The Massacre [2.0]

The Doctor and Steven land in 16^th century Paris, stepping into the middle of a city-wide feud between the newly formed Catholic and Huguenot factions: both out for each others blood. Oblivious, the Doctor heads off to meet a chemist on the verge of discovering bacteria, and Steven passes some time in the local pub.

Of course, things are never going to be that straightforward, and it’s not long before the Doctor disappears; Steven is accused of being a Catholic spy, and the sinister Abbot of Amboise appears to be wearing the Doctor’s face.

The Majesty

This is a fantastic period of history to visit. It’s perhaps less familiar now than it would have been when The Massacre was first broadcast, but the drama and the characters are all there ready and waiting to be tapped. We meet Catherine d’Midici, the Duc de Guise and Admiral de Coligny - that’s amazing!

The idea of the Abbot of Amboise being a double for the Doctor is very good. As a device, it’s developed a lot more in “The Enemy of the World” with Patrick Troughton. Here is doesn’t add much to the story except providing a mystery – never explained or resolved - and allowing Hartnell to act like a villain. However, despite that rather limited approach, it’s a great idea. The Abbot is delightfully sinister, and Hartnell performs him very well.

The Misery

Largely, however, “The Massacre” fails to live up to the promise of the premise. The characters are great, historically, but in this story they spend most of the time standing around talking. Our heroes – the Doctor and Steven – are absent or passive for most of the adventure. Steven certainly does a lot of running about from place to place, but it’s all very inconsequential. Perhaps there is too much historical drama intrinsic to the setting; our heroes cannot add much and therefore end up simply standing and watching. But still, we as an audience want to explore the world through the eyes of Steven and the Doctor: we don’t just want the TARDIS’ arrival (offscreen) to be a pretext for watching some other people do some other stuff.

Another missed opportunity is the arrival of Dodo. Apart from the rather obvious missed opportunity to cast somebody else (anybody?) in the role, there is the idea that Dodo is the descendent of the Huguenot Anne Chaplet. So why can she not be played by the same actress, thereby linking her very strongly to someone we have got to know? Instead we have an introduction to a completely new regular character in a more casual and abrupt manner than we have ever seen yet. 

And her lack of intelligence, awareness and general common sense is pretty breathtaking. Her first words on entering the TARDIS are “Where’s the phone?” and “Are you a policeman?”. No mention of it being ‘bigger on the inside’; no amazement at the dizzying array of instruments – just sheer stupidity personified.

Magical Moments

• “Since you came here, everything which has been so carefully planned has gone wrong”. It’s usually the charge that gets laid against the Doctor. But the accused is the villainous Abbot of Amboise... who looks like the Doctor... and we haven’t seen the Doctor all episode... and nobody has met the Abbot before yesterday... Could the Abbot be the Doctor in disguise? Through clever storytelling it remains a live question for a significant part of the story.
• “What a senseless waste” The Doctor’s reflection on the tragedy is a deliberate reminder of his failure to stop the Daleks, and his failure to prevent the massacre of Troy. (It says a lot about this series that the second ‘Magical Moment’ of this review is already highlighting something from the end of the final episode.)
• “If your researches have no regard for the value of human life, then I want no part in it”. Steven is on fire with indignation at the Doctor, and it’s great to see the Doctor on the defence.
• “We’re all too small to realise time’s final pattern. So do not try to judge it from where you stand” When he does defend himself, the Doctor can do so with great poetry!
• “Even after all this time, he cannot understand. I dare not change the course of history.” The Doctor decisively overturns the worldview we have been so far established in the series. We have always been told time is fixed and physically cannot be changed: it will always bounce back. Now we discover that time can be changed, but it is incredibly dangerous to try, and the Doctor is very afraid of the consequences. This brings together the dogmatic insistence of the Doctor against changing time (e.g. in the Aztecs) with the Monk's gleeful and irresponsible alterations in The Time Meddler. It's handled very well and allows the series to make a distinctive curve in it's later approach to established history.
• With Steven away, the Doctor can monologue freely. “Now they’re all gone. All gone... None of them could understand... Not even my little Susan, or Vicki. And as for Barbara and Chatterton – eh, Chesterton – they were all too impatient to get back to their own time. And now, Steven... Perhaps I should go back home. Back to my own planet. But I can’t!” Not only is this a great reflection on the journey of Doctor Who so far - even with a little in-joke in there - but this is the first time we have seen the Doctor hint at why he has left home. It’s grand to see the series start to stretch it’s legs and explore new territory.

In Summary
The Massacre's main problem is that it's missing. A story that relies on character and period costuming, etc, is very dependent on the visuals. They are lost, and the remainder is rather garbled, unfortunately. That aside, this story is very disappointing, and not only because it introduces Dodo. There’s a huge amount of talking, and very little action. There’s a plethora of underused characters, and the back seat taken by the Doctor, especially, means that things really plod along. The whole question of why the Abbot looks like the Doctor, and what the Doctor has been doing all story is completely ignored. The Abbot dies off-screen; the massacre is alluded to with some general shouting, and there’s barely enough intrigue to cover the back of a postcard. There’s certainly no exploration of the actual faith behind the factions, though this being the conservative BBC in the 1960s, the bias is definitely in favour of the Huguenots.

For a far better dramatisation of these events, I recommend Ken Follet’s “A Column of Fire”, available at all good book stores, and which I have recently finished.

This rounds out the third and final instalment of the trilogy of tragedy, in which the Doctor fails to save the world. It was a good idea, and it took us to interesting places, but I will be quite glad to see the Doctor winning again!

Overall: 2.0