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Following from 2013's Lady of Mercia, a Fifth Doctor audio that barely featured Nyssa, the also 2013 audio play Prisoners of Fate is all about Nyssa. Writer Jonathan Morris satisfyingly ties together several plot elements that had accumulated for the lady from Traken over the course of a variety of audio plays, offering some resolutions along with a starting point for some new ideas in a nice time paradox puzzle story.

When Janet Fielding came back to play Tegan, the makers of the audio plays naturally wanted to assemble the Fifth Doctor's (Peter Davision) best team of companions--Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan, and Turlough (Mark Strickson). The trouble was, any story featuring Turlough before Enlightenment had to include the subplot about him being in league with the Black Guardian, a story arc from Five's second season, and Nyssa had left the show in the story previous to Enlightenment. So in the audio Cobwebs, Nyssa was reunited with the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough after the events of Enlightenment. The makers of the audios also took the opportunity to age up Nyssa to something close to Sarah Sutton's actual age, featuring her decades later in the process of trying to find a cure for a disease called Richter's Syndrome.

The trouble with this was, in an earlier audio play, Winter, the Fifth Doctor had already encountered an older Nyssa who had not met up with him after Terminus. Winter had taken place inside the Fifth Doctor's mind while he was undergoing the regeneration seen in his final television serial, The Caves of Androzani. The Doctor and Nyssa essentially share a dream as part of his visions of previous companions and she tells him about her grown children and her life since she'd left the TARDIS. So when Nyssa rejoins the group in Cobwebs, she realises she can't tell the Doctor about her kids because the regenerating Fifth Doctor she'd encountered already didn't know about them yet.

Then people decided it was no fun having an older Nyssa around--and made things difficult because, since her voice sounded the same, it had to be explained somehow in every story that she looked older. So in The Emerald Tiger she finds a sort of fountain of youth and she's back to familiar television Nyssa, presumably enabling any casual listener to then pick up in the next story without needing to be filled in on why Nyssa's there and Turlough's not working for the Black Guardian.

But Jonathan Morris decided to turn all these convoluted band-aids and plot reroutings into a plus for a deliberately confusing paradox puzzle plot. So the group actually runs into one of Nyssa's kids, as an adult, on a planet where the rulers are able to see the future. To add to the confusion, Nyssa's son is named Adric (Alastair Mackenzie) and when he sees Nyssa on camera he assumes he's seeing her from earlier in her time stream, from before Terminus, before she left the Doctor. In his mind, she disappeared, presumed dead, when she left with the Doctor again in Cobwebs. The audio tries to confront the awkward truth that Nyssa, despite obtaining the cure for Richter's Syndrome, never returned home with it, choosing instead to wander with the Doctor. Both she and the Doctor try to explain this but no explanation ever quite holds water. I'm not sure what Morris could have done but I admire the effort.

Adric II is also working on the cure for Richter's Syndrome his mother never delivered so naturally the issue comes up. Parallel to this tangle is the one involving the oracle that allows the local authority to try criminals before they commit crimes. There's a nice courtroom scene where the Doctor points out the subjectivity in the premonitions the wordless oracle chooses to show--and of course this is borne out later in the story when we see them come true but in contexts that greatly modify the guilt.

There's the old fashioned, very understated, possibly romantic tension in this one between the Doctor and Nyssa and also between the Doctor and Tegan but it doesn't aspire to anything as blatant as some of the earlier stories. I always had the feeling that Tegan, on television, was sort of meant to be the possible romantic partner that never came close to coming off due to the number of companions Five usually had at once. The audios where it's just him and Nyssa travelling go a long way to take Five out of his "older brother" image into something like romantic chemistry, though it's never quite as overt as Four and Romana or Ten and all his companions. Maybe once all paradoxes are cleared away, then there'll be time for love.

Twitter Sonnet #1108

Horizons crowd with plastic figment trees.
The outer edge of hardened clouds condensed.
A question writ on stationed eyes was seized.
The song of tangled trumpets soon commenced.
A sturdy figure hauled the cable up.
A row of stars descends across the board.
Acclaimed in blue, at times we lately sup.
At silent docks the hulks are always moored.
An artist claims succeeding slides of brooks.
A creek could glitter red for peppers near.
The lamps along the bank were casting looks.
A darkened knot became the birch's deer.
At last, a synthesized recorder played.
The old electric bed was never made.

