We All Fall Down

It’s been a few years, and I imagine that this episode has rightly faded from memory for most people — and yet its writer, Toby Whithouse, is still regularly held in a mystifying high regard by Doctor Who fans, to the extent that many were disappointed he wasn’t picked for the new showrunner over Chris Chibnall.

To the best I can figure, this acclaim is based on two crutches: that he happened to write the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the show (along with K-9), and that since then he hasn’t done anything to dramatically upset the ship. At least, not until his series 10 episode, which I suppose stands most clearly in contrast with the two identical yet decreasingly interesting episodes that preceded it.

It’s in this light that I think back to “A Town Called Mercy,” one of my votes for worst-ever New Who episodes, yes. Only a couple of other clear contenders for the prize, and none has gone as far to disrupt my faith in the show and its creative rudder.

To quote another commentator, homunculette:

It’s like Toby Whithouse decided to write a Western without attempting to do any research into what Westerns are like or any historical research into the time period and instead just wrote it from his memories of seeing like one Clint Eastwood movie as a kid. It’s mind-numbingly boring, morally trite, and tosses off a casually transphobic joke for no reason.

This honestly describes so many scripts of the era (e.g., “Curse of the Black Spot”). But “Mercy” is just particularly vacuous, even for Whithouse and even for seasons 6-7. It doesn’t even begin to make an argument for its existence, beyond showing off a different location. One of the fun things about a tired form is that it’s ripe for deconstruction, or salvaging. Sergio Leone did this to astounding success, and there’s no reason a show like Doctor Who couldn’t find something to interrogate about the Wild West.

It’s done it before, of course. However one may feel about The Gunfighters, it’s a genuinely funny and unapologetically weird comedy that makes a point of playing off and against genre tropes, as with the Doctor getting increasingly exasperated that people keep putting guns in his hand. Even if the finished serial is an acquired taste (one I have acquired), it’s written with wit and observation, neither of which is in evidence with Whithouse’s work.

That lack of wit or observation — and lack of concern about that lack, which might spur curiosity and research — is to me one of Whithouse’s defining qualities. He very much reads to me as the kind of guy who takes a course in a subject, successfully follows a practice blueprint that was laid out for him, and decides he’s now got it down to a science. Every script of his, it’s like he’s playing Mad Libs with an entry level screenwriting textbook; just lifting stock conflicts and conversations and scenarios whole-cloth, and rearranging them according to the instructions. It’s the definition of mediocrity. And fandom being what it is, of course, for that he gets credit. Good job, Toby. You didn’t color outside of the lines. Solid work. What more could we reasonably ask?

Compared to some of the other modern-era mediocrity, which tends to exist in balance with some extenuating virtue, I find Whithouse’s total white-bread adequacy pernicious in regard to its stifling, blunting factor on the series. I nearly gave up on the fucking show, a show I’d obsessed over since 1999, after his cowboy episode. Others I know did give up on it halfway through his series 9 two-parter, and nothing can draw them back again.

Matthew Graham is a prime counter example. Everyone hates his first episode, and you’ll find few vocal defenders of his later two-parter. People will wonder why his Who work was so bad, compared to Life on Mars. But, seriously, take a look at how he writes. All his writing follows the same patterns, as does all of Whithouse’s, and your answers to his successes and failures are right there. Graham is also a deeply mediocre writer, who like Whithouse got lucky with a breakout genre mash-up sci-fi show. But Life on Mars is different from Being Human, and more substantial for its problems, in the same way his Doctor Who material is.

Graham is superb at coming up with pitches: visionary concepts, that he’ll flesh out with well-drawn characters, sparkling dialogue, and some astute thoughts about how and why they do what they do. This comes through in the main draw to Life on Mars — the scenario, the people who inhabit it, and how they interact — and in Rose and the Doctor’s dialogue in “Fear Her,” and all of the psychology of the Flesh duplicates. But then, once he’s sketched that basic picture, Graham has no fucking clue what to do next; where to go from there. So Life on Mars just ambles on, following no clear plan, reiterating its premise a couple times an episode for two years, until in a panic, when Simm’s had enough, Graham just picks one explanation and calls it done. Similarly, Rose and the Doctor arrive to investigate, then just mill around a suburb for 20 minutes, facing scribble monsters and other directionless first-draft material, and squandering what good will their best characterization all season may otherwise have earned.

