Program note: “It’s the end… but the moment has been prepared for.” I started these “Dr Who from the Start” reviews as a series of Facebook posts in October 2011. At first they were quick 1-paragraph opinions with a set of extra details added on in the comments. When I started, Facebook still imposed a length limit on status updates, longer than Twitter’s but still short, but they didn’t impose a length on comments. So it was in the comments that the posts started growing longer and longer… until Facebook removed the length limit and the main posts also started to grow. I finally realized the series needed to come over here to a blog, a change I made partway through the Tom Baker years.
Along the way I’ve only done the televised Dr Who stories— I didn’t review the two Peter Cushing movies, or the stage plays, or any other “side” material. I haven’t even done the Big Finish Eighth Doctor audio dramas, even though Night of the Doctor established them as canonical. So it is perhaps odd that I’m going to finish my series with a story that was both non-televised and is entirely non-canonical. Why am I covering Scream of the Shalka to wrap up this series? Two reasons: it was as close as Dr Who came to having a 40th anniversary special, and for a brief period in 2003 we, the fans, believed this was going to be the new series of Dr Who.
See down at the bottom for a bit on my future plans for this blog. But now, on to the business of the day:
“Tell me honestly— am I irritating you yet?” —The Doctor
Story
The TARDIS materializes in the village of Lannet— and a very annoyed new Doctor emerges. The TARDIS has been diverted, it’s not the destination he had in mind, and he finds himself locked out of the TARDIS and forced to investigate his surroundings.
Lannet is a village cut off from the outside world and living in fear. A mysterious sound from deep underground has everyone terrified. Somehow the noise tells people what their new underground neighbors want— which is for everyone to sit quietly in their homes and not call any outside authorities for help— and anyone who disobeys faces deadly “punsihment.” Even now the Doctor is strangely uninterested in helping. With the help of local Alison Cheney (the only one of the villagers brave enough to stand up to what’s happening, and already clear companion material) the Doctor does something clever to temporarily free the villagers from control— but then he wants to just let them call in the authorities while he leaves them to sort the rest out themselves. Only the fact that the underground creatures have stolen the TARDIS forces him to stay.
Soon the military is on the scene. They don’t appear to be UNIT but they have the Doctor’s UNIT file and more-or-less coerce him into playing his old scientific advisor role. The civilians are evacuated while the Doctor and the soldiers go underground to meet the Shalka, alien invaders who rule “a billion worlds” and aim to add Earth to their empire. When none of the evacuated villagers arrive at their destinations, the Doctor and the soldiers realize the Shalka’s real scheme: not just the people of Lannet, but in similar villages all around the world, the Shalka have been modifying their captives into biological weapons designed to destroy the Earth’s atmosphere and convert it into a world suitable for the Shalka themselves to colonize— and the Doctor has less than an hour to rescue Alison and find a way to stop the Shalka from destroying the human race.
Review
Scream of the Shalka, Dr Who’s first animated story, was never broadcast on television— instead it was posted, in six weekly installments, on the Dr Who page of the official BBC website. It was written by Paul Cornell, who had contributed several novels to the Virgin and BBC Dr Who book series and would go on to also write for the new series. The Paul McGann movie was something of a stylistic hybrid of Classic and the new series. Shalka adheres more closely to Classic’s style and structure but also foreshadows some aspects of the new. The Shalka Doctor’s way of speaking and frequent snarky asides sound a lot like the dialog of the new series. And much like the new series would introduce the Doctor still mourning over the events of the Time War, Shalka gives its Doctor a tragedy in his backstory— which we learn enough about to understand his character arc, but not enough that it ceases to be a mystery.
