor's age down a bit too specifically. For another, it asks us to swallow the idea that Time Lords have the same traditions as humans -- they give presents and blow out candles on the anniversary of their birth. We could, of course, execute the Moffat Manoeuvre, and say that birthday cakes and candles are a Time Lord tradition that English humans copied. But there's a simpler explanation. Romana knows that the Earth is the Doctor's favourite planet. She must also know that he has adopted some of its customs -- tea, jelly babies, ginger beer, cricket. So she has very thoughtfully given him a traditional human birthday party: in the way you or I might throw a Japanese style party for someone who we know loves manga. It's a kind thought and the Doctor accepts it as a kind thought.

In Ribos Operation, the Doctor and Romana were markedly hostile to each other. In Pirate Planet they achieved a kind of balance or equilibrium. And now here is Romana giving the Doctor thoughtful gifts. Before too long, it will be impossible not to think of them as a married couple. 

All the Doctors have had their own preferred wardrobe style; but the scarf, the Burgundy coat and the floppy hat have become the fourth Doctor's uniform -- defining him in the way that the bowler hats defined Laurel and Hardy and the deerstalker defined Sherlock Holmes. At this point in the cycle, Tom Baker is no longer The Serious One. He is no longer The Alien One. By the end of this story, he will certainly have become The Silly One. But more than anything, he is and will always be The One With The Scarf. And the series itself recognises this. 

What do you give a Time Lord for his birthday if he already owns a scarf? 

Romana gives him a new scarf. Exactly the same as the old scarf.

The Stones of Blood is the one hundredth Doctor Who story. Not the one hundredth episode (that was Dalek Master Plan Episode Ten): the one hundredth story. And by coincidence, the final part of the story was scheduled to go out five days shy of November 23, 1978: the show's Fifteenth Anniversary. Some sort of celebration was clearly in order. The cake scene stops short of saying directly that the Doctor and Romana are celebrating the longevity of their TV show, but the audience knows perfectly well that that is what is happening. 

And why not? The Doctor is clearly aware that he is a character in TV show -- it's only a dozen years since he looked out of the screen and wished the viewers at home a merry Christmas. He opens school fetes, sends fans birthday cards and introduces the first issue of Doctor Who Weekly (as it was then). He has more in common with John Noaks or Johnny Morris than he does with Captain Kirk or Robin Hood. The best analogy is still Father Christmas. A birthday party for a TV character on the birthday of their show makes perfect sense. The Doctor and Doctor Who are basically metaphors for each other. Post-reboot, Moffat and Davies would expand this idea at wearisome length.

Does the Doctor even know his own date of birth? He certainly recalls a childhood -- we have heard him talking about the daisyness of daisies with Time Lord gurus; looking into the Untempered Void with his friend the Master; and experiencing night terrors and being comforted by a future companion. We now know that the Doctor was adopted and doesn't remember his birth-family. But there's no reason why an orphan would not celebrate their birthday, even if they didn't know the exact date. The Division would presumably have dated the Doctor's birth from the day when Tecteun found him: but that was certainly a lot more than seven hundred and fifty nine years ago. The child-Doctors we have heard about must be younger versions of the person we have always thought of as the First Doctor. Indeed, the appearance of the child in Listen was based on childhood photographs of William Hartnell. It must be the seven hundred and fifty ninth anniversary of the current cycle of regenerations that Romana is celebrating.  

But even this would have sat poorly alongside the Cartmell Masterplan -- which, you will recall, states that Time Lords are not born, but knitted. I suppose a race of clones might celebrate the day they came out of the cloning machines. Then again, the Doctor believes himself to have had a human mother; details of whom have never been made public; so his birthday might be a poignant occasion for him. 

So, all told, it is probably just as well that there is no such scene in Stones of Blood. The birthday cake scene was, indeed, written -- by script editor Anthony Read. Tom and Mary reportedly really liked it. But Graham Williams thought it was too silly. That's the Doylist reason for the pointless Black Guardian warning in the prologue: it was a late replacement for the vetoed sequence.

The Key to Time saga is about law versus chaos; and also about nostalgia vs progress and plot vs anti-plot. But it is also, surely, about science fiction versus comedy; earnestness versus foolishness. One can almost imagine Graham Williams walking into the middle of the Doctor's birthday party like Graham Chapman's Colonel at the end of the Parrot Sketch and announcing "I am sorry: this is all getting far too silly." If Douglas Adams had been in charge, that might even have happened. He's the one who pitched an idea about the TARDIS slipping Time Lines and materialising in TV Centre during the filming of an episode of Doctor Who. Douglas won't assume his role as script editor until the beginning of next season, but Anthony Read is doing his very best to channel some post-Hitch-Hiker silliness.

"I knew a Galactic Federation once" says the Doctor in Episode Four "Lots of different lifeforms so they appointed a justice machine to administer the law." 

"What happened?" asks Romana. 

"They found the Federation in contempt of court and blew up the entire galaxy." 

That's a Douglas Adams joke if ever I heard one. 

But for now, the forces of sensibleness remain in control. 

Graham Williams vetoed the birthday party. 

The crew ate the cake.

This is the second part of a series of articles on the Doctor Who story Stones of Blood. 

All ten part have already appeared on my Patreon. 

Patreon followers have also read my definitive guide to the UK election, and are about to read my essay on the Doctor Who story Androids of Tara.

It would be great if the majority of people reading this could join them. 

We have been asked to wear covid masks.

And here is a funny thing. Some people (at least one person) thinks that Michell was the original inspiration for the character of Doctor Who. Doctor Who started in '63 and Michell came to prominence in '69, and it's hard to see where Verity Lambert of Sydney Newman would have come across him. It might be that a dowsing rod is a bit like a sonic screwdriver, but the sonic screwdriver didn't become an important accoutrement of the Doctor until the 1970s. (Arguably not really until the reboot.) But Michell is certainly an English eccentric, with a store of obscure knowledge, and is certainly regarded by some people as a kind of Merlin figure. And in photographs he often wears a scarf.

Now I have told you about the connection, it exists.

Flying saucers, stone circles, Atlantis. John Michell, Doctor Who.

Wolvesacre moat, Chester cathedral.

Join the dots. All stories are true.

This is the first part of a series of articles on the Doctor Who story Stones of Blood. 

All ten part have already appeared on my Patreon. 

Patreon followers have also read my definitive guide to the UK election, and are about to read my essay on the Doctor Who story Androids of Tara.

It would be great if the majority of people reading this could join them. 

Rilstone on Stones of Blood

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