Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord! But I thought you were dead!

Last week, I talked about continuity, and I did mean the sci-fi fan definition of the word. ("Continuity" usually means making sure Amy's hair is up or down depending on when in the episode this shot takes place. In fanspeak it means desperately trying to reconcile contradictory events in a programme that isn't even trying in that respect.) And, while I thought last night's episode "The Beast Below" was a number of nice ideas that didn't quite gel into a good story, its interesting premise was based on a piece of Doctor Who history in the manner that I recommended in my last post. The 1975 story The Ark in Space (12.2) introduced all the solar flared ravaging the Earth business. "The Beast Below" doesn't even require you to know The Ark in Space exists, but it draws on an idea that warranted further exploration.

Anyway, this week, another buzzword: "canon". In fanspeak (I keep wanting to type "fansqueak") "canon" means "did it really happen?" When I was growing up, the continued adventures of the Doctor (No. 8) were told in books (BBC), audio plays (Big Finish), and comics (Doctor Who Magazine). Each of these contradicted the other two (and sometimes didn't, which made it even more confusing), so you kind of had to decide which one was real - or "canon". There were some fans who hated the TV movie so much they declared it apocryphal, and therefore there was no Eighth Doctor at all. All that could be definitely agreed upon as canonical were

the televised adventures, and this was reinforced when the series came back and contradicted books, audio plays, and comics alike. ("The Eleventh Hour" (31.1), which was excellent by the way, confirmed that Paul McGann was indeed the Eighth Doctor.) But that's not actually the kind of canon I want talk about. Because there exists a Doctor Who canon in the other sense of the word, meaning certain stories that are considered exemplary, worthy of repeated viewing; the ones everyone, not just completionists, should see...the "classics". I'm thinking about this because in my armchair time-travelling I have now watched six Doctor Who stories, three of which are in this club, and three of which aren't. An Unearthly Child (1.1) is because it's the first story, and the first episode is so good, even if the subsequent three aren't. The Daleks (1.2) is for a number of reasons, not least that it introduced the fucking Daleks, and is therefore perhaps single-handedly responsible for the series lasting more than 13 episodes. The Aztecs (1.6) - if memory serves, the first Hartnell story released on DVD - is because it's very well written and surprisingly not that racist. The ones that aren't: In 2050, fans are not going to be clamouring for The Edge of Destruction (1.3) to be one of the first stories released on hypercube. Marco Polo (1.4) was apparently very well remembered by viewers in February and March 1964, but because no one has seen it since then, it's never going to be part of the canon. And The Keys of Marinus (1.5). Hot on the heels of The Daleks (1.2), great things were expected of Terry Nation's second serial, and of its new monsters, the Voord, who, as About Times points out, "failed to set the world alight":

"In charge of the villainy is Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord...He is dispatched in such an obvious 'The End...or is it?' manner that his return was inevitable. (His return in the Doctor Who annuals, anyway.) Whereas the Daleks have been finally, definitively destroyed on-screen at least three times and still keep coming back, we've yet to see a TV adventure in which the first episode ends with 'Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord...but I thought you were dead!'" (Vol.1, pp.57-58)

Had this been the case, 2|Entertain might have decided that The Keys of Marinus deserved earlier release. (The order in which the stories were released on VHS and DVD is one indication (well two, and with obvious limitations) of how highly various stories are/were thought of.) Then again, "The Sontaran Strategem"/"The Poison Sky" (N4.4/N4.5), which features the perfectly-cast Christopher Ryan as lead Sontaran but is in every other way one of the worst Doctor Who stories ever made, suggests that The Time Warrior (11.1) is a classic for being very well-written, not because it introduced the Sontarans. Or, the Sontarans only became recurring monsters because they were introduced in such a good story, and if Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord, had tried stealing scientists from 20th Century Earth in a Robert Holmes story, he might have achieved greater notoriety. This goes to show that monsters are only as interesting as the stories they feature in, which is why Moffat is better off bringing back solar flares than Daleks (he's doing both), and why I'm awaiting the return of the Silurians with nervous anticipation but don't really care why Amy's going to fight a broken Cyberman (my money's on Amy). But we digress. In a way, perhaps canon isn't all that complicated: the reason stories like The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Caves of Androzani, and Spearhead from Space are considered classics is because they are amongst the best-written stories of 40 years of Doctor Who...oh, and they're all written by Robert Holmes. Fancy that. Some stories are so good they can't not be considered part of the must-watch canon. But what about the others? For those stories that were released on video after 1992, or DVD after 2003, it's more of a point system.