Sometimes, despite the best and worst intentions, nothing much gets done. The 1983 Doctor Who serial Terminus has an extraordinary amount of confusion and ineffectuality, partly due to production difficulties. Yet it's not a bad serial for that, in fact I find it kind of a fascinating, adorable, slow motion existential nightmare.

Spoilers after the screenshot



The second serial to feature the companion Turlough (Mark Strickson) finds him still secretly working for the Black Guardian (Valentine Dyall), trying to kill the Doctor (Peter Davison), which of course he doesn't manage to pull off. He does succeed in getting the TARDIS partly torn open so that Nyssa's (Sarah Sutton) bedroom opens into an alien ship carrying lepers to Terminus, a sinister station at the very centre of the universe.



On the ship, Nyssa and the Doctor meet a pair of fetchingly 80s space pirates who boarded the ship before realising its cargo was not of the profitable kind. They soon docks at Terminus where a group of sinister armoured men herd the lepers--along with Nyssa, who's become infected--off to be "cured".



Turlough and Tegan (Janet Fielding) spend the entire serial wandering around lost and make absolutely no contribution except when Turlough knocks out some kind of bypass conduit that affects something vague on the Terminus bridge. Nyssa and the young male space pirate, Olvir (Dominic Guard) try to prevent Nyssa being taken off for the cure, only to find that it really is a cure, and the female space pirate, Kari (Liza Goddard) spends the most of the time just following the Doctor around so he has someone to explain things to.



One of my favourite moments, which is probably effective in ways that have nothing to do with what anyone intended, is when Olvir fights off one of the armoured men while Nyssa is manacled behind him. Olvir wins his fight but as we watch him pausing a moment to catch his breath, an enormous dog headed alien, the Garm (R.J.Bell), slowly ambles up, unchains Nyssa, and carries her off.



Meanwhile, Olivr looks around for Nyssa, just so happening to keep his back to the huge, ponderous fellow taking her away.



Nyssa and Olivr have a few moments rendered odd or downright inexplicable by strangely slow choreography or incomplete dialogue. I think Olivr was intended to be a potential love interest for Nyssa, which is probably why when he breaks into her cell to release her she trips him and jumps on him to attack him before realising who it is. But everyone moves so slow it's only on reflection you realise that we're meant to think Nyssa didn't recognise who was coming into the cell until after she was already straddling him. As it is, Olivr's phoney tumble followed by Nyssa slowly and deliberately climbing atop him is just kind of adorable, particularly since both actors seem so young and sincere.



Of course, this serial is famous for the moment when Nyssa takes off her skirt for no apparent reason and spends most of the story in her underwear. The idea was that, feeling ill after being infected, she needed to relieve pressure on her stomach. I don't know why no-one thought to give her one simple line to make this clear. Anyway, it was apparently actress Sarah Sutton's idea in the spirit of fan service. As she's said in an interview:

Dropping my skirt was my parting gesture to all those fans who wanted to see the real Nyssa. It was my idea and John [Nathan-Turner, the producer] okayed it, but in retrospect I wish I hadn’t bothered because it caused such a stir, I get asked about it whenever I’m interviewed about ‘Doctor Who’.

Here she was trying to do something nice and apparently it turned into a controversy. This was Nyssa's final serial so even sadder is the conclusion of the interview:

There was a strike going on when we made ‘Terminus’, and so on my last day I didn’t finish. I had to come for a brief re-mount during the recording of the next story, ‘Enlightenment’, and so my farewell scene wasn’t the last thing I did at all. It left me with a bit of an empty feeling – I went home thinking ‘Well, I’d at least have liked a clean break’.



Nyssa does at least make herself useful at the end of the story when she improves on the cure for space leprosy. And Sutton was later able to continue Nyssa's story in the Big Finish audios in which she rejoins the Doctor after years spent working on plague cures.

The Doctor, of course, ends up saving the universe and freeing the Garm from slavery, but that's all in a day's work.

Twitter Sonnets #1076

Triangles stitched to make a disk ignite.
A single burned umbrella kept the rain.
To-morrow's drops inside the house requite.
The weather cars are filling up the lane.
Beyond the plastic window keys were thrown.
However diamonds light cigars for time.
The walking legs surprised pianos home.
The stringy forest shakes upon the dime.
Above the ridge are needle eyes to watch.
The sleeping hunters sold a whittled post.
The secret falls consist of peaty scotch.
Behind the booze a silent barley ghost.
In casts of candy ties were ceiling fans.
Adoring roofs deployed the curtain lands.

