![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thirty Days of Doctor Who: Day Six
Aug. 8th, 2010 08:05 pmDay 06 - Whatever Tickles Your Fancy
Since we've been talking about favourite thinks for five days now, it seems a bit odd that there's not a 'Favourite Writer' question in this meme. My answer is thoroughly predictable, but let's talk about Robert Holmes a bit anyway.
His great strength as a writer for the series was an ability to ground whatever the science fiction premise du jour in solid characterisation - I believe in Jago and Litefoot and Li H'sen Chang as in few other guest stars. And when needed, he was also capable of giving us some of the most gloriously over-the-top villains in Who history. There is no single writer who had such an impact on the series pre-2005, not even Terry Nation. Holmes rebooted the series in Spearhead from Space. He introduced the Master in Terror of the Autons, and rewrote Time Lord culture in The Deadly Assassin. He shaped the whole Hinchcliff era. He gave us Autons, Sontarans, Wirrn, Sutekh, Morbius, Mr. Sin and the first adventure of Sarah Jane Smith.
His work wasn't always unproblematic, but its problems are always interesting ones - Talons of Weng-Chiang is choc full of racefail, but it's not the same boring kind of racefail as most of the stories around it. (That would be the kind where there just aren't any people of colour anywhere in space/the future/the past. And I suddenly had a lot more respect for Holmes when I heard that he wrote the cast of The Ark in Space as multiracial but they were then cast as white anyway.)
His Doctor Who writing career is in the shape of a bell curve - low at the ends but oh so high in the middle. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the same man wrote The Space Pirates and The Caves of Androzani, but all the seeds of the latter are there in former. Sadly his Sixth Doctor stories didn't hit the heights of his previous work and he died before he could complete The Ultimate Foe, but glimmers of the magic are still there. I never listen to the Doctor's 'no more gumblejacks' speech from The Two Doctors without thinking sadly of the author.
( The rest of the days. )
Since we've been talking about favourite thinks for five days now, it seems a bit odd that there's not a 'Favourite Writer' question in this meme. My answer is thoroughly predictable, but let's talk about Robert Holmes a bit anyway.
His great strength as a writer for the series was an ability to ground whatever the science fiction premise du jour in solid characterisation - I believe in Jago and Litefoot and Li H'sen Chang as in few other guest stars. And when needed, he was also capable of giving us some of the most gloriously over-the-top villains in Who history. There is no single writer who had such an impact on the series pre-2005, not even Terry Nation. Holmes rebooted the series in Spearhead from Space. He introduced the Master in Terror of the Autons, and rewrote Time Lord culture in The Deadly Assassin. He shaped the whole Hinchcliff era. He gave us Autons, Sontarans, Wirrn, Sutekh, Morbius, Mr. Sin and the first adventure of Sarah Jane Smith.
His work wasn't always unproblematic, but its problems are always interesting ones - Talons of Weng-Chiang is choc full of racefail, but it's not the same boring kind of racefail as most of the stories around it. (That would be the kind where there just aren't any people of colour anywhere in space/the future/the past. And I suddenly had a lot more respect for Holmes when I heard that he wrote the cast of The Ark in Space as multiracial but they were then cast as white anyway.)
His Doctor Who writing career is in the shape of a bell curve - low at the ends but oh so high in the middle. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the same man wrote The Space Pirates and The Caves of Androzani, but all the seeds of the latter are there in former. Sadly his Sixth Doctor stories didn't hit the heights of his previous work and he died before he could complete The Ultimate Foe, but glimmers of the magic are still there. I never listen to the Doctor's 'no more gumblejacks' speech from The Two Doctors without thinking sadly of the author.
( The rest of the days. )