Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Part Four

Mags turning into a weredoge gets Captain Cook a high score from the audience. He tries to give the Doctor some exposition but the incidental music is going as crazy as Mags (maybe it is being performed by another weredoge?) and it is very hard to make out what the Captain is saying.

The little manny in the audience's eyes glow. The Doctor escapes from the ring but Mags chases him (doggys like chases). He goes up to the three audience members and all of their eyes glow now and this somehow causes the Doctor to fall back into the ring. He is only saved when Mags turns upon Captain Cook and the Captain goes

Ace and Kingpin look in the space bus for the missing piece of the medallion. The bus conductor robot tries to kill Ace, but when Kingpin finds the missing piece he gets his memories back. He remembers the robot has a self-destruct button and gets Ace to press it. Instead of simply going "blargh I am ded" the robot goes

Mags scares the clowns so she and the Doctor can get away. The mannys in the audience "want more" so the clowns turn on the Ringmaster and Morgana, making them do a disappearing magic act. Then all of the clowns do the thing with their hands.

I somehow don't think the Ringmaster and Morgana will be coming back. It's like Paul Daniels' 1987 Hallowe'en special all over again!

The mannys in the audience want the Doctor. He goes back so Mags can run away, and the clowns chase her (doggys like chases) in their scary black death car.

When the Doctor goes back into the Circus he goes into a special effect and winds up in a different sort of arena - one that is old and stone and not the Circus from before. The three audience members are still there, but they also look very different - made of stone with sinister faces.

The Doctor recognises them as "the gods of Ragnarok."

It makes sense that there are three gods of Ragnarok because there are three cat gods: Ceiling Cat, who sees all; The Maker of Cats, who made us into cats out of socks; and The Hoff. Nobody knows why The Hoff is the third cat god, but he is. Unlike religious mannys, who worship their gods, we are cats so we merely acknowledge our gods as equals.

The gods of Ragnarok are obviously bad gods because they use their giant eye to watch things from below, like Basement Cat does, while Ceiling Cat watches from above and is a good cat.

"I have fought the gods of Ragnarok all through time."

says the Doctor. While you might think that the Doctor has never met the gods of Ragnarok before now, remember that everything in this story is a metaphor for something else outside the story, including the gods. The gods say

"Entertain us!"
"Entertain us or die! So long as you entertain us you may live."
"When you no longer entertain us you die!"

The Doctor does magic tricks for the gods. They shoot some pewpewpews at him, but they don't kill him yet. They say

"You are nearing the end, Doctor."

and

"You are on the brink of destruction, Doctor. We want something bigger, something better."

This gives us a clue as to who the gods represent in the show but, just as this story has been doing throughout, I'm going to hold back on revealing the answers for now...

Mags meets up with Ace and Kingpin. Ace lures the clowns to where Chekhov's Bellboy's robot from part one is, and because she has the remote control now she can has it turn its pewpewpew eyes upon the clowns.

Five clowns come out of the clown car, which is not that many really but what can we expect on a BBC budget?

Ace, Kingpin and Mags steal the clown car to get back to the Circus quickly. The gods make Captain Cook come back to life as a zombie and he steals the medallion from Kingpin just before he can throw it down the well to where the Doctor is.

Ace and Mags together knock it out of Zombie Captain Cook's hands so it falls into the well, where the Doctor catches it and uses it to reflect the gods' pewpewpews back upon them. The gods and the "Dark Circus" (as Kingpin calls it) collapse, so the gods must have been load-bearing baddys.

The Circus tent explodes behind him as the Doctor walks away, not looking at it.

Kingpin and Mags decide to make a new Circus, one that can't possibly go wrong, mew. They invite the Doctor and Ace to join them but the Doctor declines, and the last line of the story is him saying

"I find circuses a little... sinister."

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is a flawed classic. It has great and memorable baddys, and a plot which manages to be both an exciting mystery and, at the same time, an allegory for Doctor Who's place in the world at the time when it was 25 years old. It is a fresh and original story, and a fine way to conclude the anniversary season.

It isn't perfect - the mystery is so slow in playing out its hand that the first half of the story can be quite hard to follow at times, and this is not helped by the incidental music intruding on some key lines of dialogue.

There are a lot of characters who get introduced quite quickly - some of them only existing to get killed off or to provide some early exposition - with the result that they end up quite broad and one-dimensional. The character of Whizzkid is an example of this, as well as being an unnecessary and unwelcome caricature of Doctor Who fans.

