The Celestial Toymaker [1.9]

The TARDIS is trapped by the Celestial Toymaker in a land where nothing is as it seems, and everything is designed to alleviate an infinite boredom. The Doctor is rendered invisible and forced to play a logic game, while Steven and Dodo are treated to a lethal version of The Crystal Maze, as they manoeuvre a series of strange games in an attempt to return to the TARDIS.

Meeting an array of even stranger characters – clowns, dolls, playing cards and toy soldiers – Steven and Dodo must avoid endlessly bizzarre booby traps such as electrocuted floors, music to which you are compelled to dance inanely; chairs that eat you alive, and a suspiciously large pie.

The Majesty

The idea of this film is great: pure fantasy. An immortal guardian who staves off his boredom with childish amusements is a fantastic villain – his amorality somehow more believable than if he had been a manifestation of pure evil. Michael Gough is the perfect actor for this character, making him one of Hartnell’s most memorable enemies.

There is also something good about how ridiculous the games are – hopscotch, obstacle courses, hunt the thimble, odd one out. There’s few more humiliating ways to die than while losing at an infantile game, and Steven in particular lets his frustration come out.

The character of Cyril is pretty good as well. Perfectly obnoxious, he is the first opponent we can really dislike, which gives us so much more motivation to root for Steven and Dodo.

The Misery

The structure of the story, with the Doctor invisible and rendered mute, and with Steven and Dodo facing a new opponent with every game, means there’s little development or progression in the story. It could have been two episodes or ten – it would make no difference, because the story simply repeated the format over and over with a new game every episode.

The games themselves were often frankly boring, and each one was spun out to last a full episode, even when it could have been completed in ten minutes. There was little tension and lots of padding.

Each episode ends on a riddle, no doubt intended to entice viewers to try to work out what was coming next. But the riddles are totally unsolvable – they are all simply red herrings and therefore a missed opportunity to increase interaction with the audience.

The Doctor’s trilogic game is referred to as being something highly technical, but it really isn’t. I played a version of this game in primary school, and while there are more pieces in the Doctor’s version, the basic algorithm to solve the game is not in any way different – it just has to be repeated more times. Why didn’t the Toymaker challenge him to a game of four-dimensional chess or something?

Magical Moments

• The Toymaker leaves the Doctor with one disembodied hand. It’s a cool idea. Mind you, it doesn’t look good on the reconstruction, but it’s still sort of shocking when it happens.
• On the other hand, the CGI dancing dolls in my reconstruction are both freaky and comical, like zombies at a 90s disco.
• After all the childish ‘fun and games’ where Cyril tricks Stephen and Dodo, cheating and generally playing dirty, he slips onto the floor and is instantly electrocuted. We then get a long lingering shot of his black and smoking corpse. I can just imagine the screams of traumatised young kids who thought that Dr Who was getting down to their CBeebies level. How wrong they were!
• The Toymaker’s final trap. “Make your last move, Doctor. Your last move.....”

Representation

Nothing in the script suggests that the Toymaker is supposed to be Chinese. At least, not that I remember. And given that he is supposed to be an alien and an immortal, there’s no obvious link to China. Yet here we have a European actor dressed in clearly Chinese-inspired clothes, and the Doctor putting on a high-pitched caricature of a Chinese accent when mimicking the Toymaker’s voice. It seems as though one of the creatives – probably the Director – saw the term ‘Celestial Toymaker’, and decided that as “Celestial” was an unflattering nickname for a Chinese person in 60s London, it would be a hilarious in-joke to make the Toymaker oriental. The joke doesn’t feel quite so hilarious today, and while the Toymaker’s garb is certainly iconic, and while Michael Gough certainly does a grand performance with no hint of Chinese caricaturing, the story can’t help avoid a lingering smell of racism. It’s strange to have this coming on the back of “The Ark”, with it’s more serious moral that people of all shapes, colours and sizes must work together. It seems that the producers can be progressive one week, and make a racist joke the next, without ever seeing the inconsistency.

In Summary

The Celestial Toymaker was one of my favourite William Hartnell adventures as a child. As an adult, my opinion has changed a lot. Even discounting it’s demeaning representation of Chinese culture, it is repetitive, absurd and, worst of all, boring. Michael Gough cannot rescue it. The Doctor is written out of the story. Dodo is no less annoying than usual. Steven just wanders about doing his thing, and everyone else pops up for one annoying scene or other and then disappears. I like that Dr Who is entering, quite literally, the realms of fantasy, but this was quite a mis-step for the first such adventure.

Overall: 1.9