Peter Halliday | Through the Shattered Lens

Remember when I was writing about classic Doctor Who for Halloween? Let’s get back to that with a look at the 17th season of the original series. This season is a controversial one. It featured some of the show’s worst serials but also one of its best. Today, it’s remembered for introducing Lalla Ward as the second Romana and for featuring Douglas Adams as the script editor.

One frequent complaint about this season is that, under Adams’s influence, the season featured more comedy than before and it sometimes felt more like a version of Hitchhiker’s than Doctor Who. There’s some truth to that but Adams’s influence also made Season 17 into a season unlike any other. Many of Adams’s ideas didn’t work but he did give us City of Death.

Destiny of the Daleks (1979, directed by Kim Grieve)

Destiny of the Daleks will always have a place in my heart because it opens with Romana regenerating into Lalla Ward. I will admit right now that, as a kid watching Doctor Who on PBS, I had a huge crush on Lalla Ward. So did Tom Baker. He ended up marrying Ward, though the marriage did not last for long. The relationship between Baker and Ward often seemed to reflected in the relationship between The Doctor and Ward’s Romana. Long before the Doctor Who reboot had people buzzing about the Doctor and Rose, fans of the original series knew that the Doctor and Romana were in love.

Destiny of the Daleks opens with Lalla Ward’s Romana cheerfully informing the Doctor that she’s decided to regenerate because she was bored and she’s decided to look like Princess Astra. The Doctor points out that Princess Astra is a real person and Romana can’t just take on her appearance. Romana then tries out several other appearances before The Doctor tells her to go with Astra. This goes against everything that the show had established about Time Lords and regeneration but at least we end up with Lalla Ward as Romana.

It’s too bad that the rest of the serial itself isn’t that interesting, even if it does feature the first appearance by the Daleks since Genesis of the Daleks. Davros returns as well, though he’s now more or less just another generic villain. The Daleks have a new enemy, a group of robots called the Movellans. The war between the Daleks and the Movellans are at a standstill because both are governed by logic. That goes against everything we know about the Daleks.

This was Terry Nation’s final script for Doctor Who. Reportedly, he was angered when Douglas Adams extensively rewrote the script. Nation moved to America and later created the original MacGyver.

City of Death (1979, directed by Michael Hayes)

City of Death is a Doctor Who classic. Romana and the Doctor visit modern-day Paris and the BBC found the money to allow the production to shoot on location. The Doctor and Romana walk around Paris, hand-in-hand. Count Scarlioni (Julian Glover) is actually an alien who wants to steal the Mona Lisa so that he can use it to fund his time travel experiments. Countess Sacrlioni (Catherine Schell) is a classic femme fatale. An American private investigator named Duggan (Tom Chabdon) wears a trench coat and solves problems by punching first and asking questions later. John Cleese and Eleanor Bron appears as museum patrons who think the TARDIS is a work of modern art. Douglas Adams later reworked bits of his script into Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Even people who cannot stand the rest of season 17 will agree that City of Death is one of the best of Tom Baker’s serials. City of Death balances humor and drama and it features an excellent villain in the form of Julian Glover. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are at their best, the story is genuinely interesting, and — much like Jago and Lightfoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang — Duggan deserved his own spin-off.

The Creature From The Pit (1979, directed by Christopher Barry)

This serial features the season’s first appearance by K-9, who is now voiced by David Brierley. Though this serial was third to be aired, it was the first to be filmed.

It’s not much of a serial. The TARDIS materializes on yet another feudal planet where Lady Adastra (Myra Frances) rules through fear. Lady Adastra’s critics are thrown in the pit, which is said to be home to a great monster. Instead, it’s home to a gentle blob that was sent to the planet as an ambassador. The Doctor helps the blob gets its freedom while Romana and K-9 are briefly detained by a group of bandits. Whatever potential the story had is short-circuited by the very unconvincing monster.

Nightmare of Eden (1979, directed by Alan Bromley and Graham Williams)

Two ships materialize in the same location and end up locked together. Then the TARDIS materializes and the Doctor offers to find a way to unlock the two ships. One of the ships is a luxury space liner and the passengers are soon being menaced by clawed monsters that look like stuntmen in rubber suits. The other ship is a trade ship that the Doctor comes to suspect is involved in a drug-running operation.

Once again, the monsters were not at all convincing but the Doctor investigating the interstellar drug traffic was at least something different. Much like City of Death, Nightmare of Eden, with its luxury spaceliner, had a few moments of satire that worked. Unlike City of Death, the supporting characters were not that interesting and Tom Baker himself just seemed to be going through the motions. Nightmare of Eden was better than a lot of Season 17 but it still ultimately comes across as being rather muddled.

The Horns of Nimon (1979 — 1980, directed by Kenny McBain)

The Horns of Nimon, is it terrible or is it great? Some defend it because of its allusions to Greek mythology, its deliberate humor, and the over-the-top performance of Graham Crowden as Soldeed, the leader of the Skonnan Empire. Others, like me, point out the turgid pacing, the bad creature effects, and the fact that the majority of the serial is just people walking around. Based on the myth of the minotaur, The Horns of Nimon looks and feels cheap. Crowden splits his pants at one point and I guess there was no time to stitch them back up. The whole thing is just too slapdash.

Shada (2018, directed by Pennant Roberts and Charles Norton)

For decades, Shada was the Holy Grail of Doctor Who. The final serial of the 17th century, Shada was in the process of filming when the BBC’s technicians went on strike. With 50% of the serial filmed, production was suspended and eventually canceled.

