We take a single episode of a science fiction TV series and overanalyze it to within an
inch of its life.
This is the Fusion Patrol podcast.
Welcome to the discussion.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fusion Patrol. I'm Eugene.
And I'm Simon.
And tonight we're looking at the Doctor Who Series 11, or Series 37, episode The Witch Finders.
Doc and the gang arrive in Lancashire, just in time for the dunking of an old woman, an accused witch.
And despite the doctor warning her gang not to interfere with history, once again her companion...
Oh, wait, this time the doctor interferes, but it's too late.
The old woman has drowned.
Hashtag sad.
But at least she wasn't a witch.
At first, the doctor passes herself off as King James' witchfinder general to Becca Savage, the local landlord.
But then, in one of those awkward moments, King James turns up, and it appears her cover is blown.
but King James accepts the story with one minor correction.
Obviously, as a woman, the doctor can only be the Witchfinder General's assistant.
Graham is taken to be the Witchfinder General.
Luckily, King James doesn't appear to know the people he is appointed to office.
The doctor discovers that Becca has been purging the village of suspected witches for months,
and her fervor is unabated.
King James is equally as fervent, and they set about to save the entire village's souls,
even if it means killing them all.
Yaz discovers that the women who have been killed have been resurrected as mud zombies,
animated corpses filled with alien mud.
As the doctor's investigations bring her increasingly in conflict with Becca,
she finds herself accused of witchcraft.
Finally, the gang must wield torches and go on a hunt to end the menace
that threatens to fill the world with mud.
Okay, the Witchfinders, the Witchfinders.
What's your initial thoughts on the Witchfinders?
Well, I have to say, generally speaking, I'm really quite impressed by the historicals we've had in this season.
Apart from the Alien Menace part?
Apart, yes. Well, yes. I was trying to think of a positive way of putting that, which is, all right, if you want a positive on the Alien Menace in this particular story, it's not quite as tacked on as in, for example, Demons of the Punjab.
it's more integral to the story itself and so in that sense it's more forgivable okay and
it kind of needs to be there i mean you're gonna well i'm not sure it does okay no no let me rephrase
i would i would have liked a pure historical about witch trials okay no i what i i guess what i meant
was if you were gonna have a if you're gonna have the story of mud zombies that were being accused
to being witches or something of that nature, then perhaps setting it in the maybe 16th,
maybe 17th century is needed as opposed to setting it on the 23rd stage.
You know, putting it on Mars, in the water of Mars, you would never take them as witches.
So, but yes, they could have had a story about witches that was not, that had nothing to
do with aliens.
I absolutely agree.
And I was very disappointed when the tendril popped up out of the ground.
ah darn it of course it's aliens again so i did wonder if the text that said damn and nothing else
to me might be connected with the fact that when i worked it out arrived at a time that was probably
about 15 minutes into the original transition transmission time of doctor who yes and and
oddly enough that was exactly what that meant it was at exactly the moment the tendrils popped up
and it wasn't meant for you because i figured you probably weren't watching it and that i would be a
spoiler but i was sending it to somebody else but i accidentally sent that text to you but yes that
dam was when the aliens appeared because again with the trailers that they are doing this year
and with the dearth of information that they're putting out you could be perfectly believable
believing that there was this was a straight historical from everything we see they they
completely avoid showing you anything that looks alieny yeah in the trailer so and in demons of
the punjab they did kind of have that whirlwind doctor materialize shot and and maybe a shot of
the thing underground so that you could think oh there's something there is something spacey going
on but but in this one yeah i i thought i thought they were going to have the courage to do it but
apparently not so nevertheless nevertheless it's it's still got a lot to got a lot to commend it
in terms of being both a kind of, not that I'm an expert,
but certainly it seemed to me a reasonably accurate account
of witch trials around that period.
And an interesting period, in fact, to look at.
That's what I'm particularly excited about, I think, in this series,
is that they've gone for historicals that aren't necessarily
the kind of blockbuster box office stories like dickens or shakespeare although this is
contemporaneous contemporaneous with shakespeare should be yes yes yes indeed yes it would be um
but a very very different kind of story than the shakespeare code oh yeah one with witches again
absolutely uh you know something the the the like the shakespeare one is very ren fair
and this isn't this is a little more let's say realistic is a hard word to use but it it certainly
doesn't make it look like a bunch of merry peasants hanging around and shading shouting huzzah and
eating turkey legs um which is kind of what you get out of the shakespeare code it's it's a very
dean park version this this looks like a very hey this looks like a really bad time to be alive
Yes, I think that's the key difference. It's actually, I mean, Ryan says he more or less could have just turned to the camera and said, hey, kids, don't you think this is a bit dark? It is pretty dark.
