Bad Santa (and a Farewell to the Second Doctor)

My Second Doctor marathon comes to a close with a Christmas tale from Mark Michalowski.

If a story told by letters is epistolary, then is there a term for one told by someone within a story?

That's the case here as a teacher named Miss Bennett has, at the recommendation of a Miss Wright (Polly, presumably) brought in the Doctor to tell her class a Christmas tale.

Santa is out in his sleigh doing his thing when the TARDIS suddenly materializes in front of it. In goes the sleigh with Dasher and Vixen and all the other reindeer. The procession comes to rest in an enlarged console room and the Doctor greets St. Nick. He mentions to the South Pole's most famous resident that they had met before when the Doctor was with two friends of his, John and Gillian. These are, in fact, two of the Doctor's grandkids who appeared in the so-called "TV comics" but I am unsure what this means. In some sort of equivalent to TV Guide? I haven't been able to track them down which is, perhaps, just as well given the quality of comics of this time.

Anyway, the Doctor proceeds to tell Santa that he knows of his clones and of the wormholes in space they all use to get presents delivered on a timely basis. Bluntly, he asks Santa to quit delivering presents. Like some Yuletide version of Paul R. Ehrlich, he warns that, as Earth's population grows and humans spread out over the galaxy, things become less cheerful. The Doctor shows Santa a future with thousands of dark satanic mills that are needed to feed the demand for presents for billions and billions of children and he warns that all of those wormholes that'll be required to have Santa simulacrums do their duty will wreak havoc with all of those luminous threads that make up the web of time and space.

The Doctor decides to take over Santa's rounds and deliver presents himself. His first stop at Suzie and Timmy's house doesn't go well. They want a ghetto blaster and computer games but all the Doctor can fish out of his capacious pockets are a bunch of flowers and a nooild, which is a telepathic translator. Unfortunately, it won't work on the kids' cat, Trixie.

The kids' dad shows up and starts manhandling the Doctor but, luckily, Santa appears and puts things right.

Santa and the Doctor agree to work together on robots to take the place of Santa clones and safer, more environmentally friendly wormholes so as to maintain the integrity of the Time-Space Continuum.

A very humorous holiday tale. I could just picture the Doctor fumbling through his pockets while some skeptical, impatient kids waited for some decent presents. This may be a rather insubstantial way to bid farewell to the Second Doctor, but it was a lot of fun.

Watching the Hartnell era, I saw the show's conventions being devised and many of its favorite tropes that we'll see over the coming decades appear for the first time. With Troughton, the show really feels like it should, it feels like it has since his time. The Doctor goes from being an old, grandfatherly figure, to a more avuncular one, albeit like a crazy uncle. He had a warmer rapport, overall, with his companions.

The Second Doctor was written, like all of them, I suppose, inconsistently. I think of him as having a playful side and an occasional charming forgetfulness. Whereas his previous self would charge in lobbing grenades of opprobrium, this incarnation would try to cajole first. For me, there has to be some whimsey to go along with the Second Doctor instead of merely a slavish adherence to duty. Do-gooding is necessary in portraying the Doctor but not sufficient.

You can see Troughton in the nascent Seventh Doctor as well as in the Fifth Doctor with those, "Well, that didn't quite go as planned" moments.

Jamie sticks out as the best companion but I enjoyed Ben and Polly as well. Zoe was a fine companion too but she didn't get nearly the number of good lines as Jamie did and she also didn't get to be a computer whiz as often as Jamie got to be a man of action. At least she fared better than Mel as computer things went. 

We meet the Brigadier in "The Web of Fear" and Troughton gets to play the Doctor and the villain in "The Enemy of the World". I loved the wire work such as in "The Underwater Menace" and Mr. Quill's expression in "Fury From the Deep" is just classic. The Cybermen evolve over the course of the Second Doctor's tenure and those stories never seem far from writers' minds even here decades later. "The Tomb of the Cybermen" is just a blast and deserves all the praise it gets. And "The Mind Robber" was pleasingly surreal.

The writers for the DW Annual stories failed to notice that the Doctor had regenerated into someone who doesn't call those he travels with "children" while the illustrators were similarly in the dark about the new companions.

The novels and short stories continued to bring our beloved hero into new and interesting scenarios that could have never been realized on TV. I really enjoy the Christmas themed short stories and, amongst the novels, enjoyed the The Dark Path, a Master origin story. And, contra my statement above, I also found The Indestrucible Man to be great read despite the absence of whimsey on the Doctor's part. The plot and characterization were enough for a change.

So auf wiedersehen, Second Doctor. We'll see you again in "The Three/Five/Two Doctors" and a future PDA or two.

While I won't start my Third Doctor marathon for a few months yet, I am hoping that the DW Annuals get their shit in gear. And I am done with animated reconstructions, not that I minded them. It should be fun and I am looking forward to it but need a break as I have lots of other non-Doctor Who books to read, movies to rent, and a couple of Call of Cthulhu scenarios to prepare for as I'll be running them at Gamehole Con next month.

Hands off the threads, creep

In India long ago, the Second Doctor visits a maharaja. The Time Lord obviously enjoyed himself as he stayed for several days. He and his host "spent many nights discussing the universe". But the newcomer arouses the suspicion of the maharaja's magician, Nehra.

Nehra noticed that this other magician left a blue box in the cellar of the palace and decides to investigate. He finds that he cannot open it and that the mysterious case resists all investigation into its workings. Frustrated, Nehra turns to magic, a cantrip which would reveal the blue box's history to him.

He is amazed to have a vision of the Earth viewed from afar, with "luminous threads" wound around it, with many of them seeming to come from the blue box. More threads spring into being and, again, many of them are seen to emanate from other, similar, boxes. Sensing evil at work and that the threads of fire are a threat, he summons a demon named Vishathra to cut the threads.

As Nehra and Vishathra are chatting, the Doctor appears and tries to convince the magician that his plan is not a good one but to no avail. The demon moves to cut a thread and suddenly disappears. As the Doctor explains, the threads he saw were not choking the maharaja's empire, but rather they were the threads of the Web of Time. Vishathra had mistakenly cut his own thread, his own link to existence.

Realizing his mistake, Nehra vows a regimen of self-abnegation and asks how he can atone for his misdeeds. The Doctor urges him to pursue science and give him some time to think on how best to make amends.

The Doctor takes off but the TARDIS rematerializes before Nehra just seconds later. The Doctor steps out but Nehra does not recognize him. 

"Where is the Doctor?" he asks.

"'That,' he said with a smile, 'is a very long story.'"

A neat little tale. Vishathra was funny as he was a bit reluctant to go around cutting the threads. When told of the threads closing tightly around the world, he replies, "And this is...bad?" I appreciated the more light-hearted tone here after the more serious "Dust".

I am beginning to despair that I will never read of Jamie again.

Mark Michalowski's name rang a bell but I couldn't identify him immediately. I then realized he wrote the Seventh Doctor PDA Relative Dementias. This made me think about how I have not really tried to connect the themes/motifs that authors have deployed in their short trips with those used in their novels. I don't recall anything this light-hearted in Relative Dementias but my memory could simply be faulty. Perhaps I'll start this with the Third Doctor.