“I just do the best I can.” —Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Story
The Doctor picks up a signal in the TARDIS that leads him and Ace to the shores of Lake Vortigern in near-future England. The Doctor’s old friends UNIT are convoying a nuclear missile (presumably for disposal, though it’s not said for sure) when their trucks break down amid a lot of radio interference near an archaeological dig excavating artifacts related to the legends of King Arthur. While trying to get the convoy moving again, the UNIT troops under the command of Brigadier Winnifred Bambera witness a series of what look like meteor impacts but turn out to be the arrival of what seem like medieval knights, with broadswords— and ray guns. UNIT is soon caught in the middle of a battle between two factions of these knights, and when the Doctor appears on the scene they contact Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, calling him out of retirement to take charge of the situation.
We learn that Morgaine le Fay and her son Mordred are trying to find King Arthur and his sword Excalibur. Arthur appears to be in suspended animation in a spaceship under the lake, waiting for a prophesied day when he will return during England’s hour of greatest need— but Morgaine has found his location and wants to wake him up finish the conflict they started centuries ago. The Doctor explains they’re all from a different dimension “where the man was closer to the myth.” (It’s never made clear if this is the source of our world’s legends, or simply a parallel world where the legends are true.) Meanwhile the knights all recognize the Doctor as Merlin, though they knew him with a different face: it seems that at some point in his future, he will be Merlin, and this future version of the Doctor has left messages for his earlier self to guide him through the current crisis.
Review
There’s something just slightly off about Battlefield, but it’s hard to pin down what. While watching it for my blog series, I kept think it seemed oddly clunky and disjointed— but I couldn’t say exactly why. It’s not like The Happiness Patrol a few stories ago, where it was so disjointed you couldn’t even tell what was going on. I knew what was going on. Battlefield just didn’t seem to flow right. Writer Ben Aaronovitch (who wrote last season’s excellent Dalek story) now calls it a failed effort on his part, but I don’t think the writing is the problem.
The Doctor himself gave me the clue, when at one point in episode 4 (on the verge of making sure he arrives somewhere at the nick of time) he says, “High drama is very similar to comedy. Both require good timing.” That’s the problem with this story— and it’s one I put down to either the director or the video editor, not to the script: its timing is off. One example that comes after that line: a key moment involves an ancient castle exploding. We get a shot of the intact castle, and then a shot of the ruined castle with a (video-effect) explosion rising from it, but we don’t see the castle itself actually explode. Now, granting that a limited budget made them not want to spend money on an expensive exploding miniature, the least they could have done is superimpose the explosion over the intact castle and switch out the image of the ruined one behind it. Even if we called it a bad special effect, we’d have seen it. Instead it seems like they skipped over the actual key moment.
And that’s the problem with the whole story: all along I kept feeling like we either joined scenes 5 seconds too late, or else cut away from them 5 seconds too early. It’s never such a bad edit that you lose track of what’s happening, but there’s a constant feeling that you’ve missed the best bit.
With that flaw admitted, it’s a pretty decent story overall. Battlefield marks the first proper appearance for UNIT since the phase-out during Tom Baker’s early seasons (though Lethbridge-Stewart appeared in The Five Doctors, and there was a scene at UNIT HQ, UNIT itself didn’t appear). There’s an effort to introduce a new cast of primary UNIT characters, with the idea of passing the torch from Lethbridge-Stewart to the new Brigadier, Winnifred Bambera, who would probably have reappeared in the role if the Classic series hadn’t ended after this season. In fact, Aaronovitch originally planned to kill off Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier at the end of the story (JN-T had checked with Courtney if that would be okay with him, and Courtney thought it was a fine idea so long as Lethbridge-Stewart got a suitably heroic end) and the climax of the story plays very clearly as if it’s leading up to a heroic sacrifice by the Brigadier. The Doctor even believes briefly an unconscious Brig is dead and gets a heartbroken speech about it. In the end, Aaronovitch didn’t have the nerve to do it, and had the Brig wake up no worse for the wear. Aaronovitch now remarks that removing the Brig’s death without changing the story leading to it was “a young writer’s mistake” that he’d do differently now (“Now, I’d just kill him,” he says.)
For my part, I’m glad the Brig lived through it, and I like the series of great moments it gives him whether or not a heroic death scene comes at the end. The story takes a little too long to get him to the scene of the action, but once he’s there I like it. At one point he proudly points out to the Doctor all the specialized ammunition UNIT now carries, including gold bullets in case of Cybermen. “No silver bullets?” the Doctor asks. The Brig frowns, and then orders another soldier to get some— just in case. Later, the Doctor tries to get Morgaine to surrender by threatening to kill her son Mordred. It doesn’t work because she knows he’s bluffing: “Merlin” won’t kill. The Doctor lowers his sword, momentarily defeated, and then someone puts a gun to Mordred’s head. “Try me,” the Brig says.
Later, he gets his heroic near-death in a confrontation with the monster of the story, a demon called the Destroyer that Morgaine has summoned. The Doctor’s preparing to confront it but the Brigadier knocks him out and takes his place, and then gets what would have been terrific last words: the Destroyer calls him pathetic and says, “Can this planet do no better than you for its champion?” “Probably,” answers the Brigadier. “I just do the best I can” —and shoots the demon with the silver bullets the Doctor had a reason for asking about earlier. (The ensuing explosion is where the Brig would have been killed in the original plan.)
The Destroyer, by the way, is a very well-designed and well constructed monster, and its a pity that it plays only a brief role in the story. It would have been nice to see it lurking around, giving us scares and thrills as it stalked the characters, for a while.
Let’s talk about the villain, Morgaine. She’s played by Jean Marsh on her third appearance in Doctor Who. Better known for her role in the BBC’s Upstairs, Downstairs, Whovians know her from two stories back in the William Hartnell era: as the sister of Richard the Lionhearted in The Crusades, and as ill-fated companion Sara Kingdom in The Dalek Masterplan (the best Dalek story ever). Morgaine is a fascinating character. The goal in the script was to present a villain who’s a threat not because she’s simply evil but because she has an alien set of values.
Morgaine’s view of war comes right out of the middle ages (or more, the storybook version of the middle ages) when heralds from both sides would meet to agree on a battlefield and then after a days’ fighting issue a ruling on which side had won: battle only one step removed from a tournament. But while full of rules of honor concerning how warriors meet each other, she’s equally contemptuous of “peasants” who are beneath the concern of knights.
She has no hesitation in using Earth as a battlefield, without concern for innocent bystanders who might get hurt, until she and Mordred encounter a war memorial in a cemetery. Morgain is outraged at Mordred: “These aren’t the savages you claimed, and we’ve fought on their territory without their permission!” She and her knights immediately halt hostilities to hold a service honoring the dead soldiers of this world before going on with their plans. It’s during this that Lethbridge-Stewart first encounters her (and here’s another of those bad timing edits: the part of their meeting that would have been most interesting is the part we don’t see). Later, Morgaine cold-bloodedly kills a UNIT solder she meets in a pub where Mordred has been drinking— but she won’t let Mordred leave without paying his bar bill, and having no local currency she pays by using her magic to restore the sight of the blind woman who owns the pub.
Morgaine’s sense of honor proves key to the resolution of the story (it’s always good when characters actually matter as characters). She’s seized the nuclear weapon and is going to detonate it unless Arthur comes out and faces her in honorable combat. The Doctor talks her down by telling her how her action will cause a nuclear war and exactly what kind of “war” that will be like— and realizing how far that is from her picture of honorable combat between honorable soldiers, she stands down.
I mentioned Morgaine’s “magic” above: yes, this story even more firmly introduces magic into the Dr Who universe than the previous story’s Gods of Ragnarok. As broadcast, it’s left a bit ambiguous but there’s no technological explanation forthcoming. A deleted scene would have made it explicit: when Ace asks for an explanation, the Doctor asks he if she knows Clarke’s law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When she says she does, he replies, “The reverse is also true” and Ace realizes he means that sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. We get a general impression throughout the story that in their home dimension, King Arthur and Morgaine and all the knights are part of an advanced civilization capable of space travel (she rules over 13 worlds) but apparently achieved by “sufficiently advanced magic.” Some fans were outraged at the time; your mileage may vary.
The Doctor Saves Ace: For Real!
Among the behind-the-scenes lore of Classic Dr Who is the following (studio videotape of the incident is found on the DVD release of Battlefield).
One scene had Ace caught in a booby trap, a sealed chamber filling rapidly with water. On set, actress Sophie Aldred did the stunt herself in a water tank on set. The tank was evidently substandard, and as the scene ended the glass front began to crack, and after a couple of seconds shattered completely. At the time, as part of the scene, Sylvester McCoy was standing directly in front of the tank (as the Doctor, trying to help Ace), and he was the only one in position to see the glass start to crack.
Realizing what was about to happen, the thought ran through his head that as the glass broke, the water pressure would shove Sophie through and she could be cut to pieces by the jagged edges— and even if she wasn’t, she was about to be spilled onto the studio floor which was covered with exposed electrical cables, and she might be electrocuted. At the very moment the glass started to break, he bellowed at the top of his lungs: “GET HER OUT OF THERE!”
The safety people waiting above the tank couldn’t see what was happening, but they heard McCoy’s yell. While everyone else in the studio was hopping up on chairs to avoid being electrocuted themselves, they grabbed Sophie and yanked her clear at the exact moment the glass finally shattered.
And that’s how the Doctor saved Ace’s life— in real life!
Next Week:
“Ghost Light,” 3 episodes.