you know that's that dark ages kind of thing yeah but it it i thought i thought that was i
thought that was well handled because we are going into a into a a scenario that was itself a pretty
dark period if you're going to go there then you really ought to face up to that and i thought they
handled that really well considering you've got to you've got to get up and move on and have some
kind of sci-fi action adventure afterwards the way in which the doctor reacted because my my kind
of initial response to the doctor giving the lecture on oh you know you mustn't interfere
in history it's just oh we're going there again but it was there for a purpose it was setting it
was setting the context of showing the doctor intervening and that that moment where the the
friends the companions fam whatever we call them were looking at her to see how she would react
you were, you know, you didn't know. You didn't know how she would react. And her choice of
reaction, I just felt was spot on. That's, that is what the doctor would do. Or it's what the
doctor we know now would do. I mean, maybe not the William Hartnell who would have brained someone
with a rock would have done, but certainly the doctor who has become a little more affectionate
towards humans. Well, certainly Tom Baker, Leela era. I think there have been cases where the
doctor was definitely do as I say, not as I do. Oh, you know, kind of like telling Leela not to
do something. And then the doctor goes off to do it. You know, it's been less so this year.
It has been the doctor kind of warning off the companions and the companions trying to
really being the ones that are chafing. And, you know, rightly so. I mean, I can,
completely understand. On the other hand, I can also, honestly, from a state of cowardice,
say, you know, all those people are standing there and they're not doing anything because
they know they could be next. And that's a sort of informed and intelligent decision,
even if it is cowardly. So, you know, if the doctor says, gosh, don't go over there,
you interfere with history and they'll kill you. That's a true statement. It's like you're very
likely to die from that but but i i think i think i'm gonna come back to the the bystanders
questions i think that's an interesting one but the the doctor's focus on not interfering seems
to be about not messing with the web of time right other than the health and safety of her
companions although yeah she does clearly have some some regard for that but that's right she's
the only doctor that's ever made them basically have consent so that now she's absolved of guilt
when they die instead of Adra.
Yes.
I did tell him,
could get blown up on a spaceship
while trying to undo some locks.
I'm just saying.
All right.
Yeah, quite right too.
Quite right too.
I'm very much in favor of that.
But I also think that, you know,
this is a Doctor where the real genuine sense
of jeopardy has been reintroduced
in that some of the environments she has taken,
she's gone into with her companions,
have felt so...
Places that are hostile or inimical to life
in one way or another
that the odds genuinely seemed stacked against.
Which, no.
Well, I was just going to say,
in this situation here,
so it is.
Previous kind of almost omnipotent versions of the Doctor
would perhaps have found some way
of saving that old woman at the beginning. What I like about how they handled this here was they
they wouldn't I don't think they could but they wouldn't let the doctor stand by in order to
protect the web of history and let the old woman just die without trying to do something about it
but they had her do something about it and yet she was unsuccessful and it wasn't it wasn't that
she didn't make a genuine effort it was more that the the situation they found themselves in was a
was a really perilous one even though you're not talking about i mean at that time there's no alien
threat or anything there's no threat of universal destruction or anything like that it's literally
just this woman's life is is in mortal danger from from the mob and who could do anything about
that with you know with with absolutely no resources and the doctor does her best and you
can't fault her for it and she takes a huge risk in doing so but the woman still dies so you say
that they've created a genuine sense of threat and i'm trying to think back on the episodes and
i i don't know about demons of the punjab but this episode rosa are the two that stand out to me
as being a genuine sense of threat.
I mean, Ghost Monument felt pretty dangerous to me.
Did it?
Because I think my complaint about the Ghost Monument
is they kept talking about how deadly the planet was
and not, ooh, the atmosphere is poisonous,
yet we're breathing it.
Oh, we're going to...
The water's poisonous.
The water's poisonous, but...
What you see in it,
and what I think is so effective,
is you see it in people's reactions.
So it's not that they're just telling you.
It's that they're...
It's not like you have to see someone fall in the water and have the flesh eaten off their bones or whatever in order to understand that it's dangerous.
Even if it were, I don't feel like, all right, here's my thesis then.
The episodes in the past, the threat feels more real because it's not made up, right?
The planet with the atmosphere is a made up thing.
The flesh eating bacteria in the water is a made up thing.
The doctor can pull out the sonic screwdriver and go, oh, I've just attenuated the bacteria in this water and it's fine.
That's why you didn't die when you fell in.
It's a made up non-threat, but witch trials are real.
Nasty people with torches and pitchforks and religious fervor are real.
Those are real threats you can get away.
I'm going to partially agree with you.
I mean, I don't think it is just the ones in the past, but I think it is about basing the threat on something real.
the vacuum of space is real so it's not as if you couldn't have something that was extraterrestrial
or set in the future and had a real threat in it maybe maybe it's maybe it's the expectation of
maybe it is years of the writers cheating starting with russell t davies worse than any of them you
know put us all up in danger and that the last minute sonic screwdriver comes out grab a pail
of glop slide down the elevator shaft.