Afterwards, Shada developed a legendary reputation. It was often described as being a potential masterpiece, despite the fact that Season 17 was not one of Doctor Who‘s best. Footage of the Doctor and Romana visiting Cambridge was widely released and even used in The Five Doctors. The footage itself did look good but that was because it was mostly just Tom Baker and Lalla Ward relaxing and trading funny quips. There was very little of the actual plot to be found in those scenes.

Finally, in 2017, Shada aired. Animation was used for the unfilmed sequences and a white-haired Tom Baker even returned to shoot some new linking scenes. Shada was finally broadcast in the U.S. And, it wasn’t bad. It may not have been the masterpiece that so many assumed it would be but it was certainly an improvement on The Creature From The Pit, Nightmare on Eden, and the Horns of Nimon.

The Doctor and Romana travel to Cambridge to help out another timelord, Prof. Chronitis (Denis Carey). After Chronitis is apparently killed, The Doctor and Romana discover that space criminal Skagra (Christopher Neame) is seeking a Time Lord named Salyavin who is somewhere on the prison planet, Shada. Things get muddled once the Doctor actually travels to Shada but the Cambridge scenes are a definite highlight of the serial, a very British diversion for a very British show. Much as with City of Death, the best moments are the ones where Tom Baker and Lalla Ward just get to play off of each other without having to deal with any sort of intergalactic menace. Also, as with City of Death, Douglas Adams would borrows bits and pieces of Shada for Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Shada may not have been a masterpiece but it would have been a decent end for the seventeenth season.

The 1993 Best Picture nominee The Remains of the Day is a love story. Actually, it’s a series of love stories. Every character in the film is in love with something or someone. It’s just that, with one exception, they’re all so extremely British that it’s sometimes hard to tell.

The one exception is an American congressman named Trent Lewis (Christopher Reeve). As the film opens in the 1950s, he’s just purchased Darlington Hall, which is one of those country manors that hold so much history and romance for those of us who regularly watch Downton Abbey. Lewis is excited to have a British manor of his very own. It even comes with its very own butler, a Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins).

As we see in flashback, Stevens previously worked at Darlington Hall when it was owned by Lord Darlington (James Fox). In the 1930s, Lord Darlington may have loved Britain but he was also dangerously naive about the rise of Nazi Germany. Actually, to say that he was naive might be letting Lord Darlington off too easily. When we first meet Lord Darlington, he seems like a well-meaning but hopelessly out-of-touch aristocrat. He has so little understanding of the real world that he even asks Stevens to have the sex talk with his godson (played, somewhat inevitably, by Hugh Grant), who happens to be close to 30 years old at the time and, one would presume, far beyond the age when the talk is really necessary. When we first see Lord Darlington, who is hosting a conference on how to best deal with the rise of the Nazis, arguing that Britain should ignore the rise of Hitler, it’s easy to assume that he’s just as clueless about Germany as he is about his godson. But then, eventually, Lord Darlington orders Stevens to fire two Jewish maids and you’re forced to reconsider everything that you previously believed about him.

And then there’s Ms. Kenton (Emma Thompson), who worked as a housekeeper for Lord Darlington. She loves the repressed Mr. Stevens but continually finds herself frustrated by Stevens’s professional detachment. Unlike Stevens, Ms. Kenton doesn’t hold back on her opinions but, when she finally has a chance to stand up for her beliefs and defy the status quo at Darlington Hall, she backs down.

And then there’s Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens may be one of the most emotionally repressed characters in the history of the movies but the entire film revolves around trying to figure out what or who Stevens loves. It’s a little too easy to assume that he’s in love with Ms. Kenton, even though that will be the natural instinct of most viewers. While he obviously feels affection towards her, he can never bring himself to truly express it. (That said, getting a letter from her appears to be the only thing that can actually inspire him to leave the safety of Darlington Hall and venture into the outside world.) While it seems, at times, that he might love Lord Darlington, Stevens himself prefers to say that he respected Lord Darlington and, after the war, Stevens seems to have no trouble staying on at Darlington Hall even after its bought by Congressman Lewis. Much like the ghosts in The Shining, Stevens has always been the butler and always will be.

Ultimately, Mr. Stevens loves his job. He loves being a butler. He’s a man so dedicated to his job that he even continues to work even while his father is dying in the next room. He loves making sure that everything’s perfect at Darlington Hall and he never bothers with worrying about how imperfect the world outside Darlington Hall may be. In that way, Stevens is a stand-in for all of the European leaders who willfully chose to ignore what was happening in Germany in the days leading up to World War II. And, much like those European leaders, he finds himself forced to work for an American in the aftermath.

As a film, The Remains of the Day can be frustrating but in a good way. Mr. Stevens is such a repressed and detached character that, much like Ms. Kenton, we’re always tempted to give up on him. Fortunately, Anthony Hopkins is one of those actors who can suggest so much with just a pause in his dialogue or a quick glance to the side. You look at his sad eyes and suddenly, you know everything that Mr. Stevens cannot bring himself to say. Emma Thompson has a somewhat easier role because Ms. Kenton at least gets to say what she’s thinking but she still bring a lot of depth to the role and has a lot of chemistry with Hopkins. And finally, you’ve got James Fox who is so comically befuddled that it’s all the more shocking to consider all of the pain that he — intentionally or not — is partially responsible for.

The Remains of the Day is a great film for all of us Downton Abbey-loving history nerds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nlyIvHY1Xw