Peter Harness is superb with coloring outside Whithouse’s carefully manicured lines, with bold, confident strokes that trace new and inspiring forms to expand the imagination and the boundaries of what the show can and should be… and then squanders much of that with a stultifying ignorance about the topics he so loves to explore. It’s exciting to see the show tackle the issues that he bring up, and then frustrating to see such a dangerously uninformed take on such prickly topics, be they science, politics, ethics. Less confidence and more research, even a modicum of research, would do Harness a wonder.

The thing about each of these cases is that the mediocrity is an end sum; a result of a real strength that benefits the show and an undisciplined tedium that nearly pulls it back to zero. In the process, though, there is dynamism. They do things with the show, that help to redefine it and internally that help to justify the effort even it it does level out in the end. Any next script might be the one where they learn to mop up their fog and their strong points will shine out clearly.

By contrast, Whithouse studiously avoids shining, in favor of an even, calculated mediocrity from start to end. This is true of his own show (compare “what if modern-day UK cop landed in corrupt 1970s department?” to “What if three monsters fashionable in other pop culture at the moment lived in apartment together?” in terms of the thought and thematic potential involved), and it’s true of his tediously recycled Lego kit Who scripts. The best you can reasonably say of the guy is that he effectively maintains the status quo and avoids making waves. And to my mind that’s also one of the most damning, and an imminent threat to a show as dynamic and reliant on vibrant change as Doctor Who.

“A Town Called Mercy” is the barest and most damning example of what he doesn’t have to say as a writer. Its only grace I can see is a ready case study for how to kill the show, or avoid doing so, to assign to future writers.

The casual transphobia is just the perfect garnish to its existential blight on the show at one of its more creatively vulnerable moments.

(On the topics of pernicious mediocrity, dangerous ignorance, and casual bigotry, I also have things to saw about Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts. But, not here; not now.)

Bad-ass title sequence aside, the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era is the period that nearly broke Doctor Who. Same as the Lennie Briscoe era of Law & Order. It’s where the show found its successful formula, settled in, and learned to coast. This is Doctor Who at its most dangerously comfortable. (Note how many people perceive this era as “correct” Doctor Who, and extrapolate or compare its tendencies to the show as a whole.) It’s not until circa 1987 that the show started to get systemically weird again, in a way that let the show continue to grow and breathe and live (Much like seasons 18-20 of Law & Order!), and led into its modern-day incarnation. (Unlike Law & Order!)

It’s not that the era is awful; it doesn’t do much for me, but there are some nice parts (Deadly Assassin, say). If I’m hard on it, it’s less about the era in itself than about the negative influence it had on the show going forward. Like, if after Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the show had gone in a wildly different direction again, then fine. Things change; they move on. We try things, then we try something else.

But this is where the show achieved a sort of stasis, both in terms of its future creative momentum and its public perception. It’s not even the most interesting stasis they could have picked for the show. Yes, let’s rip off a popular horror movie and put the TARDIS in the middle. Inspiration incarnate. What galls me is how quickly this became What Doctor Who Is, and anything that varied from the formula was wrong. It’s so daft that even the serials within the Hinch/Holmes era that don’t match the template (e.g., Android Invasion) are considered awful, no matter what neat ideas they may bring to the table. They’re different, so they’re wrong.

Which, for a show like Doctor Who, which more than any TV program I can think of, embodies and glorifies change, is very nearly a profane mode of thought.

Again, it’s not like the Hinch/Holmes vision is invalid. It’s as worth exploring as anything, and resulted in a few epiphanies (Deadly Assassin, again). But then it had to keep moving, and it didn’t. It started into a downward spiral of trying to maintain or replicate or work against these few months of production. All of Doctor Who became a precursor to or an attempt to return to this supposed glory period, when the show had become so very small and isolated. It nearly destroyed everything.