I don't think that's done with Russell T. Davies.
Yeah, but he really shorthanded it
into the miracle at the end
of the episode.
Well, that's part of the format thing.
Yeah, it's a 45 minutes. He chose the format,
so I assume that he
is an intricately part of it. I'm not trying to
bash on Russell T. Davies,
but at the same time, I feel like
that has accelerated rapidly at that point.
And so, yeah,
even if you dump him in space, I kind of feel
like the doctor could go well the sonic screwdriver happens to have a force field that generates an
atmosphere thing but you can't undo racism you can't go to atlanta with a sonic screwdriver and
solve racism can't do it threats threats threats threats real because it's a real threat it's a
real problem in my mind as opposed to one that was made up by the writer and i guess that's what i'm
i'm still basically in agreement with it but i i think she i think it goes beyond it goes beyond
what you choose there because you can you can have a situation like this and you can treat it
in a way that doesn't make the threat real so for example if you'd had a doctor who was a version of
the doctor who was more powerful than the current version played by Jodie Whittaker and he had
actually been successful in rescuing the old lady it creates a sense that actually yes the doctor
can undo a lot of these things it is it by by whatever action she takes because she's because
she's smarter because she's faster she's cleverer she can actually protect herself from some of the
consequences of these places and so i guess what i'm saying about that scene is it was important
that we did see the consequences and that the the kind of horror of what what people's religious
beliefs led them to do was actually shown on screen before you kind of go off into the
extraterrestrial story which you know in its way was actually solved with a bit of magic wand
waving and that that in itself didn't feel so real but this part of the episode did did you
just inadvertently and i i suspect it's convention and and history but i thought it was interesting
that your gender pronouns switched.
When you were talking about a more powerful version
of the Doctor, you said he.
Only because the previous versions of the Doctor
have all been men,
and I'm talking about a previous version of the Doctor.
I was searching in my head
for whether that was the right pronoun,
but at the time it would have been he,
and now it's she.
So I don't know.
So the she Doctor is a lesser,
less powerful version of the Doctor.
I know. No, I wouldn't say that. I would say that the Peter Davison version is a less powerful version of the Doctor than the Tom Baker version, for example.
And the Jodie Whittaker version is a less powerful version than, well, certainly than David Tennant, who strikes me as that version of the Doctor was someone who really did attain almost literally in some of the episodes, godlike powers.
And I don't like that.
No, I prefer, I truly prefer the era.
And even when you have a doctor who was enormously powerful like Pertwee,
I feel like when they get dumped on a planet like Colony in Space or the Mutants,
that they're in, you know, he's not omnipotent.
He's not much stronger than the rest of us when it comes to bullets and death by choking and whatnot.
That there is there is a potentially of course, I didn't think the writers are going to just cheat him out of it, too, with the Sonic in those in that era.
And and I do really appreciate the fact that when they set the doctor down here, I feel like there is a, you know, she doesn't just have to stand up on a rock and tell everyone that she's the doctor and they all go running.
Yes. Yes, exactly.
While you're picking up on the gender pronouns, there's somewhere else I want to go with this episode, which I appreciated.
And you might not expect it because certainly when we were looking forward to, well, I was looking forward to the new doctor taking over the role.
I was keen that they didn't make a big deal out of the gender change.
Because obviously there's the potential for a lot of mileage in jokes and throwaway comments.
Can I just, before you carry that thought, I just want to say that my reservation on that was that if you're, I agree that they shouldn't make an issue out of it.
My concern is that if they did make the doctor a woman, they would make an issue out of it.
And that they would fundamentally have to alter the storytelling so that they could do that.
So that they would have, so that they could present those issues that were a problem.
And I've got a section here that I suspect is tailing right to where you're going.
It could well be where I'm going with it.
But the opposite end of that is that if they completely ignore it, why did they do it?
Other than just to appease, you know, it's not an artistic decision.
It's a, well, let's do that.
Why have they cast men for so long other than to appease the radical male lobby?
I don't think it was ever done to appease the radical male lobby
until the last couple of years.
I think it was done because the doctor is a man
and we hired another actor.
It was done because of the patriarchy.
I really don't believe that.
I really believe it was done because the doctor was a man
and, yeah, we have to hire a new actor.
It just wouldn't occur to anybody.
And I guess you could...
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
It wouldn't occur to anybody.
That is my point.
No, I think that you would not...
You wouldn't.
You just wouldn't.
Exactly.
No, you wouldn't think of changing it.
It's like, it's a guy, it's a guy.
Exactly.
It's a guy.
He's the next guy.
He's going to keep his little willy when he goes from one generation to the next.
It might change shape and color and hair color and whatnot, but it's a guy becoming a guy.
You would not think of it.
