Overview: Doctor Who: The Cartmel Era

Sly and Sophie Aldred formed the best TARDIS team
this side of Five/Nyssa.

Written between the 1st and 2nd of July 2012.

I was a lot more apprehensive about this part of the series. I'd barely seen any McCoy growing up, but I had heard about his era in both positive and negative terms - he was daft at first, then manipulative and dark in a creepy way. Add to that my dislike of Mel and the knowledge that Season 24 is oft considered one of the worst by "fan consensus", and I knew I was in for a ride. Perhaps, I wagered, I wouldn't like it. That might be a change for me, the man who likes some of the worst Who ever made, I might be able to write those fun kinds of scathing reviews that inspired me to start this blog in the first place.
     I had no such luck, and for that I am glad. Even in Season 24, I found the Cartmel era to be a source of either constant fun or constant fascination, ranging from the hilarious antics of Time and the Rani to the dark, primal battles present in Survival. Even where the scripts themselves weren't very good, the characters' humour and characterisation made everything hold together, and there isn't a single serial here that left me truly disappointed - even the depressingly underacheiving Silver Nemesis still has quite a few moments that make me chuckle, and is another of Seven's great chess games.
     Key to this era's success is most definitely McCoy himself, who is an excellent actor. He's perfectly able to balance comedy and drama, his character ranging from the light-hearted, analogy-mixing buffoon to the manipulative chessmaster who seems to revel in the shortest of games. Importantly, he was the first Doctor in a long time (think late Hartnell) to be a true pacifist, even if it meant turning his friends into weapons to fight his battles for him. This can be seen nowhere better than in the closing scenes of Survival, where The Doctor, almost drawn in by the influence of the Cheetah Planet, nearly kills The Master before resurfacing and defying it, enforcing his pacifistic will. It's also seen in a wonderful bit from The Happiness Patrol, where The Doctor manages to get a Sniper to throw away his weapon using only his mind.

I used to hate Mel, but in Season 24 she's
just really awesome.

     The companions are consistantly good in this era, although Mel does have a few issues. She's not a bad companion per se, and her portrayl in Season 24 was enough to make me forget my larger problems with her from Season 23. She's really quite a lot of fun, and her chirpyness, which initially put me off, helped to save the season from total disaster. However, the problem with Mel, especially when compared with Ace, is that she doesn't really have a characterisation; it's once mentioned where she lived, and that she was a computer programmer, but that never has any effect on any of the stories. Sure, it would have been weird for her to solve problems with her knowledge of the ridiculously primitive (by today's standards) 80s computer programming languages, but it would have made the character more of a presence instead of simply some fit ginger bird who pops in for six stories then buggers off with Robert Holmes' version of Captain Jack.

     Ace is much more interesting, and this is probably because she's one of the most well-developed companions that the series ever had. More modernistic writing leading into the Nineties saw a much more definite move away from Something for the Dads and a greater focus on characterisation. As a result, we got to see a hell of a lot more of Ace's background - her family, her hometown and her childhood. Sure, we'd seen companions' families before, but they were all aliens - this was the first time a contempory companion had been given such depth, and the development of Sophie Aldred's character from the boistrous teenage girl of Dragonfire into the mature young woman of The Curse of Fenric is a wonder to behold. If I have any complaints, it's mainly that the 27-year-old Aldred never really came off convincingly as the 16-year-old Ace, but that's purely surface level and there's so much right with the character that I can make that fall squarely into my suspension of disbelief.
     Over all else, this era was a pioneer for interesting sci-fi ideas. Cartmel insisted that he hire new writers instead of lending from the previous era, and this brought the show screaming towards the innovation of the early Nineties with great swiftness. This works best in the final season, with stories like Ghost Light; an example of the era's metaphorical prowess. I interpret Ghost Light as a large metaphor for the Evolution vs Creationism debate, and the anger that bubbles up on both sides. My favourite of these, however, has to be the parable of The Happiness Patrol, which is a brutal, brutal satire of Thatcher's government. The Cartmel Era showed the world that Doctor Who still had good stories to tell.
      I can't do an overview of the Cartmel without discussing his eponymous masterplan. Cartmel wanted to bring mystery back to the Doctor after the eras after Troughton had revealed more and more about his origins and his society of origin. His plan was to reveal that the Doctor had been created (or loomed) from the genetic material of the one of the Time Lord founders, making him incredibly powerful. Eventually, Ace would have gone to the Time Lord Acadamy in Season 27, and trained to be a Time Lady despite her human heritage. This only really pops up in three of the serials, but I'm really not a fan of it and there's a small part of me that's sorta glad that this never happened. The Doctor, as we saw in Season 24, is a chaotic wizard that flies from place to place, righting wrongs and changing lives. He's not a flipping God.

Farewell, Sly. It's all backwards from here.

     My favourite stories of the era? The Happiness Patrol is just 75 minutes of pure awesome, showing The Doctor topple a regime in a single night, a regime that slashed at the contempory government in a way that was subtle enough to not cause trouble and obvious enough to get people thinking. The Kandyman is an excellent creation, a satire of modern capitalism, and he's also scary enough for the kids. Another favourite is Time and the Rani - it's perhaps not the best of stories, but it's far better structured than either of the Rani's other stories, and it's brilliant fun from start to finish. My most disappointing story is probably Silver Nemesis, which tried so much and managed to accomplish so little. It's also where the Cartmel Masterplan is at it's least subtle, which may or may not have something to do with my dislike of it.
      The Cartmel Era is 12 bloody brilliant serials, all of which show that Doctor Who was heading in a really good direction. I enjoy every minute of it, and despite a few issues here or there, it's been one of my most fulfilling examinations of Who so far. I personally will miss McCoy, Langford and Aldred, and I hope that some day they'll get to revisit Who again. The era was intelligent, fun and certainly one of the best.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: I rewind eight years to Season 18.