The big problem is the Master. He's never been the most satisfying character in the series - we've never properly understood his motivation, or his true relationship with the Doctor - but in the past this didn't seem to matter so much. Roger Delgado played the original Master with an imposing dignity, almost a grandeur, that masked the character's insubstantial inner-workings. Anthony Ainley's version was more two dimensional but hardly less satisfying: we didn't need to know why he was bad - his Master was evil itself, the cackling personification of motiveless malignity. A bit panto perhaps, but none the worse for that.
The Sound of Drums displays some of his traditional modus operandi. The sharp dress sense of the Delgado years returns, as does the hypnotic powers. The original Master also had a penchant for false names and dubious alliances with alien races, just as we see here. But this new Master is neither evil, nor dignified - he's just nasty and rather self-indulgent, an infantile delinquent. And he's so obviously broken, so damaged. Perhaps in an attempt to flesh out his character, to explain or understand the Master, he is shown as being mentally ill, driven to psychopathy by the childhood trauma of observing the Untempered Schism. As a result his great villainy is enfeebled: he's merely trying to get the Doctor's attention, a brutalised child who craves the teacher's time and can only get it by being naughty.
When Delgado's Master watched The Clangers, it was with the wry air of an anthropologist; in The Sound of Drums he watches Tellytubbies and cries "Cor, innit brilliant!" (I paraphrase). He pretends to be Zippy from Rainbow for the President of the United States. He literally thumbs his nose at the Jones family. Like a child, he thinks being Prime Minister will mean he will get to do whatever he wants. When he discovers Gallifrey has been destroyed, he's like the little boy who wished away his parents only to find that the wish came true.
Surely the central question of his character is the idea of 'mastery': what that means, and what he will do to achieve it. Here, for the first time, we do see him manage to take control of something large - in this case the government of the United Kingdom - but he seems actively disinterested in exercising his control. I wonder whether his mania for being in charge, for being obeyed, could be some form of control freakery, a desire to have things done his way or not at all - but that certainly isn't what happens here. Once he has the keys to Downing Street he throws his paperwork into the air and murders his cabinet (in a childish fit of pique - what does it achieve?). By the end of the episode we discover that taking control of the country is only a means to an end: mastery of the entire planet. But then, having achieved that, we'll see next time that the Earth is only a stepping stone to gaining control of the Universe. This Master has no real interest in running the country, or the world, and I can't help but think that if he did conquer the Universe he wouldn't be much interested in running that either, his childishness recalling Roger McGough's 'The Leader'.
What's to like then? Well, this episode was much touted as an urban thriller and, for Doctor Who, it does that pretty well, even if London has never looked quite so much like Cardiff as it does here (nor has Brighton ever looked more like Penarth for that matter). The scenes of the Doctor, Martha and Jack on the run, scavenging for resources are good: there's a sense of them being on the back foot, forced into a strategic retreat, that makes this story feel different from any other. The camera trick with the Perception Filter works curiously well, even after repeated viewings, and the sight of Gallifrey is marvellous, tying this scrap back to the epic mythology of the Time War.
Despite my problems with the Master, this is a decent enough episode that really does pack a punch through its final moments. I'm not fussed with the Doctor's superannuation - it's thrown into the mix to raise the stakes, but is undermined by its obvious impermanence. The real shock is seeing the sky ripped open and the Toclafane descend - an excellent sequence built on good-looking effects and hammered home by the (still shocking) use of music (Voodoo Child by Rogue Traders, which, I am required by law to state, is played diegetically). The final shot refocuses the story around Martha as she stands watching London begin to burn - a good cliffhanger and a powerful moment in the programme's history.
Surely the central question of his character is the idea of 'mastery': what that means, and what he will do to achieve it. Here, for the first time, we do see him manage to take control of something large - in this case the government of the United Kingdom - but he seems actively disinterested in exercising his control. I wonder whether his mania for being in charge, for being obeyed, could be some form of control freakery, a desire to have things done his way or not at all - but that certainly isn't what happens here. Once he has the keys to Downing Street he throws his paperwork into the air and murders his cabinet (in a childish fit of pique - what does it achieve?). By the end of the episode we discover that taking control of the country is only a means to an end: mastery of the entire planet. But then, having achieved that, we'll see next time that the Earth is only a stepping stone to gaining control of the Universe. This Master has no real interest in running the country, or the world, and I can't help but think that if he did conquer the Universe he wouldn't be much interested in running that either, his childishness recalling Roger McGough's 'The Leader'.
What's to like then? Well, this episode was much touted as an urban thriller and, for Doctor Who, it does that pretty well, even if London has never looked quite so much like Cardiff as it does here (nor has Brighton ever looked more like Penarth for that matter). The scenes of the Doctor, Martha and Jack on the run, scavenging for resources are good: there's a sense of them being on the back foot, forced into a strategic retreat, that makes this story feel different from any other. The camera trick with the Perception Filter works curiously well, even after repeated viewings, and the sight of Gallifrey is marvellous, tying this scrap back to the epic mythology of the Time War.
Despite my problems with the Master, this is a decent enough episode that really does pack a punch through its final moments. I'm not fussed with the Doctor's superannuation - it's thrown into the mix to raise the stakes, but is undermined by its obvious impermanence. The real shock is seeing the sky ripped open and the Toclafane descend - an excellent sequence built on good-looking effects and hammered home by the (still shocking) use of music (Voodoo Child by Rogue Traders, which, I am required by law to state, is played diegetically). The final shot refocuses the story around Martha as she stands watching London begin to burn - a good cliffhanger and a powerful moment in the programme's history.
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