"It was your show all along, wasn't it?"

Ace asks the Doctor. The gods of Ragnarok are the BBC Management. They can't kill the Doctor while he is still entertaining, not even though they want to, not even though he is their greatest enemy and stands against everything they believe in. They want "something bigger, something better" and yet are prepared to sit there while the Doctor performs his low-budget magic tricks one after another.
And then by the time they try to kill him off, it is too late.

Despite the TV series getting cancelled the following year Doctor Who is, of course, still with us - and by that I don't just mean the new series that came back to BBC TV in 2005. Target novelisations of the TV stories were available before they began to be released on VHS (and later DVD). In the 1990s they would be repeated on the satellite channel UK Gold, allowing cats and mannys who were too young to have seen them on the BBC to watch them and become fans that way. Plus there were many original book stories, comic strips, Doctor Who Magazine and Big Finish... and all that before the internets truly came along!

By its 25th birthday in 1988 Doctor Who had grown to be far more than just another TV programme. It was The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Part Three

Ace is locked in a room with Bellboy where she learns he made the robots, including the random pewpewpew robot from part one. Or maybe it is not so random after all? Maybe it is Chekhov's Pewpewpew Robot? Now past the halfway point, it seems we are beginning to turn the corner in unraveling the mystery as Ace starts to get the backstory of the Circus from Bellboy.

The Doctor makes a break for it and runs away from the clown robots, so they immediately turn on Captain Cook and capture him instead. The Doctor meets Deadbeat and talks to him, then Deadbeat takes the Doctor to where Ace and Bellboy are. Bellboy says Deadbeat's name is really Kingpin.

Morgana, the clown and the Ringmaster all argue about what to do, and we see that they are all scared of failing the secret masters they serve.

Now back in the cage, Whizzkid talks to Captain Cook about the Circus, saying

"Although I never got to see the early days, I know it's not as good as it used to be but I'm still terribly interested."

Because he is a FAN. Do you see what they did there? Whizzkid is a fan of the Circus but he also acts like a stereotypical fan of Doctor Who itself, whom the programme makers have decided to have a go at like Number Two in Fall Out "turning upon and biting the hand that feeds him."

This petty and unwarranted attack continues as Captain Cook tricks Whizzkid into going into the Circus ring before him:

"Oh, yes, of course. I mean, there's no real danger, is there? Really?"
"Only for those without resource or imagination or panache. I'm sure you have all those qualities."

Do you get it? Is the programme making itself blatant enough? It is saying that fans lack all three of these qualities themselves, and so they have to get them vicariously from watching the Circus or Doctor Who. I'm only surprised they did not go the whole distance and have Whizzkid's appearance be that of a stereotypical Doctor Who fan as well. But Whizzkid is a manny, he is not a long cat, nor is he made from socks.

Kingpin and Bellboy both have missing memories so they can't tell the Doctor and Ace everything about what is going on in this story, which is important for the story's pacing because it helps preserve some of the mystery for later.

"It's this place, you see. It does things to you."

says Bellboy, to give an excuse for this laser-guided amnesia.

The Ringmaster does another rap to introduce Whizzkid to the Circus ring. Like Nord he gets nil points and then pewpewpewed, with only his glasses remaining for the Ringmaster to hold up.

The Doctor, Ace and Kingpin escape while Bellboy stays behind, and when the clowns come he makes the robot ones kill him while the real clown does more business with his hand. This buys the others precious time needed for them to escape.

The Doctor, Ace and Kingpin go down to the cave with the eye and they see that Kingpin's medallion has an eye on it so they know it is important and related to the eye in the well. But the medallion is borked and so they have to find the missing bit before they can progress this plot any further. The Doctor gives himself up so that Ace and Kingpin can go look for it, and also so that he can be present in the end-of-part-three cliffhanger scene.

The Ringmaster does yet another rap, but this one is shorter than the ones he did before, subtly suggesting that he is running out of ideas and so hinting that it will not be long before he ceases to be entertaining and the Circus masters will then turn on him.

The Doctor, Captain Cook and Mags all go out into the ring together. Captain Cook makes them create a moonlike lighting effect that causes Mags to transform into a weredoge and the Doctor to make a face. Cliffhanger!

Part three is a really good episode in which all the setup of the first two parts starts to pay off at last, while still keeping much back for the grand finale next time.

