Classic Who: The Celestial Toymaker
Sunday, 4 April 2010 12:43![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexOh, Michael Gough! How I have loved you ever since I saw Hammer's Dracula as a tiny child! How marvellous it is to see you enjoying a good Doctor Who villain role - and what a pity that only one episode of your performance now survives intact. Still, like Christopher Lee, Tom Baker and Alan Rickman, it is also true that one of your very best qualities as an actor is your voice - so thank goodness that, at least, remains.
The actual character of the Toymaker is slightly different from what I'd always assumed on hearing about this story, though. From the epithet 'celestial', I'd rather assumed that his power would extend further into the fabric of the universe than it does, and have him doing things like playing with the stars as though they were toys. Even when I realised that his powers were in fact limited to quite a small domain, I was quite surprised to discover how closely he actually adhered to the rules of his own games. Obviously he does have to be defeatable so that the regular characters can escape from him and go on with the series - but it all seemed a bit too easy in the end. I suppose maybe that is the point - what appears at first to be a terrifying all-powerful being turns out in the end to have little more than a few illusions up his sleeve, just like the Wizard of Oz.
We do get a very interesting stand-off between him and the Doctor at the end of the last episode, though, in which he tries to tempt the Doctor over to the Dark Side:
There is quite an impressive range of appropriate tropes and themes on show here. We've got scary clowns, live playing cards and a kitchen with a crotchety cook where fights break out (both from Alice in Wonderland), a 'sergeant' who looks distinctly like most portrayals of the Nutcracker to me, riddles as cliff-hangers (though annoyingly, never ones which the viewers had any chance of solving, since they all refer to things we haven't met in the story yet), commentary on what the 'rules' of games actually are, who gets to make them and what is 'fair', music-box style ballerinas (a reference to Coppelia? It's two years too early for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and a rip-off of Billy Bunter. The robots with televisions in their tummies anticipate the Teletubbies by a good 30 years. And I assume that the Toymaker's oriental costume is meant to reference the tradition of the Chinese as magicians and makers of automata: the kind of thing represented by this Youtube video.
We've touched on quests and illusions in The Keys of Marinus, and also entered a world of (apparent) fantasy in the House of Horrors sequence in The Chase. But this seems to be the first time that Doctor Who has set a whole story so explicitly in a world of fantastic, and particularly child-like, imagination. Puzzle games will, of course, be an important element in later stories like Three's Death to the Daleks, Four's Pyramids of Mars and The Five Doctors, while Eleven's first story has just reminded us how important the use of childhood tropes continues to be in Doctor Who. Talking of New Who, I note also that the Toymaker communicates with Dodo and Steven at one point through the TARDIS phone (though admittedly in what turns out to be a fake TARDIS), just like the child contacting the Doctor at the beginning of The Empty Child.
I've already mentioned the use of television screens as a meta-reference, and here we get it more literally than ever, as the Toymaker shows Steven clips of himself in The Daleks' Master Plan and The Massacre. So has the Toymaker been an avid Doctor Who fan all along? It's also very, very hard not to see the Doctor's reduction to a floating hand (which wasn't even William Hartnell's), and then the further removal of his voice, as emblematic of John Wiles' desire to get rid of William Hartnell - though a kinder reading is that it allowed Hartnell a much-needed rest, and also meant that he could read many of his lines directly from a script, thus by-passing his increasing memory problems.
Meanwhile, the side-lining of the Doctor puts the focus on Steven and Dodo instead. I don't think Steven comes out quite as well as he did when left entirely alone in The Massacre - but then again it would be difficult for any character to show very much depth, or any actor very much talent, in a plot based around playing what are deliberately portrayed as juvenile games. But we do see some attempts to bring out their different approaches to the situation. In particular, in episode 2 Steven wants to dismiss the cook and the sergeant on the grounds that they aren't real, but Dodo shows more compassion about the fact that they were once people, too, and is more ready to engage with them. She turns her feminine charms on the sergeant, with the result that he agrees to help them (at least temporarily).
Steven also gets a sudden burst of quality characterisation at the end of the final episode, when he is willing to go out of the TARDIS and make the last move in the Doctor's trilogic game, thus sacrificing himself to save the Doctor and Dodo. Given the reference to his experiences in The Daleks' Master Plan and The Massacre at the start of the story, I take this to represent the lasting impact which his inability to prevent Sara Kingdom's death or to save Anne Chaplette has had on him, and to constitute an attempt to redeem himself in retrospect. His protestation that "Something's got to be done! We can't just stand here and talk our way out of this!" is also a very classic encapsulation of what he stands for, and it is very appropriate that this also sparks off the Doctor's idea about how they can escape after all by using voice commands to finish the game remotely. I've taken a while to warm to Steven (mainly because of him not being Barbara), but I do quite like what he has become by this stage, and appreciate the developmental journey which he has been on to get there.
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.
