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Andrew O'Day - Terrance Dicks' The Five Doctors |
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Andrew O'Day In Words and Pictures |
Andrew O'Day: Facets of Fandom |
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© Andrew O'Day
Stevens, Alan (undated), ‘An Analysis
of Resurrection of the Daleks’, Erectile Dysfunctionhttp://www.kaldorcity.com/ Stevens, Alan (undated), ‘An Analysis
of Resurrection of the Daleks’, causes of impotence and cureshttp://www.kaldorcity.com/ Dungeons and Doctors: ‘The Five Doctors’ and metafiction of the game Andrew O’Day I’ve been thinking more about Robert
Holmes’ ‘Carnival of Monsters’ (1973) as a metafiction of Doctor
Who’s playful nature,
aptly situated in the programme’s tenth anniversary season, immediately
after the season opener ‘The Three Doctors’ (1972-73), which called
attention to the fact that the Doctor is a ‘role’ which had at that
point been ‘played’ by three different actors: William Hartnell, Patrick
Troughton, and Jon Pertwee. If we fast-forward to Doctor
Who’s twentieth
anniversary in 1983 we find Terrance Dicks’ 90 minute special ‘The Five
Doctors’, adding Tom Baker (partly) and then-Doctor Peter Davison to the
mix, with Richard Hurndall recast as the first Doctor. And it seems to
me that this special is also quite suitably metafictional and
postmodern. It was produced at a time when Doctor
Who had become largely
intratextual and postmodern. Whereas John Nathan-Turner’s producership
had begun with Christopher H. Bidmead as script-editor (1980-81), who
had fought against too many ‘monster of the week’ scenarios, Eric Saward
quickly took over as script-editor and notably pastiched elements of
previous monster narratives in his own written narratives in what
Frederic Jameson (1997) would call a play with historical allusion
(though not always complacently). ‘Earthshock’ (1982), for instance,
takes elements of ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ (1975) (see Stevens and
Moore), as well as having elements of ‘The Tenth Planet’ (1966) (see
Chapman 2006: 147-8) and ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ (1967) such as when
Cybermen are activated and burst out of containers; ‘Resurrection of the
Daleks’ (1984) literally resurrects Davros, referring to events of
‘Destiny of the Daleks’ (1979), as well as featuring the Thames side
warehouse of ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ (1964), with the presence of
slaves revolting at the start of episode one recalling both these
narratives (see Stevens, undated); and ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ (1985)
takes elements from many Cybermen (and non-Cybermen) narratives,
including ‘Earthshock’ at the end of episode one and through the same
incidental music by Malcolm Clarke. Indeed, it would seem that while
ideas of bursting out of tombs and resurrections were a staple of the
gothic genre in which Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes worked in the
mid 1970s, here it is emblematic of the postmodernist approach adopted
by Saward of bringing back the past; so the title ‘Resurrection of the
Daleks’ alludes to this as much as it fits in with the Biblical theme
present in many of the Dalek narrative titles. And Saward brought back
old villains and monsters in the series as a whole (see, for instance,
not only the 20th anniversary
season but also the 1985 22nd season).
The location of the crypt, a place of the dead, where Omega, seeking new
existence, lands in ‘Arc of Infinity’ (1983) and the idea of Sea Devils
awakening from hibernation in ‘Warriors of the Deep’ (1984) are also key
motifs of this postmodernist approach. James Chapman (2006) sees this
period of the programme’s history as made up of a combination of
originality (new writers and directors) and resurrections of the past.
Chapman writes that ‘The recycling of ideas…inevitably affects
long-running drama series’ (2006: 146), and, more recently, in an
article on televisual memory, Amy Holdsworth has noted that ‘memories of
television are written into serial narratives through practices of
self-citation and self-referentiality’ which ‘often occur in anniversary
episodes’ (2010: 141). Chapman reads such an anniversary special ‘The
Five Doctors’, which has a pre-credit sequence of a clip of William
Hartnell as the Doctor, and then, following the title sequence, begins
with a shot of a newly designed TARDIS console, as a narrative looking
to the future yet evoking memory of the past by actually bringing back
characters. This makes it like ‘Mawdryn Undead’ (1983) which revolved
around the notion of memory, and it not only sees the figurative
emergence of Rassilon from his tomb but also the emergence of old
Doctors and companions who, though they do not seek immortality in the
plot, are both brought back from the past, and immortalised as fictional
characters through the media of television. For, as Alec Charles (2007)
suggests, television is characterised by ‘liveness’, and by being of the
moment, and of having an archived quality, and indeed freezes time. However, as Jim Leach (2009) has
argued, Dicks’ ‘The Five Doctors’ is connected to role-playing games
such as Dungeons and
Dragons (1974), where the
Doctors perform according to their roles. While Leach’s discussion is
highly original and intriguing, this article will take his points
further by looking at how ‘The Five Doctors’, as a game, is
metafictional. It draws attention to its construction as a game in a
postmodern sense and raises issues about the construction of the wider
series. As Leach notes, the game motif also gave writer Terrance Dicks a
clear structure on which to hang elements from the programme’s past
(2009: 60). ‘The Five Doctors’ is also postmodern, then, highlighting,
through the game motif, through the fact that this is a fiction, and
through the notion of showing off monsters, the programme as a site of
play. The article will conclude by looking at how the programme has
generated merchandise of toys, miniatures, and role-playing games, and
so sparks off play in those ways. Leach’s aim, somewhat like Kim
Newman’s (2005) before him, is to ‘illuminate the factors involved in
the success of a particular phenomenon’ (in this case Doctor
Who) ‘and more broadly in what makes popular culture popular’ (2009:
2). Leach’s approach is innovative and he has more time for post-1979 Who than
did Newman. In Leach’s introduction he explains ‘I have…chosen to devote
one section to each of the seven Doctors from the original series, with
each section focusing on one key issue, which will be discussed in
relation to the entire series but examined in detail through a close
examination of a single story featuring the Doctor in question…I have
opted for stories that suit the topic at hand’ (2009: 6). While Leach
could have given a very different account of Who by
choosing different narratives, his fifth section focuses on regeneration
with the narrative chosen for analysis being ‘The Five Doctors’. To give a bare-bones summary of
the plot of ‘The Five Doctors’, a mysterious figure (who later is
revealed to be Lord President Borusa) picks up the various Doctors and
companions by a ‘time scoop’ and brings them to the Death Zone on the
Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey, where they must fight old enemies,
such as the Daleks and Cybermen, and solve puzzles, in order to
penetrate the Tower of Rassilon so that Borusa (as it transpires at the
end) can claim the gift of immortality. Leach’s discussion of ‘The Five
Doctors’ is groundbreaking where he argues that writer Terrance Dicks
‘managed to impose structure on it by drawing on the emergent “game
culture” that was itself indebted to Doctor
Who’ (2009: 60). Leach notes that ‘The interaction between game
culture and the series was already apparent in the development of Time
Lord mythology in fourth Doctor stories such as The
Deadly Assassin and The
Invasion of Time’ with ‘the Time Lords as rather pompous and
fallible beings, practicing elaborate ceremonies and jostling for power’
and that ‘the show’s audience certainly included many who were attracted
to the role playing games that had become extremely popular since the
introduction of Dungeons
and Dragons in 1974’
(2009: 60). As Leach rightly points out, ‘The game connection is made
explicit in The Five
Doctors’ (2009: 61). In the DVD Special Edition commentary, Dicks
noted that the motif of a chess game with chess pieces fell into place,
but Leach’s discussion highlights the importance of also seeing a
connection with role-playing games, though there are differences. The motif of the playing board
can be seen as the mysterious figure (later revealed to be Lord
President Borusa) places figures of the Doctor and his companions on a
table-top board of the Death Zone as he removes them from their normal
environments and where the characters find themselves in the Zone. The
scene when the fifth Doctor realises that he is being attacked is an
important one to consider in relation to this notion. The fifth Doctor
tells his companions Tegan and Turlough that he is being whittled away
‘piece by piece’. While he is referring to the fact that the other parts
of his being, his other selves, are being attacked, the phrase ‘piece by
piece’ is an important one since it has a double meaning and fits in
with the game motif of the different pieces being taken out of time and
placed on a ‘playing board’. There are panning shots of this board at a
couple of stages in the narrative. In the commentary to the
televised version of the narrative, actor Nicholas Courtney (the
Brigadier) refers to the beautifully painted figures of the Doctor and
his companions placed on this board as chess pieces, and we can here
think of ‘chess variants’ and ‘themed chess’ like ‘Lord of the Rings chess’.
These pieces may remind one now of Susan Moore’s 1983 resin Doctor
Whofigures (each seen standing on a base like in ‘The Five Doctors’
in Howe and Blumberg 2003: 363-64, and seen in colour in unnamed 1984:
11). Moore was indeed commissioned to produce the play figures for ‘The
Five Doctors’. The painted pieces have an artificial quality and they
appear to be like figures of fictional characters of the type used in
games. Here we can make a comparison between Lord President Borusa
putting these figures on the board and playing a game using ‘real’
Doctors and author Terrance Dicks playing a game using the ‘fictional’
characters of the multiple Doctors and his companions. The narrative is
to an extent then illusion-breaking, as in Patricia Waugh’s (1984) and
Mark Currie’s (1995) discussions of metafiction, while still treating
characters as ‘real’, such as when, for instance, towards the end of the
narrative the fifth Doctor himself looks over these ‘game figures’. But
while critics such as Currie write about surrogate authors and readers
within narratives, they do not point to how a device such as there being
game figures of characters within a narrative can be metafictional. When
toys and game figures related to television programmes are usually
discussed, they are seen as part of a postmodern culture of collecting,
but in ‘The Five Doctors’ are postmodern in the sense that they are
placed within the diegetic world of the narrative and reflect on the
fictional status of the characters. Although these pieces resemble
‘chess variant’ pieces, there were also more metal-likeDungeons and
Dragons miniatures, and
indeed after ‘The Five Doctors’ Doctor
Who miniatures, and it is
best to see these figures as miniatures in a general sense pointing to
the fictional construction of the narrative, and ‘The Five Doctors’
bears some resemblances to role-playing games. Considering the topic of Doctor
Who being a series where
an authorial figure plays with ‘characters’, we may wonder who is
in control of the game in ‘The Five Doctors’? Is it Lord President
Borusa who, although not competing with other ‘players’, puts the
Doctors on a playing board, and manipulates them so that he can get to
Rassilon’s tomb and claim the prize of immortality? Is it Rassilon? Or
is it indeed, as suggested above, writer Terrance Dicks, who is moving
all these characters, who are, on one level, like ‘game figures’, around
as it suits him? Is Lord President Borusa therefore representative of
the real ‘author’? There is the oft-cited narrative of how writer Robert
Holmes was originally approached to write the anniversary special, of
how he set to work on it, but abandoned the project since he found it
too difficult to incorporate the many elements into one adventure (see,
for example, Howe and Walker 1998: 440). Lord President Borusa can
therefore be seen very much as eventual writer Terrance Dicks’ double
who brings all the diverse elements, the different pieces, onto a
game-board (the Death Zone on Gallifrey) through the use of a
time-scoop. This is similar to the Doctors being brought together by the
Time Lords in ‘The Three Doctors’ (Howe and Walker 1998: 442), but there
the idea of the game was not present. As in role-playing games, the
motif of the quest is prevalent in ‘The Five Doctors’ where the
‘real’ author figure Terrance Dicks sends his characters, who on one
level are like ‘game figures’, on a voyage with Lord President Borusa
putting the Doctors in the position where they are able to undertake
this. Therefore, as in role-playing games, there is an end goal. In
role-playing games, the quest is often to find a particular item of
treasure and here Lord President Borusa, as outlined by Dicks, seeks
immortality, promised by Rassilon. While Dicks reveals in the DVD
commentary to the Special Edition that the idea of the Dark Tower came
from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’
(1855), in which Roland seeks the Tower and must face various hardships
along the way, but where what he finds at the Tower is never revealed,
the notion of the quest in ‘The Five Doctors’ can still profitably be
compared to role-playing games since the overall motif is of a
playing-board. In ‘The Five Doctors’, ‘real’ author Terrance Dicks
navigates the Doctors past obstacles such as monsters from the past. Dicks brings the Doctors past
obstacles on this quest based on the characterization of the various
Doctors and their abilities. In role-playing games, participants
determine the actions of their characters based on their
characterization and their particular abilities. Characters, for
instance, have ‘attributes’ (abilities common to all characters) and
‘skills’ (abilities specific to certain characters), which are known as
‘statistics’. These are often ranked on a numerical scale, and a dice is
rolled to determine whether characters actions are successful (Mackay
2001: 7). It has, however, become more common for rulebooks to encourage
gamemasters and players to exercise interpretive control during the game
sessions (Mackay 2001: 7-8). This raises the issue of roles.
Does the device of regeneration, of having different actors playing
their original part as the Doctor, underline that these are all quite
literally roles? All drama, whether for the theatre or for film or
television, involves actors cast in a part and performing these parts
based on having learnt lines in a script, but the bringing together of
different actors to have played the character of the Doctor at different
times in the programme’s history underlines this. Furthermore, Leach
notes, in keeping with above, that ‘As pawns in an unknown game, the
Doctors perform in accordance with their different personas, underlining
the way in which the device of regeneration’ is like ‘the shifting
pleasures of role-playing within game culture’ (2009: 61). Indeed, as
Leach further notes, ‘Each Doctor approaches the tower [of Rassilon] in
an appropriate fashion: the forthright first Doctor goes through the
front door, the more devious second Doctor uses an underground passage,
while the athletic third Doctor uses a rope to reach the top’ (2009:
61). The mannerisms of the Doctors are also accurate: the first Doctor
continually calls Tegan ‘child’, and addresses the fifth Doctor as ‘my
boy’; and the third Doctor uses the phrase ‘I’ve reversed the polarity
of the neutron flow’ from ‘The Sea Devils’ (1972) (Pixley 2002: 30) and
addresses the Brigadier as ‘Lethbridge-Stewart’ and the fifth Doctor as
‘dear chap’. ‘The Five Doctors’, then, is intratextual, referring back
to the roles of the different Doctors established in previous eras of
the programme, just as indeed do the ‘roles’ of the companions (Susan
typically twists her ankle in a helpless female role as in ‘The Dalek
Invasion of Earth’ episode one). Interestingly enough, the
presence of the Master also highlights the notion of roles strongly. The
Master, dressed in black, fits the role of the stereotypical villain in
the Doctor Whouniverse,
in every sense, and is an evil renegade from Time Lord society. However,
in ‘The Five Doctors’, the Master is sent for by the
Time Lords to go to the Death Zone to ‘rescue the Doctor’. Therefore,
his role is reversed, so much so that even he is astonished when he
learns what the Time Lords wish him to do. The Master’s constructed role
is so established that the third Doctor recognises this man dressed in
black even though his facial appearance is different (Roger Delgado’s
Master of the early 1970s has been replaced by Anthony Ainley’s) and
both the third and fifth Doctors refuse to believe that the Master has
come to help. As the fifth Doctor puts it, ‘Like Alice, I try to believe
five impossible things before breakfast’. However, although the Master
is not put on the playing board in his usual role as stereotypical
villain, even he ultimately reverts to form. This notion of roles ties in
with role-playing games, to an extent, since, as Daniel Mackay (2001: 6)
notes, role playing games are a performance art, sometimes played on a
tabletop where only the spoken component is acted, and sometimes
live-action where players perform their characters physical actions and
interact with one another in character, with either minimal or elaborate
production values. Mackay writes: …in the role-playing game the rules
are but a framework that facilitates the performance of the
players…Rules and game mechanics may make the arbitration of a session
either satisfyingly graceful or frustratingly confusing, but it is the
performance of the session that brings the game to life (2001: 2) As Mackay makes clear,
‘players’ pretend to be the characters they have chosen. However, rather
than seeing role-playing games as like scripted theatre plays with a
‘tight, verbal narrative’, it is best to see them as like types of
improvisational theatre made up as the players go along and communal
(Mackay 2001: 49). Although in ‘The Five Doctors’ Borusa as ‘player’
does not act out the roles of the Doctor himself, since the Doctors are
treated as ‘real’ in the context of the narrative, it is tempting to see
Terrance Dicks as ‘player’ (though not competing with others) giving the
fictional character of the Doctors, companions, and ultimately the
Master, words and actions in keeping with their roles. But while the
Doctor will, as he puts it to Sarah Jane, do what he always does,
‘improvise’, a carefully shaped script, in television as in theatre, has
been written. The idea raised here of
‘roles’ is often to be found in discussions of, what has become known
as, ‘metatheatre’ or ‘metadrama’ (for the first use of the term
‘metatheatre’ see Abel 1963). As Mark Ringer has noted, initially
metadramatic criticism was linked with Shakespeare and other Elizabethan
dramatists and with twentieth-century drama (1998: 11), and the term
‘”Metatheater” or “Metadrama” means drama within drama as well as drama
about drama’ (1998: 7). While Anne Righter (1962) and James Calderwood
set the tone for the metatheatrical approach to Shakespeare, looking,
for example, at his use of theatrical metaphors and the way in which
theatrical self-consciousness blurred the distinction between play and
reality (see Ringer 1998: 12-13), it is Richard Hornby’s (1986)
classification of six types of metatheatre that is most useful here. For
Hornby, metatheatre where ‘the subject of a play turns out to be, in
some sense, drama itself’ (Ringer 1998: 13) involves not only direct
self-reference and literary and real-life reference but also drama that
makes perception its theme (here we may think ofDoctor Who narratives
such as ‘Carnival of Monsters’ and ‘Castrovalva’ (1982) as television
equivalents), the play-within-the-play, ceremonies within the play, and
crucially role-playing-within-the-role.
Ringer explains that such ‘role-playing-within-the role’ is where ‘a
character becomes an “internal actor”, a doubly theatrical figure
enacting a deceptive role as part of the “actual” role’ (1998: 8). For
Ringer ‘Characters who play roles within their roles can be interpreted
as commenting upon the phenomenon of all role
playing within the theater’, just as the play-within-the-play device,
seen in Shakespearean drama like Hamlet and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, comprises ‘playwright/directors-within- Moreover, towards the end of
‘The Five Doctors’, Lord President Borusa in his games room, dressed in
a black robe with a coronet on his head, seems like a dark role-player.
When Borusa arrives with the fifth Doctor in the Tomb of Rassilon, there
is again the idea of Borusa as ‘player’, and Dicks’ surrogate, and the
Doctors and their companions as figures in this game. Borusa orders the
companions not to speak or move and they become frozen-like. As Dicks
reveals in the DVD Special Edition commentary, this was a convenient way
of not having to write dialogue for all the companions at this point,
but it also fits in with the game motif. But at the same time as becoming
identified with Lord President Borusa, does real author Terrance Dicks
not become identified with Rassilon at the end of the narrative who has
set up this challenge as a type of ‘gamemaster’? Earlier Patrick
Troughton’s Second Doctor states ‘Oh dear. We could be playing the game
of Rassilon at this very moment’. And later the voice of Rassilon is
heard in the Dark Tower stating ‘This is the game of Rassilon’. When
Rassilon appears, his presence is indicated simply by a face and voice,
but over his face, partly set against a black background, red, green,
and blue lights shine. This has the effect both of making Rassilon
appear ghostly (see Pixley 2002: 30) and like a supernatural being.
Although we do not know this at first, it is Rassilon who has set up the
scenario where one must overcome obstacles and penetrate the Tomb in
order to claim immortality. There is a twist on the ending to
role-playing games since in this case, we see that ‘to lose is to win
and he who wins shall lose’ since immortality turns out not to be a
blessing but a curse, and, after the First Doctor deciphers the meaning
of this proverb and tells Rassilon that Lord President Borusa should be
given the immortality he seeks, Borusa’s face is incorporated into a
frieze around Rassilon’s tomb. Therefore, as in all Doctor
Who narratives, the
‘real’ author becomes identified with the side of good and with the
Doctor. For in considering the
connections between ‘The Five Doctors’ and role-playing games, one might
note, for instance, that, in Dungeons
and Dragons, the Dragon Master, or, in other role playing games, the
Gamemaster often determines the overall original ‘story’ of the game,
though in some cases the gamemaster may use an already published script
which comes with maps and history. The gamesmaster typically describes a
vivid setting and acts as arbiter in addition to voicing the non-player
roles (Mackay 2001: 6). Mackay (2001: 5-6) cites Edward S. Bolme’s
description of the gamemaster as follows: The gamemaster’s job is akin to that
of a director. The gamemaster takes care of the scenes, coordinates
the movements of the villains and extras, and manages the plot line of
the story…The players are entirely dependent on the gamemaster for
their knowledge of their situation. It’s the gamemaster’s job to
provide them with the data they need to build a picture of where their
characters are. Mackay states that ‘The characters
live within a fictional world that the gamemaster creates’ (2001: 5) and
sums up: ‘The gamemaster is akin to a play’s director, a novel’s
author…a legend’s storyteller…a sporting event’s referee’ (2001: 6).
Certainly in ‘The Five Doctors’, Terrance Dicks, through Rassilon,
provides Borusa as ‘player’ with his plotline, and his reason for moving
the character of the Doctors into the Death Zone. For Doctor
Who is similarly a
fictional narrative form where an author carefully structures his
material. And, if Terrance Dicks, as gamesmaster, is following any rule
book, it is the rule book of the overall series Doctor
Who which determines what
is possible. The connection between ‘The Five
Doctors’ and role-playing games is also important at the level of genre. Dungeons
and Dragons involved what
we would traditionally think of as fantasy adventures. Mackay traces the
history of role-playing games as originating from nineteenth-century
war gaming, which led in the late 1960s to Dave Wesely being interested
in multi-player games and one of his players Dave Arneson being
interested in medieval wargaming where players controlled individual
characters rather than armies, ‘Set in a world of knights, cavaliers,
castles, and feuding kings’ (2001: 13-14). A fantastic element was added
to this medieval setting, influenced by J.R.R. Tolkein’s trilogy The
Lord of the Rings (1954)
(Mackay 2001: 14-15). In the 1980s the role-playing community was drawn
from war gamers and science fiction/fantasy fans, which had their own
subculture of conventions (Mackay 2001: 16). Indeed, role-playing games
had contributed to films like Star
Wars (1977) and the
fantasy films that emerged in the early 1980s (Mackay 2001: 21-22). In
his original 1960s outline for what became Doctor
Who, C.E. Webber states that the danger with Doctor
Who is in ‘science
fiction or fairy tale labelling’ since the programme could be both (Gillatt
1998: 12). In ‘The Five Doctors’, the Doctors and their companions are
brought to the Death Zone on Gallifrey by a time-scoop (an element of
science fiction), and must face science fiction monsters. However, the
quest to the Dark Tower, the prize of immortality, the presence of a
mythological super-being from the dark times (Rassilon), and symbols
such as the Coronet of Rassilon, and the Ring of Rassilon, which one
puts on to gain immortality, are elements associated with what we would
traditionally call fantasy. Although most Doctor
Who narratives do not
make the idea of a game explicit, this reading of ‘The Five Doctors’
illuminates some of the notions that make the programme work, meaning
that the metafiction reflects on the overall series. In all Doctor
Who narratives, writers
play with fictional characters. Doctor
Who is a series of
serials which concerns the alien Doctor travelling in his time and space
machine, the TARDIS (an acronym for Time And Relative Dimension In
Space) and therefore the rules of narratives see him brought by a ‘real’
authorial figure into a time and space with each new serial. This was
slightly complicated during a lot of the Jon Pertwee era of the early
1970s where the Doctor was exiled to Earth by the Time Lords, only being
sent by them to different planets occasionally, against his will, to
‘fix’ situations. But present day Earth was still a time and space
utilised by writers. Therefore, Lord President Borusa’s bringing the
Doctors into a time and space (the Death Zone on Gallifrey) reflects on
this aspect of the programme. So Dicks is doing what the ‘real’ authors
of many Doctor Who narratives
do, moving fictional characters into new environments. Moreover, writers
in the programme generally determine the actions of the Doctors based on
the characterization of the various Doctors and their abilities, so
treat this as a role, as indeed they do with companions and the Master.
Furthermore, the motif of the quest was present in other Doctor
Who serials, most
explicitly in the 1978 ‘Key to Time’ season, produced by Graham
Williams. Composed of six narratives, the super-being, the White
Guardian, sent the Doctor on a quest for the six pieces of the Key to
Time, which would restore balance to the universe, with each piece being
found in each of the six narratives. The Doctor therefore had an end
goal but had to overcome obstacles. An intratextual example of an
‘obstacle’ that the Doctor must overcome in ‘The Five Doctors’ is indeed
when the First Doctor finds that the chess board located at the entrance
to the Tomb of Rassilon is a death-trap by throwing coins onto the
different squares and where the Cybermen are subsequently electrocuted.
This echoes the third Doctor’s quest through the City of the Exxilons in
‘Death to the Daleks’ (1974) where the Daleks are similarly destroyed (Pixley
2002: 30). But the idea that is most evident through the game motif in
‘The Five Doctors’ is exactly that: that whether a role-playing game or
a game in a more general sense, Doctor
Who is largely a
programme of play. The game motif in ‘The Five
Doctors’ was most important in giving writer Terrance Dicks a structure
for introducing the Doctors and their companions and a selection of old
monsters. This also had to be a structure which would enable him to pair
different Doctors and companions as some actors and actresses proved
unavailable or dropped out (Howe and Walker 1998: 442). So ‘The Five
Doctors’ shows all these elements from the past interacting, with there
being many intratextual references, while telling a mystery narrative of
who controls the game. These elements from the past, as we have seen,
can be thought of as fictional elements, since there are figures of
fictional characters of the type found in games placed on the playing
board. Not only that but, although dead, the fact that ‘The Five
Doctors’ opens with a pre-credit sequence of William Hartnell from ‘The
Dalek Invasion of Earth’ has the effect of being on show. Likewise, when
fourth Doctor Tom Baker declined to appear in the special, the use of
clips showing his Doctor and Romana from the untransmitted narrative
‘Shada’ (1979) has this effect. On top of that, although K9 serves no
plot function, his appearance with Sarah Jane near the start of the
narrative has this effect. And the presence of Caroline John (Liz Shaw),
Richard Franklin (Mike Yates), Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Wendy Padbury (Zoe)
in cameos is important for the same reasons. Rather than being ghosts,
these companions are phantoms, illusions of the mind, but, like ghosts,
they are echoes of the past. The monsters in ‘The Five
Doctors’ are also on display, here mainly without any deep motivation,
much as was the dinosaur which rose from the sea in ‘Carnival of
Monsters’, showing the importance of the monster as a figure of play.
The first monster that is encountered is a Dalek which pursues the first
Doctor and Susan through a corridor, much like the metallic city in the
first Dalek narrative ‘The Daleks’ (1964). Not only do we see distorted
reflections of the Doctor and Susan on the walls, but we also see
shadows of the Dalek on another wall, much like in ‘Genesis of the
Daleks’ (1975). Moreover, when the Dalek destroys itself by firing its
energy weapon at the wall causing the beam to bounce back, the inside of
the Dalek is partially revealed. The Dalek is on visual display
throughout and has no motivation but to exterminate the Doctor and
Susan. What we are therefore provided with is a stereotypical Doctor
Who ‘corridor scene’,
accompanied by lively music, without any of the plot of regular Who narratives.
We are not even given any bearings as to where this ‘corridor’ is in
relation to the rest of the landscape of the Death Zone; it is just
present as a set-piece from which one can see the Dark Tower. Indeed, as
the DVD Production Notes reveal, originally the Autons from ‘Spearhead
from Space’ (1970) and ‘Terror of the Autons’ (1971) were also to have
appeared attacking Sarah Jane before her being rescued by the third
Doctor, an idea dropped for budgetary reasons, but that would have
raised the question of what shop windows had been doing in the Death
Zone and have been another set piece just to show-off a monster. In the
final televised version, troops of Cybermen also feature heavily and
once again are on display, as they are, for instance, massacred one by
one by a Raston Warrior Robot, who, for example, graphically disembodies
one of their heads, with accompanying music, and are later slaughtered
by laser beams as they traverse a chess board. Furthermore, we are told
that the Yeti which menaces the second Doctor and the Brigadier ‘must
have been left over from the games’. Certainly, there is no suggestion
that it is being controlled by the Great Intelligence of the Patrick
Troughton narratives ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ (1967) and ‘The Web of
Fear’ (1968), so it could just as well have been any wild animal. But
the second Doctor’s cry ‘It’s a Yeti!’ creates nostalgia in the
television viewer. While ‘The Five Doctors’ largely puts monsters on
display without their having the scheme found in many of the programme’s
narratives, it still reflects in a postmodern sense upon the play
associated with them in other narratives. The programme has also generated
toys (often of monsters), miniatures, and role-playing games showing how
it leads to
play. Jonathan Bignell (2007), for example, has already discussed the
way in which children, who used to play at being Daleks, played with
Dalek toys which were released as part of ‘Dalek-mania’ (an extensive
list of these toys from the 1960s to the early 2000s is provided by Howe
and Blumberg 2003: 474-96). Following John Panton (2006) and Lincoln
Geraghty (2006) who discuss the social meanings of playing with Star
Wars merchandise, Bignell
(2007) has commented on the social meanings of children playing with
Daleks. Bignell, for example, notes that children may identify with the
Daleks’ ‘otherness’ while desiring the Doctor’s rationality and control,
and also that possessing a toy Dalek may tame the bleak outlook of
television narratives. What is important here are the connections
between play in television such as Doctor
Who and play around the
programme by children. The connection between television fictions and
children’s games has, for instance, been drawn out by Stephen Kline who
(quoted in Panton 2006: 199) writes: The linguistic and cognitive skills
involved in constructing narrative in play are precisely those that
children need to understand television and to transfer its tales to
their play. In one sense, there is evidence of a potential new
complexity in play: the child is the playwright devising a script, a
director staging the dramatic event, and the actor making appropriate
voices, gestures and noises – all at the same time (1993: 339) We have seen how the pieces in
‘The Five Doctors’ are like chess variant pieces and indeed a Doctor
Who Chess Set was
released in 1992 (Howe and Blumberg 2003: 274-75). But, as was also the
case with Star Trek,
the Doctor Who programme
triggered off its own role-playing game (The Doctor Who Role Playing
Game, 1985) (Howe and Blumberg 2003: 294). Published by FASA in
three editions, the game saw the player take on roles, either like the
Doctor and his companions or as agents of the Celestial Intervention
Agency, to prevent the threats posed by variousDoctor Who enemies.
Contained within the different versions of the game box were supplements
for the game which provided details about the Daleks (The Daleks and
The Dalek Problem), the Cybermen (The Cybermen and Cyber Files:
CIA Special Report) and the Master (The Master and The
Master: CIA File Extracts), as well separately published adventures
(The Iytean Menace, The Lords of Destiny, Countdown, The Hartlewick
Horror, The Legions of Death, City of Gold, The Warrior’s Code)
(Howe and Blumberg 2003: 295-97). There was additionally a set of three
rule books and a pamphlet for players and one for game masters (Howe and
Blumberg 2003: 294). In the mid-1980s Citadel
Miniatures, a subsidiary of Games Workshop, created a series of
miniatures, co-branded with FASA, to be sold in conjunction with this Doctor
Who Role Playing Game (can
be seen in Howe and Blumberg 2003: 326). The Citadel range and the FASA
range included a set of miniatures of the first five Doctors, of
companions, including the Brigadier, Sarah Jane and Turlough, and
enemies such as the Master, as well as Daleks and Cybermen, Ice Warriors
and Sea Devils, and figures such as Time Lords and UNIT troopers (Howe
and Blumberg 2003: 326-30). Harlequin Miniatures released
the table-top game Invasion
Earth in the late 1990s
where the player would lead Daleks, Cybermen, humans, Doctors and
companions into battle (www.doctorwhoinvasionearth. The Doctor Who Miniatures
Game, meanwhile, is an unofficial non-profit making game, played on
a tabletop, contains a rule-book, scenarios ranging from the frozen
Antarctic to the far future Earth, and stats for different models that
one plays with (http://www.drwhominiatures. This article, then, has drawn
out the similarities between ‘The Five Doctors’ and games, including
role-playing ones, where the metafictional aspect of the narrative is
highlighted where Dicks moves his characters around on an
obstacle-filled quest, and where Doctors, for instance, perform in
accordance with their roles. Like other metafictional Doctor
Who narratives such as
‘Carnival of Monsters’, ‘The Five Doctors’ mixes the fictional and the
real. The notion of a game highlights the programme’s fictional nature.
Indeed, the image of the miniatures of Doctor
Whocharacters on Borusa’s ‘playing board’ bears similarities with
the image of the miniature TARDIS, taken from the mini-Scope, at the
beginning of the second episode of ‘Carnival of Monsters’. Both draw
attention to the programme’s fictional status. But in keeping with the
programme’s rules, just as in ‘Carnival of Monsters’ characters such as
the Doctor and his companion were treated as ‘real’ within the
narrative, in ‘The Five Doctors’ too, the Doctors and companions, though
put in position by Borusa, are treated as ‘real’ figures with free-will
who are aware that they are being manipulated in a game and who uncover
the truth. ‘The Five Doctors’ is postmodern and we can see various ideas
which work across the series as a whole. But most importantly through
the game motif, we see reflection on the nature of play in the programme
as a whole, where in another postmodern sense the Doctors and companions
(presented on one level as ‘game figures’) and monsters, are put on
show. Also the programme leads to play as seen by the Doctor
Who role-playing games
and toys. Were we to take this notion further and bring it up-to-date,
we could consider the downloadable interactive games associated with the
new BBC Wales series of Doctor
Who. But one thing is certain: in reflecting on the playful nature
of the programme, ’The Five Doctors’, like ‘Carnival of Monsters’,
illustrates John Corner’s (1999), Graeme Burton’s (2000), Bernadette
Casey et al’s (2002),
and Bignell’s (2003) assertions that television is largely a source of
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Text © Andrew O'Day and used with his kind permission. This page was compiled by Tim Harris.
This page was first published to the internet Sunday 21st November 2010.