However, the scenes with Whizzkid just seem mean-spirited and spiteful on the part of the programme makers. His presence in the story adds very little - only another victim for the Circus - while at the same time he seems out of place in this sci-fi universe and thus it detracts from the show's credibility.

Whizzkid sets a sad and unwelcome precedent for geeky characters in the new series of Doctor Who to be caricatures of Doctor Who fans, such as those we see in Love & Monsters or Day of the Doctor (in these examples they are actual fans of the Doctor, not of a proxy like the Circus is here). I have to wonder why the producers feel the need to do this, what is it that is gained by baiting and insulting your show's fans to their faces?

We will probably never know the answer for certain, but to guess at it we could do worse than considering that, if Whizzkid is a stand-in for fans of Doctor Who (which he is) and the Circus is a stand-in for Doctor Who the show (which it is) then the stand-ins for the producer must be the Ringmaster... a character forced to perform again and again for an insatiable audience, rapidly running out of ideas and secretly longing to escape before their inevitable end at the pewpewpews of their uncaring masters.

Little wonder, then, they are so insecure that they see any criticism, no matter how constructive or well-meaning, as an ad manninem attack upon their person and hence respond in kind. The fans and the producers both have a deep-seated love for the show - it is The Greatest Show in the Galaxy after all - and ought to be on the same side, but they have been divided and set against each other by the secret masters of the Circus.

So just who are these secret masters and what do they represent? We will have to wait to find out in the final part of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Part Two

The clown waves at the Doctor and Ace to beckon them into the Circus. He is always waving his hands around, perhaps BRIAN BLESSED told him to do it?

They go inside, and Ace almost walks out again straight away after encountering the terrible gypsy stereotype that is Morgana. It just goes to show that if Li H'sen Chang had turned to out to have been John Bennett in yellowface all along within the confines of the programme then they might have gotten away with it.

It is very dark inside the Circus. There are three mannys in the audience besides the Doctor and Ace, so the sounds as though the Circus is packed full of many mannys clapping must be an illusion. Again this is an illusion inside the show itself, and not just the BBC saving money. This is an important distinction, and it is vital that we note that this is deliberate or else the whole show might look to us like a chronically underfunded TV programme on its last leg.

The Circus show begins with some clowns doing acrobatics and then the Ringmaster comes in and does another rap. He wants the Doctor to perform in the Circus and he starts rhyming in response to whatever the Doctor says. Ace has a bad feeling about this, sensibly enough, as do I - the rhyming quickly gets annoying... but then it is supposed to be annoying within the story, to put the other characters off balance mentally so the Ringmaster can assert dominance over them.

The clown notices that Ace has Flowerchild's earring, but she refuses to tell him where she got it. Ace runs away and the clown sends the other clowns, his robot minions, to chase her.

The Doctor is put in a cage with Captain Cook, Mags and Nord. Outside of the cage is Deadbeat, a manny whose "mind's completely gone" according to the Captain. The clowns come to take Nord away.

While escaping, Ace hears Morgana and the Ringmaster talking. Morgana wants to get away like Bellboy and Flowerchild (well, like them only more successfully) but the Ringmaster and the clown are in charge and she is afraid of them... or of someone or something else that we haven't seen yet.

Nord is killed by some sort of pewpewpew when he fails to entertain in the Circus ring, scoring nil points from the audience jury, but we don't see exactly what happens because this story is still letting its mystery out slowly. We only glimpse what happens from the Doctor's point of view in the cage, and then we see the Ringmaster hold up what is left of Nord.

A new character arrives at the Circus. He is called Whizzkid (according to the credits) and he annoys Morgana because he is a fan of the Circus and is enthusiastic about being in it. The Doctor and Mags escape from the cage by clubbing the robot clown guards using juggling pins, but Captain Cook stays behind.

Ace is still trying to escape from the Circus, which seems to be bigger inside than out just like the TARDIS, so this is harder than it first appears and even cutting through the Circus tent only gets her to another part of the Circus. She is caught by Deadbeat and the clown.

The Doctor and Mags are the ones on the loose inside the Circus now, and they find some stones with carvings on them which add another layer of mystery to whatever is going on here. The stones lead into caves and then to a pit where the Doctor sees an eye, suggesting that we may be in for a Lord of the Rings crossover. Captain Cook and some robot clowns turn up to capture them, confirming that Captain Cook is not just useless, he is actively working for the baddys! This revelation is the end of the episode.