That is the agenda mode as opposed to, okay, when we had to hire a new actor.
And I don't think it's the aggressive male patriarchy trying to keep the women down.
I think it's just, I don't want to say common sense, but I mean, it's just the default behavior.
It is.
This guy is this guy is this guy.
You just never go, well, this guy is this guy, this guy, this guy, this woman.
What?
No, you wouldn't do that.
Anyway.
It's certainly the ingrained assumption.
The default.
The ingrained sort of biological assumption.
Yeah.
Anyway, go ahead.
Sorry.
Derailed.
I just wanted to say those were my misgivings before we go into this conversation.
So go.
Well, I'm sure we've been there.
My hope was that they would just, the doctor would regenerate and then we could just get on with it.
And pretty much that has been what's happened.
And that's great.
What I appreciated in this episode was that, I mean, obviously when we're talking about witch trials,
although obviously religion is a big aspect of it,
you can't ignore the misogyny inherent in it.
And you throw the doctor into that.
All witches are women.
The Pendle Witch Trials, not all of them are women.
I think it's one of those things where you have to go below
the kind of surface level sexism and say,
actually, who does this affect?
It's kind of like laws that only affect part-time workers.
And you say, oh, well, you know, there's nothing sexist about it,
except that the majority of part-time workers are women,
and it disproportionately affects them.
So I think it's pretty hard to separate this out from the misogyny
that I don't think we are going to have a problem with,
agreeing that was around in the 16th century.
And so the doctor makes references to this,
I can't remember the exact line,
but about not having any difficulty being listened to when she was a bloke.
And it's like having regenerated as a man an unfeasantly large number of times in a row.
She's not had to...
The kind of privilege that she has enjoyed in patriarchal societies,
and let's face it, she spent a lot of time on Earth,
And a lot of time on parts of Earth in times in history that have been very male oriented.
And so that that kind of privilege has been almost invisible.
And now and now she's here as a woman.
And so suddenly that disadvantage she's experiencing becomes very much more obvious.
And I just liked the way that was brought out and handled without too much being made of it.
OK, I'll agree.
I won't completely agree that that's just
I mean in this particular case
it's absolutely
it's a misogyny thing
so I don't get it that way
but I'm going to face it
Peter Davison had exactly the same problem
he went from a very commanding
powerful doctor that could
to command a room
to someone who could talk to
he was blue in the face
and they couldn't convince people
to listen to him
in many instances
so that sort of
regenerative change from
gosh I can get people to listen to me
to gosh I can't get people to listen to me
has happened to the doctor in the past, just not necessarily for these reasons. So, yeah,
I mean, so I found the line. Honestly, if I was still a bloke, I could get on with the job and
not have to waste time defending myself, which, you know, I think is a fair comment.
I think, I do think it's a fair comment. I think there's certainly, absolutely,
in that context, it is. But, you know, she has had to deal with this sort of thing in the past.
My question, you know, it's all about this scene, kind of, is so, first off, and recognizing that we don't go into a whole heck of a lot about British history at this level of detail.
Would a landowner, would a landlord really have passed to a widow and continued to be the landlord in that period of time?
And it's sort of, okay, so Becca Zavarosh, she is the landlord.
and the doctor makes mention of it being unusual for a woman.
And she's like, my husband died and left it to me.
And I'm guessing she has no sons.
And so I'm just curious as to how English law dealt with that
because women were second class citizens.
And it feels odd.
I mean, there may have been no one else,
but it kind of feels odd that the village accepted her.
Well, I think without being an expert on 16th century legal history,
it's probably similar to rules of succession alike.
You just have no choice if the woman's the only one there is.
Women are second class.
Well, yeah, because you might be the eldest child,
but if you happen to be of the female type of child,
it doesn't matter that you're the eldest child.
It's the eldest son who's going to inherit.
The only way you're going to inherit is if there are no sons.
And, you know, that's how it works for royal succession.
And that is accepted.
I mean, in as much as it is accepted,
I think that would be a valid question.
But it's possible that he was an only child or that his brothers died.
You know, we've got an era when people didn't necessarily all live to a ripe old age.
If he's died, he might have outlived his brother anyway.
I guess my point is that this feels a little weird that this is not the normal circumstance.
Okay.
Now, that leads to my question.
The doctor pulls out her sonic paper, psychic paper, sonic psychic paper screwdriver,
and flashes it to Becca, the woman who is the landlord, which is an odd situation.
And she sees it that the doctor is the Witchfinder General.
And the doctor shows the same psychic paper to King James.
He sees it as the Witchfinder General's assistant.
Now, two questions.
One, King James's expectation is different from Becca's, and I'm not sure I believe that,
because surely Becca knows that women would not be Witchfinder General either, in that,
I mean, she can't be ignorant of the world that she lives in.
So it's very odd to me, unless she has different ideas.