There are other weird things that crystallized here as The Way Things Are Meant To Be, even though they never really were before. Like, the way old-school fans today muse and scoff about the notion of story arcs and long-form storytelling. Doctor Who stories are all supposed to be self-contained! That way you can watch them in any order and nothing matters! But… until season 13, that was never the case. In the 1960s, serials all ran into each other; characters often harked back to events from weeks earlier, even if it was a different story entirely. The Hartnell era is full of rather complex character development. The Pertwee era makes far less sense out-of-sequence, as stories are constantly referring to what happened before, and B-plots develop over the course of multiple seasons. (See the Mike Yates thread in the last couple of seasons.) The Doctor’s situation, and its relation to the Master’s situation, are in a state of continual development. It’s all vibrant, alive. Then after Barry Letts moved on from his supervisory role in season 12, the show just became a movie-of-the-week thing, with little to no context. And, Bidmead and Cartmel aside, this largely became the status quo for the remainder of the original run.

Then there’s the cast makeup. Pertwee had changed the dynamic by turning the Doctor into an individual action hero — the star of the show, rather than the anchor of an ensemble cast — but he still was surrounded by an expanded regular or semi-regular cast, to flesh out storytelling as needed. This is I think an element that allowed the Pertwee era to be so much more sophisticated, on a narrative level, than what had come before: it had more roles to employ, in a greater number of capacities — and you didn’t necessarily have to use them all, every week. It’s even more of an ensemble than it was before. Hinchcliffe and Holmes strip that right away, especially after the Letts legacy of season 12, and again basically boil the show down to the bare necessities and divorce it of any greater context or narrative potential or significance. One Doctor, who now is very clearly the show’s hero rather than a catalyst for the main character(s), and one lady who’s largely there to make the Doctor look smart and give him someone to talk to.

To my view, this is just as damaging a systemic collapse as the absolution of continuity. We’re going down a path to an unsupportable level of stasis, which will lead to the exact kind of irrelevance that plagued the show throughout the 1980s. Granted, someone of greater creative talent could still elevate the show, as happened in seasons 18 and 24-26, then again from 2005. But if you will, the entropy had now set in. Everything else would be a struggle, and the show’s end was ordained. What had to happen in 2005, for the show to work again, was to strip away most of the damage done during seasons 13-14, and return it to a model more closely aligned to the last time the show worked under its own steam — namely the Pertwee era. Which Davies has made a point of declaring, over and over, what he was doing. Making a new Pertwee era. Ergo his quoting the start of Spearhead at the start of each new series.

The Pertwee era was, more often than not, about something larger than itself. It used Doctor Who as a platform for social, political commentary. Explorations of colonialism, capitalism, indigenous rights, apartheid, consumerism, the military industrial complex, environmentalism, early feminism, isolationism. Dicks and Letts go on the record that they felt there was no point in telling a story unless it was about something. And then there’s the Malcolm Hulke influence.

By comparison, the Hinch/Holmes goal was to “scare the little fuckers,” as phrased on one of the DVD extras. And it largely approached this narrow goal through borrowed glory, hollowing out existing horror stories and putting the TARDIS in the resulting cavity.

This is not as sustainable a mission. It’s a smaller view. It’s an easier view. It’s a safe template because it means you can just plug things in without having to worry about any greater significance.

This is the era when Doctor Who began its descent into irrelevance because of its conscious self-isolation from structural and thematic elements that would allow it to meaningfully grow or adapt.

This is where the cult of No Meaning finds its roots.

No continuity in MY Doctor Who!

No character development in Doctor Who.

No cultural commentary.

No political commentary.

The Doctor must be the sole hero.

The sole assistant must keep to her place.

The show must not challenge my preconceptions or make me think about anything other than plot.

Doxtor Who is entertainment only. It must not try to engage me in a discussion. It must hew to my specific desire.

This is poisonous.

From here, development becomes a simple question of how “light” or “dark” the show can afford to be, which leads to decisions like putting Eric Saward in control for half the 1980s.

Though you lose a few nice trinkets here and there (The Deadly Assassin, season 18, Douglas Adams), the show would be so much better off to just regenerate Pertwee into McCoy. I honestly don’t think you lose much, and you retain the momentum built up through the first 11 years, that the following 12 so thoroughly squandered.