A lot happens in this episode, but because there is so much mystery going on it is quite confusing and not much of it makes sense in isolation - we shall have to wait for the as-yet-unrevealed details of the plot to become revealed to us in the remaining episodes before it will all make sense in the end.

I hope. Mew.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Part One

"Now welcome folks, I'm sure you'd like to know
We're at the start of one big circus show
There are acts that are cool and acts that amaze
Some acts are scary and some acts will daze
Acts of all kinds, and you can count on that
From folks that fly to disappearing acts
There are lots of surprises for the family
At the greatest show in the galaxy!
So many strange surprises, I'm prepared to bet
Whatever you've seen before... you ain't seen nothing yet."

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is the last story in season 25, and what better way to celebrate the show's 25th birthday than with a self-referential title, a show within a show? It stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace, and begins with a rap performed by the Circus Ringmaster, which concludes with him looking directly into camera and addressing us watching at home, telling us that we "ain't seen nothing yet" in a similar way to how the Doctor occasionally wishes us "Merry Christmas" or lets us know that even the sonic screwdriver won't get him out of this particular situation.

This is a brave opening, considering that we know nothing about the Ringmaster or the Circus at this stage, but it succeeds as a hook because the final line, and the Ringmaster's look, hints at something sinister going to happen.

The next thing that happens is that one of the Space Mouses from Blakes 7's Stardrive shows up with a big space motorbike and an even bigger space helmet, driving around on a planet looking for Avon or, failing that, the Circus.

The Doctor and Ace get involved in the story when an advert for the Circus materialises inside the TARDIS. It plays like something from out of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or maybe it is just that the similar rhythm of this story's title has already made me think of that? The Doctor is keen to go, and Ace is convinced by a simple bit of reverse psychology playing on her fear of clowns.

To demonstrate that, in this instance, Ace's coulrophobia isn't irrational at all, back on the planet we see Bellboy (played by Christopher Guard, who was Marcellus in I Claudius) and Flowerchild running away from the Circus pursued by a scary black death car driven by a clown. I hope that later on we will see lots and lots of clowns come out of it.
The car has electric windows that were futuristic back when this was made.

The TARDIS arrives and the Doctor and Ace meet the Space Mouse, he is called "Nord, Vandal of the Roads" and he decides not to join their group at this time. Meanwhile Flowerchild finds a space bus where she gets killed by a dangerous robot bus conductor.

Then the Doctor and Ace meet Captain Cook (played by the oddly named T P McKenna, who was Ex-President Sarkoff in Blakes 7's Bounty) and Mags. There is a moment of excitement when a robot wakes up and shoots pewpewpew blasts at the Doctor and Mags until Ace hits it with a spade. This scene is largely padding but it does serve to show there is something strange up with Captain Cook when he does nothing to try to help them.
Similarly in the following scene, when they all go aboard the space bus with the robot conductor on it, Captain Cook is useless again until the Doctor makes the robot pewpewpew itself.

Ace finds Flowerchild's earring and keeps it for later, indicating that by this time Ace is familiar with how point-and-click adventure computer games are supposed to function.

Bellboy has been captured by the clowns and taken back to the Circus. Captain Cook and Mags get to the Circus and go inside while Bellboy is being punished for running away. When Mags sees this (we don't, but from the reactions of the other mannys who see it, on top of the earlier desperation of Bellboy and Flowerchild to get away, we can tell it is something bad) she screams.

Ace hears the scream outside the Circus, and it makes her even more hesitant to go inside. This leads to a rather unusual sort of episode ending, as the Doctor and Ace are deciding whether or not to go into the Circus to face the danger that we - but not they - are aware awaits them, with the Doctor keen to enter but Ace unwilling. And so the last line is the Doctor saying

"Well? Are we going in or aren't we?"

Ending with them on the threshold of the Circus, with the peril still lying in wait rather than menacing them directly, means that we are left on an intriguing moment rather than an outright dramatic one.

Part one of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is almost entirely setting up for the rest of the story. There are a lot of characters to be introduced, and the Doctor and Ace did not even meet all of them by the end of the episode. This makes it especially hard to judge part one in isolation, because it feels like very little has happened so far - a feeling exaggerated, maybe, by this story following immediately after two that were both much faster paced because they were only three-parters.

Quatermass and the Pit

Inside the mind of every Doctor Who writer there is a race memory of Quatermass and the Pit.

