“I felt like I could run forever, like I could smell the wind and feel the grass under my feet, and just run forever.” —Ace
Story
The Doctor and Ace return to her hometown of Perivale, after she expresses a casual interest in finding out what her old mates are up to. It turns out what they’re up to is disappearing: four in the last month, although some of the locals trace it back to Ace’s mysterious disappearance even earlier. Most of the adult residents think Perivale’s teenagers are just running away, although some worry about foul play and a retired army sergeant is teaching self-defense classes at a recreation center that used to be a popular hang-out.
As always, the Seventh Doctor knows what’s going on long before he lets anyone else in on it. He notices a stray black cat wandering the area and thinks it’s vitally important to catch it. Before he can, Ace has vanished herself: accosted in a playground by what looks like a humanoid cheetah on horseback, she’s teleported to an alien world where she meets up with the survivors of those who’ve disappeared from Perivale. Ace’s home town has become the latest hunting ground for the Cheetah People, a race of humanoid felines about which even the Doctor knows very little— because so far, almost no one who’s ever encountered them has survived.
The black cat is a “kitling,” a scavenger species the Cheetah People use as scouts. The Cheetah People have the power to teleport themselves across space in search of prey, and then teleport back home with their victims— where, like other cats, they enjoy playing with their prey before they kill it. We learn the Cheetah People were once human. Because of a psychic link both with the kitlings and with their planet, they physically transformed, and any of their prey that manage to survive long enough on their alien planet will also begin to change.
But there’s more than just the Cheetah People involved: the Doctor’s old enemy, the Master, is also on the scene. He was caught and teleported to the planet by one of their hunters, and although he used his hypnotic powers to take control over the Cheetah People, he still can’t escape: they can only bring prey along in their teleporting when they’re returning home. Now the Master himself is changing, and is desperate to escape before he loses his own identity— and so he’s sent the Cheetah People off on a hunt for the Doctor, because he knows the Doctor will always find a way out.
The Doctor does know the way: they need “an animal whose home is Earth.” They have to wait for one of them to change. It’s Ace who starts to change, but before they can use her new power to get home, she’s run off with Karra, the Cheetah who first brought her to the planet, and the Doctor has to find her, not only to escape the Cheetah planet but before her own identity is lost forever.
Review
In keeping with this era of Dr Who, Survival is more interested in atmosphere than explanation. The story gives us just enough information to understand what’s going on but not enough to explain it in any real science fiction terms. Like last week’s Curse of Fenric, it succeeds on those terms, though it has a few flaws that hold it back from achieving Fenric’s success. The 3 episodes of the story break into 3 phases: episodes 1 and 3 take place (mostly) in Perivale while episode 2 is on the Cheetah Planet. But the climax of the story, taking place back on Earth, is weak compared to what went before and the story would have done better to stay on the alien planet until the end: pretty much everything that happens after the story comes back to Earth could have happened on the alien planet, apart from superficial trappings (like a character riding a motorcycle instead of a horse) and it would have been better there.
The story also misses a beat in not quite living up to its stated theme. The phrase “survival of the fittest” recurs throughout the story, but not in connection with evolution (which isn’t a topic of the story), rather as an expression of an everyone-for-himself, dog-eat-dog (or cat-eat-cat) ethic which the Doctor rejects. Going along with that, an important subplot is that the Cheetah Planet will soon be destroyed, and we’re told it’s because of the psychic link between the inhabitants and their world, so that when they fight each other they contribute to tearing their world apart. Where the story fails is that it never actually shows us Cheetah People fighting each other. They’re ruthless toward their prey, but seem to get along fine with each other. In fact it’s the human characters who threaten to turn against each other, putting their own survival ahead of their friends. When Ace starts to change, the Cheetah that originally hunted her becomes friendly. It’s almost as if the story wants to hold up the Cheetah People as the example of a better ethic— except we’re told they fight each other so intensely they’re destroying their planet. It just never quite comes together.
Going along with that, one key scene at the climax was seriously undermined by a simple censorship decision. Back on Earth, the Master has gained mental domination over a group of teenagers who hadn’t been to the Cheetah planet, but because he himself is so far gone in his transformation he starts making them behave as a Cheetah pack. When one of them is wounded, the script called for the Master to cite “survival of the fittest” and have the others kill him, then sending them on to attack Ace who just witnessed the killing. JN-T said that went too far for Dr Who’s family audience, so when they filmed it the wounded teenager just dies from his injuries, and the Master’s remark is simply an expression of his lack of sympathy— and then Ace reacts in panicked terror when the pack turn toward her, despite not having seen them do anything to justify her fear. JN-T might have been right to remove the killing from the story, but if so they needed a larger rewrite around the change.
In other ways, however, the story works very nicely. Writer Rona Munro (one of the few women writers to contribute to Classic Dr Who) revolves the story around common symbols of the “mystical feminine”: cats, the moon, etc. Ace’s temptation as she begins to change, and feels the strong pull of the Cheetah life, is done excellently and plays well off Ace’s character: in many ways it’s a defining story for who she is. The final confrontation between the Doctor and the Master, with a brief return to the Cheetah Planet, is intense and could almost be written specifically to represent the final confrontation of the two adversaries, although I’m afraid Sylvester McCoy goes a little too far over the top in his final line of dialog in the scene, which spoils it a tiny bit.
Survival was shot entirely on location in the actual London suburb of Perivale (and in a nearby gravel quarry, Dr Who’s old reliable choice for alien planets): none of the interiors in the story were sets, they just went into buildings at the location. Those involved in the production say they were very disappointed by the design of the Cheetah People, which were more or less standard furry-animal costumes. Just watching the episode, I think they look fine— but apparently the script (and the original intentions of the director and designers) called for something that concealed the actors less. Rona Munro pictured more graceful, limber creatures and the preliminary designs suggested using skintight leotards patterned to suggest short, sleek fur, rather than actual fake-fur outfits, while the faces were going to be done with makeup effects rather than masks. It sounds like that might have turned out well if they’d done it that way— but I also wonder if they would have just ended up looking like the cast of Cats. Anyway, those who made the story were disappointed but as I said, I think they look fine.
It’s almost impossible to watch Survival now with also thinking about the fact that it was the end: the very last broadcast story of Classic Dr Who. But it wasn’t made to be that. It wasn’t even the last story produced— that was Ghost Light— and even when Ghost Light was produced the cast and crew didn’t know it was going to be the end. After its opening story, Battlefield, season 26 consisted of 3 stories that all revolved around Ace in one way or another, and together formed a character arc about Ace growing up. It wasn’t planned that way, it just happened, and only after all the stories were completed did script editor Andrew Cartmel and producer John Nathan-Turner realize they should think over the broadcast order in order to play up that character arc.
It was only while Survival was on the air that the Doctor Who production office started to understand there wasn’t going to be another season (see below). If JN-T and Cartmel had known it was the end, they would have done something more special for the final story. As it was, JN-T could only go to Cartmel and ask if he could come up with some suitable final speech. Survival’s last shot is of the Doctor and Ace walking into the distance. With the Doctor’s back turned, they could dub in an extra speech without needing to reshoot. Cartmel wrote down a closing speech, and they brought back Sylvester McCoy to record it in studio, then dubbed it over the closing shot of the episode just before it aired.
As it happened, Sylvester McCoy recorded the Doctor’s final speech in Classic Dr Who on November 23, 1989— the show’s 26th anniversary. Cartmel’s writing rose to the occasion as well as anything could have:
“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea is asleep and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice— somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on, Ace, we’ve got work to do.”
Cancellation
Wanting to avoid the outcry that followed the hiatus a few years earlier, the BBC never announced that Dr Who had been cancelled. They just, silently, failed to commission the next season. Andrew Cartmel and JN-T already had plans under way, and although they hadn’t gotten as far as commissioning any actual scripts, Cartmel had been in conversation with some of the new stable of writers that he’d brought in to the Seventh Doctor’s era.
Sylvester McCoy, though he originally intended to play the Doctor for only three seasons, had agreed to come back for a fourth (and perhaps beyond) because he liked the direction Cartmel was taking the character. Fans liked it as well. Although the last two seasons had their share of execution problems, the general direction of the program seemed to be on a definite upswing, and most fans believed that Dr Who had safely passed its low point, the hiatus in the middle of the much-maligned Colin Baker years, and was set for new and better things.
The next season would have opened with a classic “space opera” from Ben Aaronovitch (writer of the excellent Remembrance of the Daleks). The story was going to open with a Star Trek kind of shot of a huge starship, then a shot of its bridge revealing that the Captain was— Ace! After the opening scene she’d retire to the Captain’s quarters where the Doctor was waiting. She’d say “This is never going to work” and he’d reassure her. They hadn’t planned what the actual story would then be, but Cartmel and Aaronovitch liked that opening scene and were going to build a story around it. Next up, a story by Marc Platt set in the late 1960s and featuring a return of the Ice Warriors. Also under consideration was a script Platt had submitted a couple of years earlier, called Lungbarrow. Set on Gallifrey, this story would have gone into the Doctor’s origins. The revelations in Platt’s script had formed the basis for the cryptic hints about the Doctor in broadcast stories as part of the “Cartmel Masterplan.” Cartmel hadn’t made up his mind whether to do the story or not, since explaining the new mystery of the Doctor would just reproduce the problem that made him want to introduce a mystery in the first place.
Whether it was Lungbarrow or something else, Ace was due to leave the series in mid-season in an episode set on Gallifrey, which would end with the Doctor enrolling her in the Academy to become a Time Lord! It was due to be revealed that the Ace-centric episodes of season 26 had been about the Doctor preparing her for that, believing the Time Lords needed some new blood to shake them out of their complacency. Actress Sophie Aldred was looking forward to seeing Ace wearing one of those high Time Lord collars, which she would cover with all the pins and badges from her jacket, no matter how many Time Lord teachers tried to tell her to remove them.
Replacing Ace, the new companion would be a deliberate contrast to Ace’s working-class roots. She’d be a posh upper-crust lady, who was then revealed to be a cat burglar on the side (much like the character the Tenth Doctor met in the new series’ Planet of the Dead). Cartmel and JN-T had also come up with an introductory scene for her: we’d start at some upper-class ball, and follow what seemed to be an ordinary rich young lady at the party as she walked out of the crowded ballroom, down darkened corridors, finally coming to a safe which she’d start to crack. Opening the safe, she’d be surprised to find the Doctor sitting inside it. “What took you so long?” he’d ask. They had no plan for what the story would be. Like Aaronovitch’s space opera, they just liked that scene and would have written something around it.
To sum up, Doctor Who was ready to move ahead at full steam when suddenly someone removed the rails. Again, no official announcement of a cancellation came down. The BBC kept the Dr Who production office open for an entire additional year, not closing it down until 1990. By the time Survival aired, production for the next season should have been officially under way, and those in the office were getting the idea. Andrew Cartmel got an offer to become script editor on the medical drama Casualty, and JN-T advised him he’d better take it.
When the public started to notice, the BBC explicitly denied cancelling Dr Who, issuing a press release that said the series was just slightly delayed while it was being revamped. To this day some of the BBC execs involved still insist they never had any intention of cancelling the show, they were just looking for someone to take over from JN-T and give it a new direction. In reality, no one was looking for a new producer, no one was working on a revamp. I can’t point to an official source to confirm this, but I feel absolutely confident in saying that they actually did intend to cancel it, had no intention of every bringing it back, and were just pretending otherwise because they had such contempt for the show they thought people would just lose interest and go on to some other “cult” show after a while.
JN-T had wanted out of the producer’s chair for several years (especially when the fans started turning against him during the Sixth Doctor era). He believed that it wasn’t a good idea for one person to stay at the helm of the show for too long, just as the actor playing the Doctor should change from time to time, to keep things fresh. But he was fiercely loyal to the show and when it was clear that if he stepped down, it would be cancelled at once, he stayed on.
In the event, he was never allowed to move on. He stayed in the now-idle Dr Who production office until it closed, constantly lobbying to bring the show back. When the office finally closed, BBC Worldwide had started actively releasing episodes to home video on VHS, and JN-T worked with that division to produce several documentary releases on the history of the show.
In 1993, JN-T pushed hard for celebrations of the show’s 30th anniversary, and produced a special for the BBC’s annual “Children in Need” telethon. Called Dimensions in Time, the special was crossover between Dr Who and equally long-running soap opera Eastenders, which centered around an open-air marketplace in London. The story brought back the Rani in a plot about her tampering with time, and featured multiple Doctors and companions wandering around together through various different eras of the Eastenders cast, also doing a reunion. As a story, it was pretty much an incoherent mess and only served as an excuse to get a lot of former Doctors together for the 30th anniversary. JN-T went out of his way to pair the Sixth Doctor and the Brigadier— thereby fixing the gap in that the Sixth Doctor had been the only one never to appear on screen with Nicholas Courtney.