September 2012 saw the release of an exceptionally good Doctor Who audio play, a Fifth Doctor story called The Burning Prince. Writer John Dorney shows exceptional skill for the medium, delivering action naturally through dialogue, and a lot of exposition in ways that engage and keep the listener's attention. Peter Davison gives a fine performance in this shipwreck adventure about interstellar politics.

I was reminded of Star Wars in two ways--one, because the titular prince is named Kylo (George Rainsford) (apparently no relation to Ren), and two, because it hits the ground running with its big crashing ship. This is what makes the beginning of Revenge of the Sith work so well--the tension of the space battle and then the ship going down makes everything that's said and done on the ship work even better, because we're compelled to listen extra carefully to any crucial information. Dorney may have been influenced by Alien with a genetically modified beast that breaks loose, precipitating the crash.

Meanwhile, of course, the Doctor's haplessly materialised aboard in his TARDIS. Suspicion immediately falls upon him when it's learned there was probably a saboteur, a situation the Doctor finds all too familiar, which he actually jokes about. Davison is another reason all the rapid exposition about two warring families and a political marriage sticks. A lot of actors might deliver every urgent piece of information the same way but Davison layers in some slight embarrassment in his observation about two reuinited lovers kissing and gives the right amount of cautious indignation when someone needlessly uses a gun on its kill setting.

The political stuff is interesting in itself, Dorney nicely setting up a situation that compels you to examine each character to discover who's a spy, who's a saboteur. Dorney plays fair, too--when the Doctor starts to explain things, all the evidence he brings forth were clues that had been given in the story. The climax is a satisfying but surprisingly melancholy observation on the difficulties inherent in heading off a war when mistrust is so deeply entrenched.

The Doctor must deal with an inhabited comet turned into a weapon in the 2012 Doctor Who audio play The Jupiter Conjunction. Though it's Turlough who seems to do most of the work in much of this nicely put together Fifth Doctor story.

There's some kind of shifty political alliance between Earth military and a previously unknown vaporous sentient species from Jupiter. There's an amusing and disturbingly prescient propaganda effort by the villains--though the instruction from one character to a subordinate to "hack the Internet" seems slightly dated the premise certainly holds water. It makes one wonder if the Russian propaganda machine that helped elect Trump is going to try making an alien invading force look good one day.

The Doctor (Peter Davison) and Turlough (Mark Strickson) find themselves imprisoned at which point Turlough takes the lead. I liked that writer Eddie Robson wanted to capitalise on Turlough's talent for being a turn-coat, it's only a shame the Fifth Doctor has to go into the fussy older brother mode he sometimes goes into for this to happen. He's caught flat footed when Turlough offers to give evidence against the Doctor in exchange for immunity but it's still fun hearing Turlough's clever plan unfold.

Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and Tegan (Janet Fielding) are also in the story and though neither has nearly as much interesting material the climax gives Nyssa a nice moment.

Twitter Sonnet #1055

A letter passed from hand to hand delayed.
Electric message roused a sleeper late.
A day without a year, a bed unmade.
They crossed the darkest road but scratches wait.
A vivid lemon stage enfolds the dance.
A stair divorced of house collects the lost.
The scarlet springs behind the eye advance.
A melted ceiling's weight concealed the gloss.
Where wood and carpet stood's a dead discount.
The plastic claws of saints divert the feast.
As scissor leaves construct each new account.
Persistent lines exclude a crimson beast.
Divided words return unwritten drinks.
Beneath a mirrored moon a surface sinks.

The past couple weeks, I've been rewatching Kinda and Snakedance, the two Doctor Who serials written by Christopher Bailey about the snake demon, Mara. Apparently based on a demon in Buddhism of the same name, the creature is a figure in two different cultural imaginations in these two serials which are even better than I remember.



This is despite the presence of Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) in Kinda. I still feel like the dialogue between Adric and the Doctor (Peter Davison) about magic tricks must have been swapped by the actors--it doesn't make sense that the Doctor would have forgotten the magic tricks he performed in his third incarnation and it really doesn't make sense for Adric to get one over on the Doctor. Fortunately he's not too obtrusive.



