Art Gallery 7
The Target novelisation of The Deadly Assassin has a great cover. The Doctor’s pensive face
looms out of the blackness, a look in his eyes that could either be rising
panic or dawning realisation of terrible danger. The two Time Lords flanking
him are captured in the archetypal pompous schoolmaster pose that only comes with
wearing a set of curtains and an orthopaedic neck brace. And above them, the
Master in all his decomposing glory, his lidless fish eyes staring straight at
the reader, a lopsided skull-grin suggesting his imminent and assured victory.
With a gloriously grisly touch, cover artist Mike Little allows droplets of
blood to fall from the Master’s hood, dropping downwards onto the two Time
Lords, suggesting their imminent bloody demise. Even the Doctor Who logo is blood-red. It’s yet another of those fantastic
borderline-horror covers that led to such good sales of the novelisations.
Mike Little only painted four covers for the Target range; The Deadly Assassin, Planet of Evil, The Masque of Mandragora and The
Brain of Morbius. Assassin is by
far his best cover. Yet it was originally the second choice until John Geary’s
original design went unused. Geary’s work is well-executed, but doesn’t give a
sense of the macabre excesses of The
Deadly Assassin in the same way the Little’s eventual cover manages. It
also appears to be unfinished as there is a large area of the picture that is
blank. Perhaps it was due to feature some of the nightmarish images from the
Matrix sequence and was left off after the furore that developed over that
particular part of the story.
The Deadly Assassin
is one of the strangest stories ever broadcast. It’s a real marmite story; you
either love it or loathe it. There’s plenty there to warrant its tag as a true
classic of the Tom Baker era, but equally there are some fundamental issues
with it. It opened the door to Gallifrey and the gradual demystification of the
Time Lords and by extension the Doctor himself. In a way, it opened the way to
the eventual cancellation of Doctor Who.
It is here that the series’ backstory becomes overcomplicated with far too many
elements for the casual viewer to recall. With every subsequent visit to a Gallifrey
based on Holmes’ ancient senators, a little bit of mystery was sacrificed and
the audience became that little bit more disinterested. By the eighties,
everyone knew who the Time Lords were and they turned up every few stories, each
successive new Time Lord less interesting than the last. The casual audience thought
the same and simply turned over to watch The
A-Team instead.
When the series returned in 2005, Russell T. Davies did the
only sensible thing; he destroyed Gallifrey off-screen and completely wiped out
all possibility of its return. Davies and his successor Steven Moffat have
wisely maintained this new backstory, apart from Gallifrey’s brief return in The End of Time and the briefest of
flashbacks in The Sound of Drums. Both
are fan-pleasing moments, but what has been apparent since Doctor Who returned is that Gallifrey and other Time Lords simply aren’t
needed. Only the Master is a strong enough creation to make occasional returns
and only when there is a story that could only be told with him. It’s hard to
reconcile the Time Lords we see in The
Deadly Assassin and each subsequent Gallifrey story with a race strong
enough to take on the Daleks. Hopefully Timothy Dalton’s Rassilon simply
glove-of-doomed every last one of them into oblivion, starting with Drax from The Armageddon Factor. After spitting on
them first of course.
There’s no sense either in The Deadly Assassin that this is a people who have mastered Time itself,
whose power is coveted by a million other races. What we get instead is a subterranean
society of university professors and Vatican cardinals who don’t even know from
where their power emanates. This is a stagnant and old society that is also
fundamentally misogynistic in that there are no females to be seen in the
entire story. It is stated that a Time Lord is a rank and title bestowed on a
Gallifreyan and clearly no woman is capable of wielding that responsibility
according to Assassin.
It’s debatable whether or not Gallifrey should ever have
been visited in the first place. After all, a series that originally ran for
twenty-six years was bound to run out of ideas one day and the temptation of
seeing where the Doctor came from was no doubt irresistible. But then this was
one serial amongst hundreds. Why should we remember this one above so many
others? If the story demanded that we saw the Doctor’s homeworld, then that is
reason enough to show it. But the bottom line is that The Deadly Assassin is not that story.
The biggest problem with the story is also its finest
section. Episode Three is an initially creative and bizarre house of mirrors
ride through the surreal madhouse of the Matrix. It’s the Doctor in Wonderland,
with memorable images like the one below, one of the scariest things ever in
any medium.
Then it abruptly turns into a tense, gritty and realistic
fight for life as we watch our hero bleed and bruise. We are presented with the
uncomfortable sight of a role model to millions of children actively seeking to
murder his opponent. It’s a tonal shift that’s hard to accept as being anywhere
near suitable for a teatime audience and is definitely misjudged. Sadly it
finally gave TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse and her brigade of biddies enough
ammunition to force the BBC to alter Doctor
Who’s approach, in essence blunting one of its most powerful tools; the
ability to scare children behind the sofa. The era of the ghost train was over.
Now we would have the Tom Baker comedy half-hour in its place; a necessary
compromise. But the simple fact is that real physical violence and Doctor Who should and must never go
together. It didn’t work in 1976 with this story and it was the death knell of
the series in 1985.
Yet Episode Three is quite brilliant. It’s the sense that we’re
watching something we shouldn’t be seeing. It’s the sense that this could very
definitely be the end of the Doctor. It’s the sense that he might actually
lose. It’s the virtual reality equivalent of The Caves of Androzani, and it’s one of the best things I have ever
seen.
There was a time when I would have put The Deadly Assassin in my all-time top ten, but nowadays there’s a
nagging sense that it conflicts with what Doctor
Who should be. There’s a fundamental sense of optimism in the programme amidst
the monsters and mayhem that’s completely missing from The Deadly Assassin. Furthermore,
the character of the Doctor is not served well by showing his home-world to be
so corrupt and senile. It merely shows that he left because he was bored, not
from any real desire to explore. On the other hand it does square quite well
with the defensive and intolerant Doctor we first met in 1963. And despite it
being so tonally wrong, I firmly believe that Episode Three is a work of art.
It’s just not necessarily Doctor Who
as we know it or would want it. However experiments like this are the life-blood
of Doctor Who, ever-changing and
ever-evolving, and for that reason The
Deadly Assassin deserves the classic status in which it is held.
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