By Jessica Holmes

Put away the guillotine, we don’t need to be chopping anyone's head off for boring me. Not today, at least. The Reign Of Terror doesn’t magically turn into an oeuvre of magnificence at the halfway mark, but it did turn out decent in the end.

THE TYRANT OF FRANCE

Apologies everyone, my television set is playing up again, so there’s a chance that I’ll have missed some details in this episode, but hopefully it won’t be anything too important.

So, in the previous episode of The Reign Of Terror the Doctor got himself a pretty fantastic hat and managed to blag his way into a meeting with Robespierre, so they can talk about how fantastic his hat is. Or lists of people whose heads have been chopped off, but I think the hat should take precedence.

So, how does this meeting go? Entertainingly. Not one to hold his tongue, the Doctor immediately starts debating a hostile and suspicious Robespierre on the benefits of his Reign Of Terror. I rather admire his guts. Come to think of it, it’d be pretty funny to see the Doctor popping about through time to give tyrants a good scolding. As for Robespierre, he’s showing signs of paranoia, convinced that even his allies are plotting his downfall. Well, Max, if you are going to insist on guillotining everyone who so much as looks at you funny, what do you expect?

Oh, and we actually have a name for the other man, now. The one the Doctor came with. He’s called Lemaitre. Translates to ‘the master’. Quite a good name for a villain, I’d say.

Back at the maison, Susan is still feeling poorly, the poor love, but she’s brought some brandy, so she’ll feel even worse in a second! According to Barbara, a short while earlier Susan kicked off all her clothes and was found shivering upstairs, which sounds to me like she’s suffering from hypothermia. Leon is wary of calling a physician for her (after all, we only know one Doctor we can trust), but after some thought he decides to risk it for her. Good old Leon.

Outside the maison, Jules and Jean (did I introduce Jean last time? I can’t recall. Introducing: Jean) are smuggling a body into the house. Just when we start to worry what sort of people Barbara and Susan have fallen in with, they pull back the tarp covering the body to reveal that it’s Ian!

At the prison, Lemaitre says the Doctor made a good impression on Robespierre. I’m not sure I’d say the same, but if he says so. The Doctor tries to make his excuses and leave, but Lemaitre insists that the Doctor stay, and calls for the jailor to arrange accommodations.
Well, I hope he enjoyed his little game of dress-up.

Remember the treacherous tailor? He’s still here, and now he’s got Lemaitre all to himself. The Doctor tries once more to leave while Lemaitre is busy, but the jailor pulls a gun on him. If he were to let the Doctor go, it’d be his neck on the line.

Dear, dear, Doctor. You’re in trouble now!

Back at the maison, Ian is coming around, and joyfully reunites with Barbara. Does anybody else think they might be a little more than friends, or is that just me? Now conscious, Ian takes the opportunity to ask Jules if he knows the Englishman his dead cellmate told him to look for, one ‘James Stirling’. Unfortunately, Jules hasn’t a clue, which is a shame, because Ian had gone looking for Jules in the hope that he would. Unfortunately for Ian’s poor head, Jules found him first, and, thinking him an enemy spy, clobbered him. That man is going to have serious brain damage before long.

Jules posits that ‘James Stirling’ is an alias, though if anyone knows him, it’d probably be Leon. In fact, for all they know Leon might actually be James. It’s easy to pretend to be English when everyone in France speaks in Recieved Pronunciation. Not that I’m complaining. I find using English regional accents to be vastly preferable to forcing the actors to attempt a dreadful foreign accent. A lot of films and programs do it and it drives me up the wall.

Sadly, Susan is getting worse, and the physician won’t come, so Barbara has no choice but to take Susan herself. The physician takes a bit too much of an interest in how Susan came to be ill, but eventually decides that a spot of blood-letting should do the trick, to the womens’ horror. I mean, what were they expecting? Panadol?

They’d probably do better to just make her some hot water with honey and lemon.

See, here’s the problem with time travel to the past: lots of diseases that the modern immune system doesn’t know what to do with. I hope the Doctor got Susan her vaccinations when they landed on Earth. Imagine if she were to come down with smallpox, or TB!

It seems that Leon was right to be wary about trusting a physician, because the medical man, on the pretence of fetching leeches (lovely), heads up to the prison and turns the women in! Having locked the door behind him, the women are sitting ducks when the soldiers come to arrest them.

Well, with them free, there wasn’t anyone for the rest of the characters to make a daring rescue of, was there?

Ian begins to worry that they’ve been a while, but he has a meeting with Leon to keep, so he heads off in hope of tracking down the mysterious James Stirling.

Back in chains, Susan’s chucked into a cell, and Barbara is marched off for questioning…to none other than the Doctor!

Ian arrives at the crypt of an abandoned church, which is a cool place for a clandestine meeting if I ever saw one. The set’s rather good too. There’s a better attempt at the illusion of size here than we’ve seen in a lot of other sets on this programme.

However, while we’re all admiring the set, a bunch of soldiers turn up. Ian’s walked right into a trap.

Leon, you scoundrel!

A BARGAIN OF NECESSITY

The following week, my television continued to act up, rendering visible perhaps one frame in twenty. I tried hitting the top of my tv with a mallet, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Ah, well.

Ian captured, Barbara and Susan in chains once more — things don’t look too good for our companions. So, it’s the perfect time for Barbara to have a nice catch-up with the Doctor. Lemaitre tries to listen in, but the jailor arrives to summon him to a meeting with Robespierre. Lemaitre reluctantly agrees to go, but orders that Susan must be kept in the prison on pain of death. He knows something.

With Lemaitre gone, the Doctor reveals his cunning plan to spring Barbara from prison. Get ready. It’s very complicated. She’s going to walk out the front door.

See? Complicated. But it’s actually brilliant, wait and see.

The Doctor spins a tale to the jailor that Barbara is actually deeply involved in the grand conspiracy against Robespierre. So deeply involved, in fact, that she knows the names of every traitor in France! Of course, she’d rather die than give them up, but the Doctor and the jailor are clever, aren’t they? What they’ll do, is they’ll let her escape, and then, when she runs off to her traitor friends, they can follow her, and arrest the whole lot!

Now, a person slightly smarter than a guinea pig would probably be able to see through this plan, but that’s part of why I love it. I love the Doctor’s ability to talk utter nonsense with such authority that it sounds perfectly reasonable.

Down in the crypt, Leon’s giving Ian the trademark villain speech, revealing that he’s always been loyal to the revolution. He thinks that Ian’s in on the English spy ring, so demands that Ian tell him the truth.

Well, you asked for it, Leon.

For reasons nobody could ever hope to fathom, Leon doesn’t believe Ian when he says he’s from the year 1963, and his soldiers are on the point of shooting Ian when Jules arrives, having come back to the maison to find it empty.

A fight ensues, and it might have been exciting, but my television chose that moment to stop showing the picture, leaving me with a bit of generic fight music and the occasional grunt, ending with a gunshot, which I assume hit Leon, because the next time I can actually see the scene, Leon’s dead and Jules is Ian’s knight in frilly armour.

Back at the prison, things become amusing when the jailor asks the Doctor why he isn’t tailing Barbara, and the Doctor retorts asking HIM why HE wasn’t doing it. Whoopsie-daisy! Piling on, the Doctor actually tries the same trick on the jailor again, but to let Susan out this time. As funny as it would have been had he agreed, it’d be a bit convenient, so of course the jailor refuses. He’s not going to risk his neck!

Lemaitre goes to meet Robespierre, who fears that the Convention will turn against him at their next meeting, on the 27th of July… 1794. Hands up, who knows their history?

(Is it still paranoia if they really are all out to get you?)

Now it’s time for Historical Nitpicking With Jessica, where I answer the historical questions that literally nobody asked.

It’s about the date of the meeting: July 27, 1794. This is absolutely correct…by the Gregorian calendar. However, during the Reign Of Terror, France was not using this calendar. They were on the French Republican calendar, so for them, the date was 9 Thermidor. Weird, I know. What’s even weirder is that aside from the timing of the start of the year (the autumn equinox rather than the summer solstice), the French Republican calendar is identical to the ancient Egyptian calendar. Just thought that was interesting.

I would call the French calendar and their decimal time ridiculous, but then I remember how English money works, and how we measure distance, and how an English mile is actually how far Charles II could run in a three-legged race before falling over (or something), so perhaps I shouldn’t throw stones.

Ian makes it back safely, and meets up with Barbara, who is also safe now. They think the Doctor’s antics are pretty funny. And they are. It rather spoils the mood, however, once Jules tells Barbara what happened with Leon. To the men’s surprise, Barbara feels quite sad for him. To them, he was a traitor, but to the Revolution, he’d have been a hero. After all, the Revolution did have a point. Perhaps too sharp a point, but a point all the same.

See, Barbara gets it. History is a bit more nuanced when you look at it from the outside. There’s a difference between believing that a republic would be better for everyone than a monarchy, and wanting to chop the heads off anyone who looks a bit too posh.

Back at the prison, the Doctor lets Susan out, but Lemaitre catches them as they try to escape, and the scene following is a bit awkward, with a noticeable line flub from Hartnell (not for the first time, but I usually give him a pass as it works for the character), and a strange bit of awkward silence which made me wonder if somebody forgot their line or wasn’t on their mark.

Once we’re off smoothly again, Lemaitre shows the Doctor the ring the tailor gave him. Lemaitre’s quite a bit smarter than the poor jailor. He’s known full well that the Doctor wasn’t who he claimed to be, and strongly suspected his relation to Susan, which is why he was determined to hold on to her. And now he has iron-clad leverage over the Doctor.

Back at the house, Jules explains to Ian and Barbara that he’s not actually of the aristocracy, he’s just against those who would rule by fear, which is fair enough, I’d say.

As he finishes up the explanation, along comes the Doctor… with Lemaitre.

PRISONERS OF CONCIERGERIE

This one is actually genuinely good. Even more so because my television started working again.

Dun dun duuuun, Lemaitre has arrived to crash the party, sweeping in and explaining at everyone just how clever and cunning he is. So clever and cunning is he, in fact… that he is James Stirling.

That did catch me off guard, I have to admit. It certainly explains the accent.

Lemaitre/Stirling says that he can get safe passage back to England for everyone as soon as his business in France is concluded, and asks Ian what was the message he needed to deliver. Ian wracks his brain to remember it, and they piece together that it was a coded message giving away the location of important meeting which Paul Barras will be attending.

Time for a little espionage. They go to the inn, and pose as staff. Ian dusts off his acting skills and I absolutely love it. He goes to the trouble of putting on a fake voice and everything. I think somebody may have been part of the drama club at Coal Hill!

Barbara, on the other hand, is as awkward as anything, and simply asks Barras how many people he’s expecting to meet. Fortunately he doesn’t suspect anything, and tells her it’s just the one, and here he comes now.

It’s Napoleon Bonaparte.

Yes. Really.

A cool reveal? Yes. Ahistorical? Absolutely.

I will leave it to you to decide which is the more important factor in your mind. At any rate, it’s little more than a historical cameo, as he’s only in the episode for as long as it takes to promise Barras his support in return for a role as Consul, and then he swans off to make his own history.

I hope we get an episode centred on Napoleon some time in the future. Well, I could write a list of historical figures I’d like to see an episode based on, but it’d take me all night.

Stirling is aghast to learn of Napoleon’s intentions, knowing that being Consul won’t be enough for a man like Napoleon. He’s absolutely right, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Or is there?
Well, no. We know that. The Doctor and Barbara know that. Nevertheless, Stirling rushes off to try and prevent the arrest of Robespierre.

Now, I do think this is a bit of a missed opportunity. Had the earlier episodes been better paced, I think this turn of events would have been interesting to devote more time to, with Stirling (and possibly the others) trying to save Robespierre as history stubbornly refuses to be knocked off course. Instead all we get is the same old stuff about history being unchangeable. I am simply intrigued as to how exactly that works. What would happen if, for example, I grabbed myself a musket, aimed it squarely at Napoleon’s head, and fired? Will some unknown law of Time make the gun misfire?

History progresses as it’s written. Robespierre is arrested, shot in the jaw, and hauled off for his appointment with Madame Guillotine, bringing the Reign of Terror to an end. The Doctor returns to the prison and orders that it be made ready for Robespierre and his allies, which of course means clearing out the old cells, which means freeing Susan!

I do think it’s a shame that Susan had nothing to do in this serial other than sit and wait to be rescued.

Back at the TARDIS, Ian, much like myself, wonders what would have happened if they had tried to contact Napoleon and tell him about the future. According to Susan, he’d have lost the information, or forgotten it. I suppose that means we aren’t likely to see time paradoxes and alternate timelines in Doctor Who.

Final Thoughts

All in all, I think the second half of this serial was much better and more interesting than the first half. However, I think that Robespierre should have been given more of a focus in this serial. Imagine watching him unravel as his Reign Of Terror comes to a close and the vultures start circling, not in just a couple of scenes, but gradually, over the course of the story. To add to that, I’d have liked to have seen more of the coup against him, beginning earlier in the story, rather than in the last episode. It was the most exciting bit of the plot and it had hardly any time devoted to it.

All the same, I think the serial did redeem itself. It’s not one I’m a big fan of, but it’s not quite as rage-inducing as that one with the stuck button, which makes it okay in my book.

And with that, this first series of Doctor Who comes to an end. I’ve certainly enjoyed the ride, and I hope you’ve been entertained by my ramblings. Though perhaps not as educational as was first intended, Doctor Who has turned out to be an interesting science fiction programme with a real charm to it, and it has tremendous potential in the future. The only limit is the imagination.

As the crew head off to their next adventure, we end on a rather nice quote which, to me, captures the essence of Doctor Who.

“Our lives are important, at least, to us. But as we see, so we learn … Our destiny is in the stars, so let’s go and search for it.”

3 out of 5 stars

 

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