Before the story’s over we’ve learned that a woman the Doctor was traveling with was killed, and he blames himself. But companions have died before, though rarely. Why was this loss lead him to abandon his former way of life? We get a number of hints, but no more. In fact there are a lot of mysteries about this new Doctor (pictured at right). He’s decided to give up his adventurous life but some unseen power is forcing him to carry on anyway (is it the Time Lords? We never quite find out). He seems to be traveling with the Master— but it turns out to be a robot in the Master’s form, and it’s strongly implied the Master’s consciousness was transferred into the robot. The Master tells Alison that he helped the Doctor at a low point in his life, and the Doctor rewarded him by giving him this chance to redeem himself. (“It was a dreadful mistake on my part,” says the Master, “not choosing death over being forced to spend eternity hearing him be right all the time.”) Was this low point the death of the unknown companion? At another point, the Doctor is unconscious and Alison checks for a pulse. Instead of the usual two heartbeats, she finds no pulse or heartbeat at all. “Puzzling, isn’t it?” the Doctor remarks as he wakes up— but we never get an explanation. Could it be the Doctor’s consciousness has also been transferred into a robot body, like the Master?
All of this makes the Doctor a more mysterious character than he’s been since Ian and Barbara met his first incarnation in an old junkyard— it’s rather more effectively mysterious than the hints dropped as part of the “Cartmel Masterplan” in the final years of the Classic series.Whatever happened in this Doctor’s past, Shalka takes him through a complete character arc over the course of the story, as he finds his way back to being the Doctor we know. He says several times early on that he’s washed up, that he can’t do it anymore, and at one point when it looks like he’s about to die, he seems actually happy about it— until he suddenly has a very clever idea and not only saves himself, but also starts climbing back out of his depression. It’s not often we get to see a character as well-established as the Doctor go through such a distinct character arc in a Dr Who story, and if Shalka had turned out to be the way Dr Who was going to go forward, it would have been a great reintroduction of the character.
In all, Shalka’s a terrific Dr Who story— but it gets let down a bit by the animation quality. Because of limitations of the technology in 2003, the animation of each episode is strictly limited with static “sprites” sliding around on the screen. The animation’s better than a mere slideshow— but not by all that much. In particular there’s almost no room for “acting” on the part of the animated characters, whose faces never change expression. Internet connections at the time didn’t support full-motion video at anything but tiny resolutions, and the producers were determined not to keep viewers waiting for a file to download before playback started, so they worked to keep the bandwidth as low as possible. given the limitations, the animators did great work— in fact Shalka won an award for its use of Flash animation— but when you pop a DVD into the player in 2015 the limitations become more obvious than the virtues.
Bandwidth, though, cannot excuse another weakness of the animation, which strictly resulted from a low budget. If during playback of a single episode of the 6-part serial, we’re stuck with a limited number of sprites, there’s no technical reason they can’t use different drawings in completely different playback files. But they didn’t: to save money (not bandwidth) they basically just did one drawing for every character and used it in every episode. So, while in the story the Doctor goes through a significant character arc, on screen we get this:
At left, the aloof and depressed Doctor in episode 1. At right, the cheerful and back-to-his-old-self Doctor in episode 6.
Still— limitations of both budget and technology are an old story for Dr Who, and I’m always one to focus on the writing first. Scream of the Shalka is a fine addition to the series’ history, and while I wouldn’t trade the return of “proper” live action Dr Who on TV, as with the Paul McGann movie there’s a part of me that wishes I could have seen how it would have gone on.
Behind the Scenes
The idea of doing an animated, web-based series of Dr Who came from a small circle of fans who, in the late 90s, were in charge of the BBC’s official website for the series. Late to the technological party as it had often been before, the BBC was only starting to realize at the turn of the millennium that a web presence might actually be something worth having, and at that point there probably wouldn’t have been a Dr Who page anywhere on their site if their nascent webmaster department wasn’t staffed largely by fans. The official site got very little attention, but the people maintaining the overall BBC site always made sure it hung around, and they occasionally managed to squeeze in something to add to the long list of non-TV Dr Who getting made at the time.
Cooperating with Big Finish, they’d posted a few of Big Finish’s audio adventures with Flash-animation illustrations; not animated, just slide shows, but generally drawing approval from fans. In the early 2000s, they introduced the “TARDIS webcam” which showed images of the police box in various CGI alien landscapes, with a touch of animation on the “atmospherics” to give the feeling that it was a live webcam feed. The location would change at random intervals, and I can remember dropping by the site now and again, always half hoping to see the Doctor emerge from (or go into) the TARDIS— even though I knew of course that would never actually happen.