Magic and trickery feature again in Snakedance in a different context--the Doctor, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), and Tegan (Janet Fielding) show up in the middle of some kind of carnival in commemoration of a defeat of the Mara hundreds of years earlier. There's a fortune teller with a crystal ball and a fun house mirror maze--both eventually giving visions of the Mara in the form of some kind of animal skull.



When Tegan finds herself facing the Mara in the fun house, the demon having laid dormant in her since Kinda, she's puzzled why mirrors don't banish the creature as they did in the first serial's conclusion. It makes sense, though, as in that case the Mara could only reflect on itself being surrounded by mirrors, but naturally it thrives on distorting the self-reflection of others. That seems clear in Tegan's first dream sequence in Kinda where the Mara divides her personality into two.



Neither is a "false Tegan" and, indeed, they both start to cooperate, trying to figure out how to escape. By thwarting them, the Mara disrupts the basic act or state of self-awareness.

Kinda is also reminiscent of Heart of Darkness with its wouldbe colonists, who come off as very Victorian, being driven mad just by coming into contact with a "primitive" people who live and communicate in ways totally alien and yet deeply familiar. The snake, Mara, being the only one among the natives who can talk brings to mind the snake's extraordinary ability to speak in Genesis (something Milton has Eve remark upon at length in Paradise Lost). The Kinda, the native people, seem innocent in their muteness, but this makes them sinister to the colonists who, like so many colonists who lost their minds in other such stories, fill the void in their understanding with a distorted reflection of self.



Bailey's two television stories show two cultures interpreting the same demon. Snakedance features a civilisation that seems to be a blend of ancient Rome and Renaissance Europe where the Mara is easily able to take control. Faith in their ability to reason has blinded the rulers and the museum curator to the danger the Mara represents--they've come to believe the demon's only a myth. The museum curator and the proprietor of the fun house quickly become the Mara's servants because both are committed to something they don't believe is real.



Poor Tegan, though she's certainly fashion forward in that romper in Snakedance. I miss Nyssa's velvety dress from Keeper of Traken, though I hated the pants version of it. But her weird blue stripey blouse is breezier and makes her seem less like a kid. Peter Davison is good as always, particularly in the climax of Snakedance.

Twitter Sonnet #1041

Reversing sounds of gongs remade the sting.
Advice is dripping in through helmet hair.
In dashes Morse encoded on the string.
The pearls direct a dark immortal hare.
A birdish rabbit fell in monkish hands.
In pickle time the radish cued the lid.
In airy marriage skies align the sands.
The sneaky jacket coats the carded quid.
Direct your eyes to elves in foley clothes.
They put the props within the sound effect.
Convenient sprites distribute noisy hose.
A passing tread for jingles we'll detect.
In sculpted ice a hummingbird decides.
Against disjointed hills the cloud collides.

Politically motivated journalists, a mediaeval castle, the second World War, Margaret Thatcher's election, and a particularly nasty mythological creature are all connected in the 2011 Doctor Who audio play Rat Trap. Carried especially well by a performance from Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, this story is funny and sinister and ties its various threads together as nicely as a wad of rats' tails.

Maybe you've heard of the Rat King, the extremely rare case of a group of rats who've gotten their tails tangled up. In Rat Trap, a government scientist begins working in the aftermath of World War II to create a super-intelligent, telepathic being by experimenting with rats, connecting them in such a manner in the tunnels beneath Cadogan Castle. Intending to visit the middle ages and witness some jousting, the Doctor and his companions, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan (Janet Fielding), and Turlough (Mark Strickson), find themselves beneath the castle in 1983 where a group of journalists are trying to uncover the truth about the place before it's taken over by Heritage in the wake of Thatcher's election and any unsavoury history can be hidden away.

Just this layering of concept is fun but the characters are nicely rendered, too. The group of journalists the Doctor encounters squabble and have distinct personalities--one had brought along a dog whistle to ward off any dogs when breaking into the castle, at which the Doctor wryly asks if they realise dog whistles attract dogs, not scare them away. Davison is in top form here and I was particularly impressed by his ability to speak great lengths of dialogue in a single breath. He usually played the Doctor as seeming almost out of breath and the impression he gave was of someone who's acutely conscious of time rapidly running out but whose sense of decorum insists that he say everything that needs saying in just the proper way. We see this in Rat Trap when, in rushing from one point to another, he manages to ask very quickly but very politely that he be reminded of a stash of napalm he'd left behind and that he should dispose of it properly when time allows.

Nyssa continues the plot thread started in Cobwebs that finds her much older than she was on the television show. She's given a moment to dramatically chew on the underused point about the Master possessing her father's body. Turlough, meanwhile, has an entertaining adventure in the TARDIS with a defibrillator.

Here are a couple Doctor Who cosplayers I met on Friday, dressed as the Twelfth and Seventh Doctors. Apart from that there's not a whole lot of Doctor Who at Comic Con I can tell you about that you can't experience yourself by watching the full YouTube videos of both panels:





I took notes for the Classic Doctor panel figuring that one might not go online. Of course, it did. I am glad I managed to post a clip of Peter Davison, Sophie Aldred, and Colin Baker discussing the first female Doctor as early as it did, particularly with respect to Peter Davison who seems to be getting thrashed for having a past preference for a male Doctor despite expressing full support for Jodie Whittaker now. I kind of knew trouble was coming when, while Colin Baker was enthusiastically putting out tweet after tweet about how great it was to have a female Doctor, Peter Davison's first tweet on the subject was only one about how we should be encouraging to fans who are "uncertain about change." I'm sad to see now that Davison has deleted his Twitter account over the backlash he's faced. Though I think this may have been an overreaction on his part the rancour that has been aimed at him, even though he has more than once expressed his support for Whittaker, is disappointing and I can see how it might make him want to stay away from social media.

At the same time, the reason I do think Davison's initial tweet was a blunder was that it doesn't seem to reflect the nastiness with which people were reacting against Whittaker, posting flagrantly misogynist and sexist comments and commentaries. I have yet to see, apart from Davison himself, anyone expressing an articulation of "uncertainty" about a female Doctor that's truly respectful.

One of the problems I have with the vigorous efforts of so called Social Justice Warriors--I know many who self-describe that way, so I don't know if it's a pejorative anymore--is that there's a tendency in their publications to respond aggressively and dismissively to people for not knowing the definition of a term that's only current in Social Justice circles. For example, I saw an article recently that blasted an article in the New York Times that spoke in favour of cultural appropriation. The response to the article was to say that the author didn't understand that what he considered to be positive instances of cultural appropriation were in fact something called "cultural engagement". So I often see this seemingly unconscious, but aggressive and sometimes belligerent, conflation of an inevitable ignorance of niche or new definitions of terms with racism or sexism. It's no wonder when people are put off by what seems to be obnoxious pedantry.

I want to say this in preface because it seems Peter Davison is exhibiting the kind of misunderstanding that reflects white male privilege. He's not been forced to have the perspective of a woman and he evidently hasn't spent time trying to imagine what that perspective is like. Otherwise, he might be responding more like Colin Baker. Six remains my least favourite Doctor so it's somewhat awkward that I seem to be agreeing with him more in terms of social politics than with Davison--Colin Baker counters Davison's only really articulated argument so far, that it's a shame boys are losing a role model, by saying that there's no reason a woman can't be a role model for boys. Though I wonder if the realities of gender role barriers in English playgrounds support the viability of boys looking up to a woman.

Personally, I find the idea of not wanting the Doctor to be a woman to be difficult to imagine. Not just for statistical or political reasons but simply because I've always liked female protagonists and I like Doctor Who so it follows I should like a female Doctor Who. But since a young age I've been resistant to ideas of behaviour prescribed by gender so there's a whole lifetime of experience in trying to create oneself as a particular gender identity that I don't really have. People who have had that experience might support the idea of a female Doctor on an intellectual level but have to deal with residual feelings from that lifetime of experience.

In my first post about Whittaker, I casually referred to people who didn't like the idea as sexist, Davison's tweet made me wonder if this was the right tact for me to take. I think Davison failed to consider the issue fully but on the other hand I do agree with what I think is at the heart of what he's saying. The Doctor, after all, walked up to the Silurian and extended the hand of friendship. I'm not saying I feel the slightest sympathy with anyone expressing outright hostility to a female Doctor. But I find myself hesitant to express hostility myself when it might push away anyone for whom this upcoming season might be the thing that changes their minds about what--or who--women can be. This is the sense in which I think Davison advocated being "encouraging".

Someone has compiled a nice video of former Doctors reacting to the concept of a female Doctor: