Tag The Missing Episodes

Bonus chapter #9. Doctor Who – Mission to Magnus (1990)

Jim Sangster 3 Comments

Synopsis: The TARDIS is drawn off course and when the culprit is revealed to be a terrifying figure from the Doctor’s past, the Time Lord suddenly starts to act like a frightened child – much to Peri’s surprise. The setting for this unwelcome reunion is the planet Magnus, which is ruled by a female elite. Soon, the Doctor’s woes are increased as Magnus becomes the target for a plot hatched by more of his enemies – the repellant Sil and the Ice Warriors!

Chapter Titles

Numbered One to Fifteen.

Background: Philip Martin writes an original novel based on scripts intended for the original season 23 before it was cancelled.

Notes: Anzor is a Time Lord, the son of a former ‘council leader’ and a notorious bully while at the Academy. His TARDIS is a Gallifreyan Council ship, which has an ’emergency compulsion facility’ that allows it to swap places in time and space with another TARDIS. He has a weapon he calls a ‘galvanizer’, which is a ‘short blue rod with a glowing orange tip’. He is said to resemble a ‘cadaverous yellow skull’:

… the screen cleared to reveal the image of a gloomy looking face with a long nose, the eyes of an angry ferret and wearing a top hat whose brim was encircled with a purple band of cloth once much favoured by Victorian undertakers. The yellow hued skin wrinkled, as thin lips spread into a sneering grimace. 

The Doctor tells Peri about a pupil at school called Cheevah, who Anzor sealed in a block of crystal and then dropped from a great height into the school yard. When Anzor’s TARDIS lands on the planet Magnus Epsilon, it takes the form of a gnarled tree. The Doctor claims that Anzor is ‘the worst navigator imaginable’ and reminds him that allowing Rana and her attendants inside a TARDIS is ‘forbidden’ [is this ban specific to Council ships, to parties who are under investigation or to any non-Time Lord?]. The Doctor has ‘steel blue eyes’.

Sil once again bathes in swamp water. He has fallen out of favour with Lord Kiv and was demoted after his failure on Varos, so he hopes to secure a significant fortune before he returns to Thoros Beta. He claims to have met Anzor before and is aware that TARDISes are notoriously difficult to enter unauthorised. The Doctor refuses to help the Sisterhood acquire time travel to prevent a perceived threat from their neighbours on Salvak. When they break into his mind, they try to persuade him to break ‘the one rule of Gallifrey you have always obeyed’. He tells Rana that all of Sil’s past associates have ‘ended up dead’, which might suggest he’s met Sil again lots of times, or has researched him – or is just using insults to further undermine him. 

On his expedition with Peri and Vion, the Doctor recognises the flagship of the Ice Warrior Grand Marshal – just a little too late for the information to be of any use to them. He’d assumed the Ice Warriors were extinct [presumably by this time period]. The Grand Marshal has a ‘speckled head’ (as seen in the TV version of The Seeds of Death, but not the novelisation, and the suggestion is this is the same Grand Marshal). One of the Ice Warriors, Craag, is said to be ‘massive’ at eight feet in height. Vedikael is the commander, described by the Doctor as an ‘Ice Lord’ (the first time this phrase has been used, by the way) and he has glowing red eyes.

Cover: Alister Pearson illustrates the lost story with a portrait of Sil, an Ice Warrior and an emblem that’s reminiscent of the logo on Varos.

Final Analysis: Like the other two ‘Missing Stories’, Mission to Magnus might make us reluctantly thankful for what we actually got as Season 23, instead of another low-key adventure trading on past glories. It’s a strange mix of previous Ice Warrior plots – a planned invasion, skulking around ice caverns and exploiting a divided society – and it just serves to underline how generic an alien race they really were away from the politics of Peladon. We also have a planet dominated by women – a presumably unintentional hark-back to that other lost story, The Prison in Space, which had been commissioned and then dropped for Season Six. We have another villainous Time Lord in Anzor too, and at least he’s actually working for the Time Lords (albeit for his own ends) and not just a renegade, but he’s removed from the story halfway through and is little more than an excuse to draw the Doctor into the story. And we have Sil – who is separated from the main action for too long and left merely to speculate on the opportunities time travel might bring (the idea of him with all this power and choosing to use it just to fiddle the galactic lottery is fun though). For all its flaws, Mindwarp turned out to be a better story than Mission to Magnus and a much stronger showcase for the regulars and Sil. I’m more than a little thankful that this is the last of the ‘missing story’ releases. The scant details we have for Robert Holmes’ proposed contribution suggest it’d be cancelled in more ways than one.

Bonus chapter #8. Doctor Who – The Ultimate Evil (1989)

Jim Sangster Leave a comment

Synopsis: The Doctor has finally achieved his life’s work and fixed everything that was wrong with the TARDIS. Peri suggests a holiday and they find themselves in an idyllic land free from war. But peace is bad for business – and an arms dealer called The Dwarf Mordant has a plan to change everything.

Chapter Titles

Numbered One to Twenty-Nine.

Background: Wally K Daly adapts a storyline originally submitted for the aborted Season 22.

Notes: The ‘evil Dwarf’ Mordant (who needs to work on that title) comes from the planet Salakan, where he previously failed to draw the Doctor into one of his schemes. The Mordant has a mouth that is a ‘scaly toothless hole’. His hands are webbed with three fingers on each, he has two eyes on ‘stubby flexible stalks above his forehead, in the centre of which is another ‘cold yellow eye’. His laugh is a ‘high-pitched chuckle full of a wicked, childish glee’. 

The TARDIS has a stowage cupboard that contains, among other items, a device that can pilot the TARDIS to the source of a transmission, a torch-like gadget that can be pointed at any object to calculate its weight and a crystal ball that helps its owner plan a holiday – an object that is one of a set presented to the Time Lords by Dwarf Mordant as a means of keeping an eye on them and avoiding their interference. The TARDIS has a ‘main thrust unit’, which makes it sound like a space rocket. The Doctor is so distressed that the TARDIS is now in perfect working order that he doesn’t notice that the chameleon circuit hasn’t worked and the TARDIS is still in the form of a police box. The Doctor threatens Mordant that he’ll inform the Time Lords that he has been spying on them and they will wipe him from history [not quite as seen in The War Games, as this involves manipulating genes to ensure his parents have a different child entirely].

Cover: In Alister Pearson’s cover, the Dwarf Mordant pulls tongues at a crystal ball containing the TARDIS console, while the TARDIS exterior materialises in a mist. The first edition featured a flash proclaiming ‘The Missing Episodes!’

Final Analysis: It’s a difficult thing for a fan to accept that the series they love is failing. We might instinctively defend Season 22, but we also know that there were a fair few issues that justified Michael Grade’s cancellation above and beyond his own personal prejudices. Thanks to this mini-series of novels based on the commissioned scripts for the abandoned Season 23, there’s a sense that we might have ended up with more of the same and that the cancellation of this run of stories was a blessing. Even within the framework of a show that stars a man flying through time and space in a phone box, there’s something that stretches credibility when the main villain seems to know that they’re the baddie. Far from being an ‘ultimate evil’, Dwarf Mordant is a diluted Sil, an exploitative capitalist who revels in the torture and misery of others. All very unfortunate, considering a rematch with the maniacal Mentor was also scheduled for the same season. Strangely though, I can easily imagine Colin Baker delivering lines such as this on TV:

Now I have nowhere I particularly want to go and no task to perform – and this is the time the TARDIS chooses to turn on me with this vicious display of goodness, and unwonted mechanical and electrical magnanimity. Now do you see why it is disasterous [sic]? I have nothing, at all, to do!’

… though that’s less about them being authentic than them being the kind of rubbish they were giving him to fight with on TV at the time. It might not be a fair comparison, but while Terrance Dicks is reliable and efficient, if rarely remarkable, this is giddy and over-written. Sorry, this one’s not for me. The best thing about it is the cover.

Bonus chapter #7. Doctor Who – The Nightmare Fair (1989)

Jim Sangster 2 Comments

Synopsis: After surviving an encounter with The Nexus of the Primeval Cauldron of Space-Time, the Doctor and Peri arrive in Blackpool, where a visit to the famous Pleasure Beach sees them ensnared by the Celestial Toymaker. But why is the eternal villain there and what does he want with the Doctor? It can’t be anything as mundane as revenge, can it?

Chapter Titles

Numbered One to Nine.

Background: Graham Williams adapts his scripts for an unmade serial intended for broadcast in 1986 before the original Season 23 was cancelled.

Notes: The Doctor and Peri begin their adventure on the observation platform of the Blackpool Tower, just as the Doctor nearly promised at the end of Revelation of the Daleks. The young guest hero this time is called ‘Kevin Stoney’ [see The Daleks’ Master Plan, The Invasion and Revenge of the Cybermen for why that’s funny] and he’s from Liverpool. The Toymaker – also referred to as The Mandarin – uses a crystal ball to observe the Doctor and other points of interest. The Doctor boasts that he has ‘shot through Black Holes’, ‘sailed through Supernovae and ‘eaten Vanarian Sun Seed Cake’ but has never experienced such a ‘magnificent’ thrill as the roller coaster; although there is a coaster in Blackpool called ‘The Roller Coaster, this one is most likely the Revolution, Europe’s first full-loup rollercoaster, which opened in 1979 and, like the Sixth Doctor, once featured in a memorable episode of a BBC wish-fulfilment entertainment show that we can’t really talk about any more. By the way, the Doctor’s also never had candy floss before; Peri pays for it with a £5 note she found in a sporran in the TARDIS wardrobe, prompting the Doctor to note that it must have been Jamie’s and he was always so careful with money [so putting aside offensive stereotypes for a second, Jamie having legal tender from the mid-1980s suggests an unseen adventure].