As the 40th anniversary of Dr Who approached, the Dr Who web team (Martin Trickey, James Goss and Mario Dubois) realized the BBC wasn’t going to anything to commemorate it, and started to develop the idea of launching a new series of Dr Who on the website, via flash animation. With great dedication, they set about securing the necessary rights as well as fund-raising for the project. Initially, they had a plan to release a full “season” of twelve episodes, comprising 3 4-part serials. As things developed, they had to scale that down to the single 6-part serial that became Scream of the Shalka.
After fundraising and getting the proper permissions, they got Paul Cornell to write the script and went in search of a producer— not an easy task given the massive disinterest the BBC had in Dr Who at the time. Like the Paul McGann movie a few years earlier, it was a long and tangled road to get things started, but by the summer of 2003 production was under way.
A number of the cast would later appear in the new series of Dr Who. Richard E. Grant played the Doctor, and would go on to play villain Dr Simeon/The Great Intelligence in Matt Smith’s final season. Sophie Okonedo played Alison, and then appeared as Liz 10 in The Beast Below and The Pandorica Opens. Derek Jacobi voiced the Master and would reprise the role, in the guise of Professor Yana, in Utopia.
And while they were recording the episodes, a BBC actor wandered over from a neighboring studio where he was shooting another series, asked what they were up to, and when they told him they were making Dr Who got all excited and asked if he could be in it. He’d been a Dr Who fan all his life, he said, and had dreamed of one day appearing in the series. The production team said sure he could be in it, and the cameo role of Warehouse Caretaker Number Two went to David Tennant.
Doctor Who Magazine was all over the upcoming production, despite one disastrously mishandled press conference early on, and fans were talking about Dr Who’s new future as a web-based, animated series. And then some alarming rumbles started to come out of the BBC executive offices. Some execs started telling the press they’d love to have Dr Who come back, but it was impossible to work out the rights. Alarmed, our intrepid IT heroes sent their boss Martin Trickey off to ask what was going on, taking with him all the work they’d done on securing the rights. He came back, the others noted, with word that the rights were okay and they could carry on— but he also seemed to know something, something he wasn’t allowed to tell them.
Not long after, writer Paul Cornell got an apologetic phone call from someone named Russell T Davies. He was sorry to preempt their hard work in getting Shalka off the drawing board, but… the rest of the production crew soon also learned the news: a new series of Dr Who was coming back to the BBC. As one of the Shalka team remembers, “It was the best worst news imaginable.”
In the summer of 2003 the BBC publicly announced Dr Who was coming back, and fan attention immediately switched away from Scream of the Shalka to following the progress of the new live action series. When Shalka’s first episode hit the web in November 2003 (to celebrate Dr Who’s 40th anniversary, as it was originally meant to do) it was already old news.
But with that last bittersweet detail to Dr Who’s long history, the Dark Years were finally over.
Next Week:
Well, that’s it for “Doctor Who From the Start.” I may eventually decide to come back and resume the journey with the new series, but right now I don’t have any plans for it. I love the new series, but— I’m an old school fan, and I’ll always love Classic more (even its lesser eras). I’ll probably get back to reviewing new series episodes as they come out. I was planning to do that in parallel with the posts about Classic, but found that one long rambling post a week was as much writing time as I could give to this blog.
What happens to the blog now? I always intended “Bigger on the Inside” to be about more than just Dr Who, but as I just said— one long rambling post a week was enough. Now that I’ve completed that, I still plan to post an article more-or-less once a week, and to branch out on topics. I have ideas for posts about writing in general, and about my own books in particular. I hope that if you’ve followed my blog for the Dr Who, you’ll decide to still follow it as it moves on.
And for myself I have one particular extra plan. Part of what I’ve tried to do with the from-the-start series was to look at every episode in context, as much as possible as viewers at the time would have seen it, and to that end I’ve held myself to a strict rationing: since starting in October 2011, I have not watched any Classic Dr Who except the next story in the series. The only exception was when the lost episodes of Enemy of World and The Web of Fear were recovered and released on DVD: of course I watched those!)
So what’s the first, next thing I have planned? This weekend I’m going to binge-watch my favorite episodes of Classic Dr Who, in the wrong order.
Until next time!