JN-T continued to work with the home video releases, to appear at conventions, talk to Doctor Who Magazine, and lobby in whatever way he could for the series to return. Whatever complaints fans might have about JN-T’s creative role in the series’ final years, we who love Dr Who owe him this: I doubt very much there would be a new series if he hadn’t effectively given up the rest of his career to fight for it.
Sadly, he passed away in 2002, just one year before fandom got the news that Dr Who was, finally, going to return.
The Dark Years, part 1
Higher-ups at the BBC must have been confident Dr Who would soon be forgotten once it was off TV screens. It didn’t happen. Over the in the US, when Star Trek went off the air Starlog magazine survived by broadening its focus to cover TV and movie science fiction in general. Doctor Who Magazine could have done the same (it would have had to change its title) but instead it kept its focus and replaced the former “what’s going on now” articles with articles delving into the history of the show. The “Fact of Fiction” article series (still ongoing) dissected the writing and production of each story, while other features interviewed people who’d worked on Dr Who over the years, from producers to script editors to set designers and special effects artists. As a result of DWM’s efforts, it’s been said the Dr Who is now the most thoroughly documented production in the history of television.
Meanwhile, Target books (a children’s imprint of a larger British publishing house) had been publishing novelizations of the episodes since the seventies, but it was in the 80s that the series really took off. They hadn’t worked their way through the whole back catalog yet, and the Target novelization continued to appear regularly. When that series finally neared completion, either Target changed to, or the rights were bought by (I’m not sure which) Virgin books, who took up the adventures of the Seventh Doctor and Ace with their “Doctor Who The New Adventures” series.
Promising stories “bigger and wider than the TV screen,” the New Adventures novels varied widely in quality. Some were outstanding. Writers from the Seventh Doctor era contributed novels, as did Andrew Cartmel himself along with Terrance Dicks and other writers from earlier in Dr Who’s history. The New Adventures took the “Dark Doctor” approach and ran with it; many fans (including me) thought they took it too far. Some writers evidently thought so, too, because several of the novels had a character arc in which the Doctor would realize he’d gone too far and vowed to reform— only the next novel would ignore that and have him right back where he started. We were in to the nineties now, when comic book superheroes were all getting “gritty and edgy” redesigns, and it seems the Dr Who novels followed suit.
Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow script eventually saw the light as a New Adventures novel. Ace stayed with the Doctor longer than she would have on the air, but as part of the NA desire to be more edgy, they introduced a story where she was separated from the Doctor in the far future, only to meet him again after years had passed (for her) and she’d grown to adulthood and joined a platoon of space marines right out of Aliens. The Doctor and space-marine Ace continued to travel together for a while before she finally left permanently was replaced by 25th-century archaeologist Professor Bernice Summerfield, a popular character who eventually spun off into her own series of novels.
The NA series had its low points. To fill up their catalog, they occasionally published novels originally written as non-Dr-Who science fiction, whose authors just renamed their lead character “the Doctor” and hoped they’d get away with it. These were books by Dr Who writers (not just anyone was allowed to pull that trick) but that didn’t change the fact that 1) just renaming another character “the Doctor” doesn’t make him the Doctor, and 2) usually there was a reason those novels had been rejected by other publishers. Besides these misfires, the series occasionally just tossed out some clunkers in general— but then so did the TV series. So does any series, it’s the nature of the game. On the whole, the New Adventures kept Doctor Who alive in another format as hopes for the TV series began to fade.
A brief flurry of excitement swirled around fandom when news broke that a Doctor Who movie was in the works. Teaser posters appeared, giving away nothing except the title Doctor Who and the tagline “He’s back, and it’s about time.” The project came to nothing, and in hindsight it seems like a good thing: the script eventually leaked to fans and it would have been horrible. It seems the only thing Hollywood knew how to do with a property like Dr Who is start with an origin story, exactly what we don’t want for the Doctor. Worse, the script appeared to be a script for Star Wars in which someone had crossed out the name “Luke Skywalker” and replaced it with “Doctor.”
But genuine hope would eventually appear. In the mid-90’s, the US Fox network was looking for a new property to capitalize on the success of The X-Files and a producer named Philip Segal, a longtime fan of the show, had talked them into financing a TV movie of Dr Who to serve as the pilot for a new series. Doctor Who Magazine breathlessly covered the production all the way through, while Fox and the BBC negotiated a shared rights deal. It looked like the Dark Years might be coming to an end…
Next Week:
“Doctor Who, the Movie” : one feature-length episode, starring Paul McGann.