After hearing Kevin’s statement about seeing ‘red giants’, Detective Inspector Truscott suggests that if the lad sees any more that he directs them towards Preston North End, as they could do with the help; Preston North End’s kit at the time was white with blue piping, and the away kit was yellow and blue – but they did eventually adopt a red jersey as their main away kit for the 95-6 season. 

As in the Toymaker’s debut adventure, it’s suggested that he and the Doctor have sparred on many occasions. The Doctor took part in the Globus Wars of Independence. His pockets contain a single jelly baby and ‘the signet-ring of Rasillon’, which is ‘the most powerful single object in the known Universes. He tells Peri and Kevin that he doesn’t actually know who the Toymaker is:

‘Nobody knows. He existed before the start of Time Lord records. There was an attempt to track him back through his own continuum – trace his path through the fabric of time, but the researchers got bored with all the games, which was possibly what they were there for. As they do so often,’ he sighed, ‘my erstwhile colleagues met something they didn’t understand, and they ran away from it. If they’d been able to control him, they would have investigated further, I’m sure. But they couldn’t, so they didn’t.’ 

The Toymaker is known to be telepathic and telekinetic, ‘up to a point’, and he was once ‘observed playing with a supernova as though it was a kiddies’ paddling pool… and we know he’s old beyond imagining…’

If fact, the Doctor realises that the Toymaker is from another universe and that he carries his own matter with him – but not anti-matter – concluding that the Toymaker will live for millions of years; the Toymaker confirms that he already has done, having spent thousands of years creating and destroying civilisations until he came up with the idea of his games.  

Cover: Alister Pearson’s composition includes the Toymaker, the Blackpool Tower, a sign for Space Mountain, a miner and a fanged-and-clawed alien. The first edition featured a flash proclaiming ‘The Missing Episodes!’

Final Analysis: The whole concept of a ‘celestial’ toymaker is an archaic pun, ‘celestial’ meaning both ‘of the stars’ and ‘from China’ (a loose translation of ‘Tianchao’, the former name for the Chinese Empire). While the word might have been used to signify ‘exotic’ or mysterious qualities, it was also a racial descriptor that is now largely forgotten. As previously mentioned in (among other chapters) The Sensorites, the word ‘oriental’ can also be problematic for some. Meaning simply ‘from the East’, it’s a colonial view of the world map, positioning China solely in relation to how it appears on a British Empire map with the United Kingdom (well, let’s be honest, England) at its centre.

… and in Doctor Who, we then have the Celestial Toymaker as a Chinese-presenting character played by an English actor. While Michael Gough didn’t resort to the kind of theatrical make-up we saw in The Talons of Weng Chiang, it’s still an example of cultural appropriation – or at best cosplaying – based on a suspicion of the Chinese. How might that have seemed had this story made it to air in 1986? In a season where a story set in Singapore had a working title ‘Yellow Fever and How to Cure It’…. you can draw your own conclusions as to how this might have played out at the time – and how it might have been received by young viewers discovering the era for themselves 36 years later. Despite spending two paragraphs discussing this issue, it’s not really something I dwell on, but it’s a handy distraction to ruminate on while trying to avoid thinking about the rest of the book.

What we have here is something that feels authentic to the period it might have been a part of had Michael Grade not stepped in and saved us. By which I mean, the Doctor is fairly unlikeable and while the adventure features a returning villain, he’s one that few of the viewers would have actually remembered and he doesn’t even act like the character as portrayed in his original appearance. The story is, like the original, a series of events rather than a plot and, sadly, it’s all a bit dull. The greatest joy comes from the Doctor’s two companions being called ‘Kevin and Peri’ in a book published a year before Harry Enfield’s teenage characters Kevin and Perry made their TV debut. All entirely coincidentally. 

To be fair, there is one scene though where Williams captures that alien quality that Colin Baker had so wanted to portray, able to comprehend the vastness of eternity:

‘The isolation of aeons,’ whispered the Doctor, overcome with compassion for the being he’d detested all his adult life. ‘The crushing loneliness of thousands of millennia… you poor, poor creature…’