I think the difference there might be, well, I don't know if it's different ideas or different
experience in the sense that she knows that she is quite capable of being the landlady,
Whereas the king might not have any experience of a woman being in a position of seniority like that.
Okay.
And then following that up, how come they both saw them as witch finders?
Well, I don't actually know how the psychic paper works, but isn't part of it what the doctor wants them to think?
I don't know.
I honestly, this is part of the question.
Did she go, I'm thinking Witchfinder General, and then shows it to them, and they go, oh, it says Witchfinder General.
Because in Kerblam, she just throws them, here's our credentials.
And it kind of felt like the woman who was looking at it just made it up whole, oh, family of the first lady, which is a really bizarre thing to pull out of nowhere.
And in the past, I've always kind of thought the doctor primed them with what he said before showing them, you know, I'm the doctor.
she's my plus one and shows the psychic paper and they go is that is that is that how it's
introduced in the end of the world yes and she's my plus yes i forgot i'd forgotten him priming
priming yeah so it's and so a lot of times more than he's just expecting to see an invitation
and and a lot of times when they show it the doctor does prime and i can't say in every situation but
he'll say these are my credentials and i feel like he's showing them that's going they'll look at that
and they'll know what credentials they expect to see.
And sometimes they'll look at it,
and they'll say something totally off the wall,
and the doctor will flip it around and go,
oh, is that what it says?
Like they didn't expect,
they expected it to be like I'm from the government,
but instead it's like I'm from the sanitation bureau
or whatever weird thing that the person is bringing to it.
And in this case, I don't remember what the doctor says,
but it doesn't prime it with anything like,
you know, we're witch finders,
and then showing them the thing,
and then going, oh, you're the witch finder general.
Could just be a writer discrepancy.
But I did think it was interesting that they were both witch finders, but King James altered it, or Becca altered it, to their expectations are different.
And I just wouldn't think Becca's expectations would be different, that she would expect a woman in this position either.
Despite the fact that she's...
Well, I think that is...
Unless it's because she's contaminated with the Morax, and she's the queen.
I just think it's because she knows what a woman is capable of, even if she realises what obstacles there are in the way, whereas King James possibly doesn't even think that women are capable of.
A woman would not be capable of being the witchfinder general.
That would be my guess on that.
But he is primed on what to expect on the paper.
But I take your point about her.
I'm not sure that she is.
And I unfortunately have only had a chance to watch this one once.
So I didn't go back and look at that.
It kind of nagged me at the time.
So I have a question about the timing of this.
Again, King James is not one of the big ones that we get any info on,
despite the colonization of the Americas started under his watch.
but if I had been reading King James's history from Wikipedia,
which I may have done before this podcast,
I would have bet dollars to donuts this occurred in 1599.
And the reason is, so a lot of what we saw on camera seemed to be fairly accurate.
I don't know that he was quite secamp,
but certainly people of the time used some phrases like,
after the reign of King Elizabeth, we have Queen James.
um i i attributed to raleigh sir walter to walter raleigh um there there's definitely some um
there's definitely some historical evidence that he may have i don't know that he was quite as
carry-on witch hunts as he was in this one but um uh you know it wasn't they weren't shying away
from but but in 1599 so in 1597 king james wrote a book called demonology um he was he was a bit of
a scholar. When he had gotten married, and he did get married, he had a ton of kids, even a bunch
that survived. He had to go to Europe to pick up his bride because storms, and this is prior to 1597,
and it was believed that the storms were caused by witches, and there were witch trials, and this is
kind of apparently where he got into this thing, because he was convinced for years that Scottish
witches were trying to send storms to kill him um he was educated he was a scholar he wrote this
book on demonology about about witchcraft and things to look and and whatnot but but accounts
put him at 1599 he became a lot more skeptical than he had previously been and started demanding
less contrived proof of witches and that would fit really well with this date i love that that's a
That's a lovely little piece of the jigsaw.
If only he'd been king of England in 1599.
He was king of Scotland.
And the Pendle, yeah, James VI, I think.
And then the Pendle.
James VI of Scotland, James I of England.
Yeah, he would have been James VI at the time.
And the Pendle witches didn't occur until 1612,
which they seem to make reference to as being,
and Wikipedia for this episode puts this as 1612,
but nobody mentioned that date.
So I have no idea.
but obviously he was king of England because they call him that.
He's going back to London and all.
Yeah, I didn't know about that.
But darn, I read that and I'm like, wow, this writer really was, oh, they goofed.
Oh, darn it, they goofed.
But it's interesting because he genuinely, he himself personally helped torture
and oversaw the death of people who were accused of witches.
He genuinely had that fervor at some point in his life.
He definitely was...
Everything we saw here, at least at some point along the way,
is completely believable with King James.
So, I mean, I'm kind of suitably impressed.
Even if they only got their history from Wikipedia.
Except they didn't look at the dates very closely.
But, I mean, it was...
If you check Joy Wilkinson's Twitter,
you'll see there's four or five books on the witch trials that she read in order to research this.
There was something in one of the articles on Pendle about King James wanted results
and the people who were overseeing the trial weren't quite sure how to curry favor with him,
whether they wanted him to torture them for confessions or whether he wanted more accurate evidence.
or they didn't know, but that their whole point is they wanted to curry favor rather than they
weren't so much concerned about, you know, obvious it's a foregone conclusion, they're witches,
but how to go about it to please the king. It's fascinating. I mean, the whole concept is
fascinating from a grim and morbid point of view. And so again, kind of cool to go look at this
period of time and talk about it. But it's also interesting to then do a little, even just a
little digging and you start going well dog dog on um uh that that bit about the switch to some
more skeptical though really i i should i should have looked to see if somebody changed wikipedia
recently like after this episode it's like why did you pick 1599 but that they have some
documentation of something after that where he wrote to someone and basically was saying
something to the effect of uh i've found that most of this stuff is is not true basically so
as opposed to, you know, like, witches, let's go.
There was a sort of bit of drawback
that was a little more nuanced
than what we saw here in that respect.
Although, I mean, I thought Alan Cummings' performance
as James was absolutely terrific.
It is a bit carry-on film, though.
I don't think so.
I thought it was very, very nicely judged.
I mean, we didn't get an ooo-er or anything
when he saw Ryan, but yeah.
I don't know
I just thought that was
rather well done
I genuinely
don't know
the scene when he is sitting there talking with the doctor
and the doctor is chained up
was a great scene
that was a great scene
and he seemed like
a person on a caricature
at that point
prior to that he seemed like a caricature
and they all object yourself to themselves
and, you know, running around the forest in a mask and all that stuff.
It's like, this is a cartoon King James.
And I know everyone seems to love Alan Cummings' performance on it,
and I'm sure he gave exactly the performance that they wanted,
but it's a little bit of a caricature.
In that one moment, you're looking at it and you're saying,
you know, he's been challenged and he can change.
Of course, he doesn't in a way, but at least not then.
Or even at the end because he kills the villain.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, that's one of the things that I thought was slightly a missed opportunity in this.
I mean, I think coming performance was not what I expected.
I thought he was going to give much more of a cartoonish performance,
a real sort of, I am invincible kind of version of King James,
who had no depth, who had no seriousness.
And if there was an act being put on here, it felt like it was the character's performance.
as in what is expected of him as a king and that in that scene where you have that exchange between
him and the doctor there is as you say there's a there is a person there and what we actually get
is there's an inquiring mind an appetite to discover some sort of truth behind the yeah okay
so there's an act there is an actual mask it may be laying it on a bit thick but that's the sense
you get about how how he behaves as a king and I loved that I thought that was really really
interesting and effective what I wasn't sure about well actually now I'm not sure it was
so much of a missed opportunity because the more I think about it the more I think it was there but
I guess I'm thinking about current parallels in terms of how you deal with someone who is
essentially a despot and who has some pretty strange ideas and whose appetites you know all
the stuff about body parts and all that kind of thing this is not a good man whatever whatever
you find in that scene where he actually where the doctor almost seems to be getting through to him
she's getting through to someone who who may be curious who may be um who may have a an interest
in the world around him but it's not it's not in any sense a kind of benevolent interest he's not
he's not looking to be a philanthropic king of any sort and and there is this there is fairly
i mean guy fox thing aside i understand he was reasonably okay yeah i'm not i'm not saying he
was a bad king all right it it's it's more like why was he a good person was he a good person
and the sense you get in this and i i don't think it's necessarily historically inaccurate
it the sense you get in this is that he's probably not a very nice person and he doesn't have a he
doesn't have a kind of moral guide to what are good acts of government as opposed to just keeping
the peace doing being in other words being incredibly incredibly pragmatic but obviously
watching this in 2018 the idea of of having someone who is a bit a bit weird in the head
OK, let's not beat about the bush, who has a very, very much greater sense of their own performance than they do of any kind of moral core in terms of how they should use the power that they have somehow acquired.
It it all seems terribly relevant.
yeah and i mean yeah it is relevant and and again does it fit here with king james because
historically king james even though his regents and tutors had tried to inform him of the ways of
um the the balance between say parliament and and and the king being a little more towards
parliament he he later as he got into his religious fervor um he became a very strong advocate of
the king is god's chosen i do what i want yeah and if it's if it's wrong god will sort me out
but no one else will also also seems quite relevant and the the interesting thing about it
the thing that felt to me like maybe it was a slightly missed opportunity is how do you deal
with someone like that because obviously there are the options of either on the one hand having
nothing to do with them denouncing everything they say and do when they say and do terrible things
and the the other way not looking at any republicans but the other way is to kind of say well
this is this is a pretty bad person who's saying and doing some pretty bad things but if i can
if I can keep them on side, if I can have a word in their ear and make them a little bit less bad,
however little that is, then at least, you know, that that's something. And that seems to me that
the kind of approach that was going on here, that the doctor was willing to deal with King James,
because I guess because he's the man on the spot or because Web of Time or however you want to look
at it and so she is dead set on convincing him and then ultimately when they're facing a common foe
she is using the fact that they have a common foe to say you know come on let's let's defeat them
and at the end of it even though they're obviously not bosom pals and the doctor's not saying hey
Jamie come along for a ride in the TARDIS there's a sense of almost affection a bit of camaraderie
between them as they walk through the woods to the TARDIS.
And I didn't know if that was right or not,
because at the end of it all, he's obviously still not a good guy.
Yeah, yeah, I can see that.
I can see that.
It is.
Having said that, having thought, having rethought.
I will say this.
It did feel like when they're walking through the thing all pally at the end,
I did.
Well, that seems remarkably, wow, we've gone past a point here,
now we're buds it did seem a little bit much yeah yeah and and that and that i think is the
danger of having a slightly cartoonish king james is that you don't get the you you see the dark
side and then you forget about it and you and you mustn't forget about it you can't normalize
these things but i'm not i'm not sure that i'm not sure that it is a huge missed opportunity
because having talked it all through i kind of think a lot of it is there in the episode
it may not have been spelled out
but it may not have needed to be
it kind of raised the questions
it did, I mean
I mentioned them because it raised the questions
in my head and maybe that's all it needed
to do without getting in the way of the story
okay, well, let's talk about
the least interesting part about the story
the aliens
the mud people
I'm just going to throw
out my questions here all at once
because they don't deserve a point by point attack
it's unclear to me why the mud didn't overtake becca immediately instead of waiting months
of a growing creeping infection one why did she have the axe by her bed was it because she was
afraid that mud people were gonna come for her was it because she was gonna go chop down the
rest of the tree because she's under the control of the mud people did she kill the women in the
village so that they would get buried so that they would be available to become the mud zombies
was the whole thing don't forget that she thought that they were satan all along correct so i i'm
unclear because what she did seems to be exactly what she needed to do to free the aliens as if
the aliens were guiding her actions she but her words were but she was she wasn't doing it
intentionally in the sense that if she thought they were satan which i think she did what she
was trying to do was double down on what she believed the good and righteous thing to do
which was to drive out satan wherever he appears so if there are witches in the village then she
needs to god save save their souls what's the axe for i mean an axe is i don't i don't i don't i
don't know I mean it question could be it could be the mud people at that point it could be because
by the time the doctor and her companions arrive on the scene she's gone beyond what I'm describing
so trying to do God's work in an effort to overcome Satan and she's she's actually in the
process of committing a murder in order to cover up something she doesn't want to know and that's
From her point of view, that's fundamentally different because she knows that's wrong.
Whereas previously she thought what she was doing was right.
Well, OK, so can you could we make an argument that that says you're doing what you think is right, but you also have an alien intelligence inside your body?
Could it be convincing her that there, in other words, could it be putting the thoughts in her head that Satan is in the village that she needs to go out and do these things?
And I just couldn't tell whether or not we were dealing with a true nut up until the point when basically it started creeping out of her eyes.
Or whether we had been dealing with an alien agent, witting or unwitting, that was actually doing work specifically to the alien's advantage the whole time.
And it's also unclear that anyone knew anything about the mud zombies until the whole army rose up.
towards it's also clear becca knows more than she's letting on yeah so ah i i don't know um i i feel
it was kind of you know it's it's a little bit glossed over i mean i don't care very much because
i didn't like that as i wasn't interested in that aspect of the episode at all the only the only
thing that bothers me slightly is the idea that if it was the mud creature in becca that was driving
her to suspect satan in all of these places well that seems it doesn't it doesn't quite it doesn't
quite diminish what historically went on because obviously there were we know there were other
witch trials in other places that were equally awful and presumably not alien driven but on the
other hand shouldn't shouldn't we face up to the to the fact that this this thing that is being
portrayed on screen when it happened it happened not because of some alien mumbo jumbo it happened
because humans did it obviously but we're definitely we're definitely human driven um
but i just i don't know it did leave me with questions but i think it was because it wasn't
really very well thought out i don't think that's what the story was about it was it was another
opportunity to get us into the historical context and and so yes this was more integral to the plot
But at the same time, it felt about as tacked on as Space Nazi did in Rosa.
Not as bad as Demons of the Punjab, but about at the same level as Rosa.
Yeah, perhaps. Space Nazi was a necessary part of the plot of Rosa, so it served a more indispensable function.