The actual character of the Toymaker is slightly different from what I'd always assumed on hearing about this story, though. From the epithet 'celestial', I'd rather assumed that his power would extend further into the fabric of the universe than it does, and have him doing things like playing with the stars as though they were toys. Even when I realised that his powers were in fact limited to quite a small domain, I was quite surprised to discover how closely he actually adhered to the rules of his own games. Obviously he does have to be defeatable so that the regular characters can escape from him and go on with the series - but it all seemed a bit too easy in the end. I suppose maybe that is the point - what appears at first to be a terrifying all-powerful being turns out in the end to have little more than a few illusions up his sleeve, just like the Wizard of Oz.
We do get a very interesting stand-off between him and the Doctor at the end of the last episode, though, in which he tries to tempt the Doctor over to the Dark Side:
CELESTIAL TOYMAKER: Doctor, I offer you power. Power to corrupt, to destroy! Think of the exhilaration of that power! Serve me and live!To me, that reads awfully like a temptation of Christ scene. And given that the climactic speech in The Massacre had just established how lonely the Doctor is, I do believe that we can now say we have a Lonely God on our hands!
THE DOCTOR: Never! Never, my friend!
There is quite an impressive range of appropriate tropes and themes on show here. We've got scary clowns, live playing cards and a kitchen with a crotchety cook where fights break out (both from Alice in Wonderland), a 'sergeant' who looks distinctly like most portrayals of the Nutcracker to me, riddles as cliff-hangers (though annoyingly, never ones which the viewers had any chance of solving, since they all refer to things we haven't met in the story yet), commentary on what the 'rules' of games actually are, who gets to make them and what is 'fair', music-box style ballerinas (a reference to Coppelia? It's two years too early for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and a rip-off of Billy Bunter. The robots with televisions in their tummies anticipate the Teletubbies by a good 30 years. And I assume that the Toymaker's oriental costume is meant to reference the tradition of the Chinese as magicians and makers of automata: the kind of thing represented by this Youtube video.
We've touched on quests and illusions in The Keys of Marinus, and also entered a world of (apparent) fantasy in the House of Horrors sequence in The Chase. But this seems to be the first time that Doctor Who has set a whole story so explicitly in a world of fantastic, and particularly child-like, imagination. Puzzle games will, of course, be an important element in later stories like Three's Death to the Daleks, Four's Pyramids of Mars and The Five Doctors, while Eleven's first story has just reminded us how important the use of childhood tropes continues to be in Doctor Who. Talking of New Who, I note also that the Toymaker communicates with Dodo and Steven at one point through the TARDIS phone (though admittedly in what turns out to be a fake TARDIS), just like the child contacting the Doctor at the beginning of The Empty Child.
I've already mentioned the use of television screens as a meta-reference, and here we get it more literally than ever, as the Toymaker shows Steven clips of himself in The Daleks' Master Plan and The Massacre. So has the Toymaker been an avid Doctor Who fan all along? It's also very, very hard not to see the Doctor's reduction to a floating hand (which wasn't even William Hartnell's), and then the further removal of his voice, as emblematic of John Wiles' desire to get rid of William Hartnell - though a kinder reading is that it allowed Hartnell a much-needed rest, and also meant that he could read many of his lines directly from a script, thus by-passing his increasing memory problems.
Meanwhile, the side-lining of the Doctor puts the focus on Steven and Dodo instead. I don't think Steven comes out quite as well as he did when left entirely alone in The Massacre - but then again it would be difficult for any character to show very much depth, or any actor very much talent, in a plot based around playing what are deliberately portrayed as juvenile games. But we do see some attempts to bring out their different approaches to the situation. In particular, in episode 2 Steven wants to dismiss the cook and the sergeant on the grounds that they aren't real, but Dodo shows more compassion about the fact that they were once people, too, and is more ready to engage with them. She turns her feminine charms on the sergeant, with the result that he agrees to help them (at least temporarily).
Steven also gets a sudden burst of quality characterisation at the end of the final episode, when he is willing to go out of the TARDIS and make the last move in the Doctor's trilogic game, thus sacrificing himself to save the Doctor and Dodo. Given the reference to his experiences in The Daleks' Master Plan and The Massacre at the start of the story, I take this to represent the lasting impact which his inability to prevent Sara Kingdom's death or to save Anne Chaplette has had on him, and to constitute an attempt to redeem himself in retrospect. His protestation that "Something's got to be done! We can't just stand here and talk our way out of this!" is also a very classic encapsulation of what he stands for, and it is very appropriate that this also sparks off the Doctor's idea about how they can escape after all by using voice commands to finish the game remotely. I've taken a while to warm to Steven (mainly because of him not being Barbara), but I do quite like what he has become by this stage, and appreciate the developmental journey which he has been on to get there.
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.
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Date: Sunday, 4 April 2010 12:55 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 4 April 2010 13:15 (UTC)I don't think this is amongst the strongest Doctor Who stories, or even the strongest of this season. But it's worth at least one full viewing, I think.