The final installment of the 1950s sci-fi series by Nigel Kneale had parts of it taken and used in multiple Doctor Who stories, without any of them quite going so far as to copy the plot outright.

The Daemons is one of the most blatant, including as it does an archaeological dig turning up an ancient spacecraft, whose alien occupants are horned, and who have influenced the development of humanity, and whose technology is sufficiently advanced as to be taken for black magic.

Image of the Fendahl also prominently features ancient aliens, as well as a skull far older than it should be. Also the pentagram on the Fendahl skull is reminiscent of the pentacle marking inside the spacecraft from the pit.

If Robert Holmes took a few ideas from Quatermass ii for his Spearhead From Space, it is not too much more of a stretch to see the influence of Quatermass and the Pit in The Ark in Space, not only in the insect design of the Wirrn being a bit like the aliens from Quatermass and the Pit, but in the way that the Doctor and Harry find one long dead as the ending to an episode. There is also the small matter of the Doctor using a device to see into the dead Wirrn's brain, which resembles the (somewhat convenient) machine that Quatermass uses to see the race memory of the aliens.

Doctor Who and the Silurians (one of the best Doctor Who stories evar, it has Paul Darrow in it!) features a race memory buried in the minds of mannys so they go mad when they see the Silurians. Although in  a clever twist on Quatermass and the Pit, instead of mannys being Martians, it turns out that Silurians are Earthlings.

Considering that Doctor Who and the Silurians is from the same season as Spearhead From Space (influenced by Quatermass ii) and The Ambassadors of Death (influenced by The Quatermass Experiment), that only leaves Inferno out of Jon Pertwee's first season as the Doctor - and while I see it as a bit more of a stretch than the other three, you could consider the mannys digging up an ancient substance that influences their minds and makes them go on destructive rampages as a reflection of the events in Quatermass and the Pit.

Also throughout season seven, the Doctor's relationship with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT more closely resembles the dynamic between Professor Quatermass and the military (and in particular Colonel Breen in Quatermass and the Pit), with this never more apparent than when they are actively in conflict with each other in Doctor Who and the Silurians. It can be easy to forget this when you are used to the more comfortable "UNIT family" dynamic seen from season eight onwards.

Beyond the 1970s, where the majority of stories influenced by Quatermass seem to be found, in The Curse of Fenric the "evil from the dawn of time" Fenric has been waiting in his container for mannys to find him and wake him up. And by the time we reach The Satan Pit in 2006 there is a very real question of whether Doctor Who is still being influenced by Quatermass or if it is now simply being influenced by earlier Doctor Who that was influenced by Quatermass.

Quatermass and the Pit is a masterpiece of building up suspense before paying it off. There is very little peril for the characters until near the end of part four (of six), only a long, slow build of mystery as the fantastic premise is established for us. When the peril does arrive, it escalates quickly until the whole of London is threatened at the climax.

The structure is similar to that of The Quatermass Experiment, but with much of that earlier series missing we lose out on being able to experience this effect there - the film version is not long enough to substitute in this respect - and Quatermass ii has a more conventional structure (with hindsight of the direction most TV sci-fi would take) of revealing much of the threat early so we then watch our heroes struggle against it.

"We are the Martians."

With a premise as strong yet fantastic as "mannys are Martians really" it is no wonder that this series proved so memorable, and as an allegory for immigration it remains as topical now as it was 60 years ago. It pulls this premise off by playing it absolutely straight, with total conviction from the actors - a real strength of all of the Quatermass serials.

André Morell is great as Professor Quatermass, although at first I found myself missing John Robinson (who played the part in Quatermass ii) since he doesn't remind me of Tiberius from The Caesars. Morell is ably assisted by a new self-sacrificing Companion, Dr Roney the Canadian archaeologist, proto-Indiana Jones and part-time inventor of convenient plot devices.

While the machine for seeing into mannys' brains is almost one sci-fi contrivance too far, it is used extremely well, with the brief footage of the aliens fighting each other being all the more effective for its brevity. The alien design is great too, and their first reveal makes for a fantastic end-of-episode cliffhanger.

The three Quatermass serials each features an original method of alien invasion that allows every one to stand out in its own way. My favourite of the trilogy (in as much as it is possible to fairly judge between them when so much of the first story is lost) is Quatermass ii, which I thought had the most exciting story, but all three are great and stand the test of time.