Whereas I still think you could have had a...
Although this was definitely part of the story they told,
they could have had a not very different story about witch trials
that didn't involve any alien element.
And I think I would have probably enjoyed it more.
But I enjoyed this.
I'm just going to put this out there.
Aliens, if you're going to set up a prison, don't disguise it as a tree.
That's the most nonsensical part of this entire thing.
Just make it a big block and bury it so no one sees it.
I mean, you get the technology to don't make a tree.
Someone's going to chop that down eventually.
Well, maybe.
Lots of trees don't get chopped down.
But yes, eventually, I suppose.
Lots of trees do get chopped down.
I've been to England.
Well, yes, if you go far enough into the Industrial Revolution, yes,
lots of trees get chopped down.
um yeah anyhow i don't know that i have anything else on this episode i want to i want to pick up
on one other thing i think i i felt was insufficiently explored in in this one um
which really follows on from what i was just saying about making the point that humans did
this and it's to come back to this idea of the role of the bystanders who as you say
have a perfectly logical position in the sense of if they were to stick their neck out or put
their head above the parapet, however you want to put it, then they make targets of themselves.
They could be next in line to be accused of being a witch, which is one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is that as a group, they could take collective action that would put
a stop to it. And in particular, the kind of the deciding piece of evidence I'm going to point to
in terms of what actually are these bystanders really? What are their true motivations here?
What genuinely are their fears and desires? Are the fact that they are having a weekly party with
apple bobbing every time there is a witch dunking? I don't think they want to stop it. I think they
are part of a a spectacle they don't want it's true absolutely true they don't want to be the
one getting dunked but it's a natural it's also a natural part of the human condition that you
don't think it's ever going to be you and so you you you go along for the spectacle and you go
along for the party and the apple bobbing and the rest of it and i felt maybe the missed opportunity
was the their culpability wasn't explored again it comes back to the relevance of of this thing
of the fact that a a bad bad governor a bad squire or whatever the female equivalent of a squire is
um just as just as with a bad king or any other bad kind of head of state you might possibly think
of who is in some way providing entertainment again if you can think of any parallels then
we kind of all become complicit in becoming just spectators of that entertainment rather than
thinking about whether this is something that we should be complicit in that we should be allowing
to have and i kind of thought the the whole of the village would basically given a pass by the
doctor and her companions when i'm not sure they deserved it so you know the term bread and circuses
came to mind um but um so that's a that's interesting because it does come so close at
the beginning of the episode it's easy to forget that yes they seem to be having a little bit of a
weekly fair and i was like oh this is this is fun actually village life is like a ren fair
and um and then they ring the bell the gong the gong or whatever it was and everyone's mood changes
suddenly it became somber and it's like
when she calls we have to go
and I didn't know what to make of that
honestly
did the landlord command
that you have a party
all day before the witch
dunking
I didn't know what
to take of it
the sense I got was that it was like
there's a requirement to take
this seriously
as in it's a it's a religious ritual so you don't want to be caught laughing at the devil
that kind of thing could be could be um and you're right they could have they could have
rose up and that did cross my mind again not understanding the mindset of 16th and or 17th
century all right hold up jacobian um era uh peasants would they consider rising up against
the landlord and slitting her throat in the night it didn't look like it would be much of a problem
well i i mean in the grand scheme of things well if you consider any any one particular individual
as as you were saying the motivation is very strongly towards saying i don't i don't want
to stick my neck out and if you were to try and act collectively how would you know who to trust
so you know think of life behind the iron curtain think of the stasi and your neighbors informing
and so on and so forth.
So there's a whole lot of game theory at play there
that makes me feel that it's not obvious
that any of us in that situation
would be brave enough to do the right thing.
But I guess my question is,
is anyone there actually interested
in doing the right thing?
And that wasn't explored.
Not at all.
In fact, most of the rest of the village
after that scene,
well, they really weren't in it anyway.
But, you know, it's down to the granddaughter.
Yeah.
as as the stand-in and she can't stand in as the village because she's lost somebody close to her
absolutely and and therefore she's she's at risk and she's she's an outsider already yeah i don't
know i have an answer for that i don't think the writer had an answer for it well it just struck
me as being a missed opportunity i would have liked to have gone a little bit more into the
culpability of the of the mob the mob mentality in those scenes but it just wasn't explored yeah
All right, well, in that case, I don't know if you have anything else.
No, I don't think I do.
I believe the next episode is something like They Take You Away.
I don't know.
I haven't been following the name.
I'm being delighted.
The name doesn't.
I'm being surprised each week.
It doesn't tell you much, I have to say.
Unless, you know.
Well, nor does the trailer.
They Take You Away of the Daleks might be a tip-off, but it's not called that.
So, anyway, Simon, thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure, as always.
Listeners, I do hope you'll join us all again next time on Fusion Patrol.
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