Now that we have a "new" series or two, the entire 1963-1989 series becomes "classic," so even Sylvester McCoy's stories have more canon points than they used to. So something from the first season of Doctor Who, even if many viewers probably find it confusing and distressing (I'm talking about The Edge of Destruction), it has more canon points because it's so old. The stupidity of this "system" should be becoming apparent, but age has its advantages. The Edge of Destruction's DVD featurette, Over the Edge (ha! get it?), produced and directed in "Look, I've learnt how to use Final Cut Pro!" style by Doctor Who fanlord Ian Levine, generally oscillates between the attitudes that the story was either a bewildering experiment, or not bad considering it was hastily written and had no budget. But in the last few minutes, Levine gives us a number of his interviewees talking about the story's lasting influence. It's (the story not the documentary) the first time we see the TARDIS as a place where dangerous or wondrous things could happen, rather than just a place of safety or just a means of conveyance. (See all stories by Christopher H. Bidmead.) It's the first suggestion that this time-machine could have some kind of consciousness or telepathy, which as About Time reminds us, was so influential on later Doctor Who mythology that the answer seems obvious from the start: "the twist isn't "d'oh, the fast return switch was stuck", the twist is that the Ship has been communicating." So while the documentary is using the story's influence as a final apology so you don't go away thinking you've just wasted an hour and a half of your life, it is telling that it is influence that they use, even showing us clips from a couple of 2005 episodes so we can see how oppressive the incidental music is now the story's continued influence (and yes, that is Russell doing the solar flares thing. Well done, Russell). Major canon points.

Is it wrong to boost the story's "rating" because of its influence? The story is also significant from a historical perspective because of paths not taken. Wood and Miles often like to remind us is that at this stage, not even the writers and producers knew what the series was supposed to be. The original brief was that the TARDIS would travel backwards, forwards, and sideways in time. What does that mean? We don't know. Neither did they. Even Lost is struggling with the concept right now. But as "a brand of Doctor Who that never developed," since even by the following story Doctor Who has become more of a science fiction adventure series than the science fiction mystery series that began several months previously, The Edge of Destruction gives us some idea. The story certainly downplays its own importance, and it does kind of look like 50 minutes of people freaking out for no reason. But so does The Haunting, a British/American horror film from around the same time, and that is considered a defining film of the genre. I don't see why - it's apparently supposed to chronicle a woman's descent into madness, and question whether this was due to supernatural prompting, but it just looked like a hysterical woman being hysterical for two hours independent of the fact that she was in a (possibly) haunted house. If that's a classic, why isn't the much scarier The Edge of Destruction a classic? I think it and Inferno (7.4) are the only Doctor Who stories to genuinely scare me, not that that's what I was looking for from Doctor Who when I was little. Child-appreciation is probably the one thing that doesn't provide canon points - as a child, I found the much-lauded The Aztecs (1.6) incredibly boring, but I loved the much-derided The Keys of Marinus (1.6) because there was so much in it that appealed to my imagination.

Maybe what all this "canon" business is really about is what stories would you show to non-fans? "An Unearthly Child" (1.1.1), The Daleks (1.2), "Aliens of London"/"World War Three" (N1.4/N1.5), City of Death (17.2), anything by Robert Holmes. These aren't just the best stories, they're the best first glimpses at Doctor Who's strengths, which have always been its writing and its ideas (and its lead actors). Show them The Keys of Marinus and they'll think Doctor Who is a hokey, cheap series that strings together sci-fi clichés, and if you show them The Edge of Destruction they'll just be confused and slightly uncomfortable. But choose the right representatives and you might be able to create some fans, who appreciate that even when Doctor Who is dumb it's brilliant.

P.S. I challenge Steven Moffat to write an episode that brings back Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord.