Review: Doctor Who: Power Play
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- 7 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
The 1980s. A time of tensions related to all thing nuclear. A fear of nuclear weapons and nuclear war dramatized so ably in TV dramas such as Threads and The Day After. Also present was a fear of nuclear power, stemming out of the previous decade and heightened by events such as Chernobyl and the secrecy surrounding the industry as a whole, something brought to life in the classic BBC thriller Edge of Darkness. For a time, it looked like another iconic BBC series might tie into these nuclear fears in its own way. Fate, however, intervened and it would take the story more than two decades to finally appear.
So what could have been Doctor Who’s take on the nuclear fears of the 1980s?
By the middle of the 1980s, Gary Hopkins was an up and coming TV writer, having sold scripts for the soap Emmerdale and the children’s fantasy series Into the Labyrinth. Hopkins eventually came into contact with the Doctor Who production office and its script editor Eric Saward. Saward, always on the lookout for writers who could contribute to the difficult to write for series, would eventually commission Hopkins for an outline entitled Meltdown. Hopkins developed it with the idea that, in keeping with the series renewed interest in its own history after two decades on air, it would see the return of the 1960s companion Victoria Waterfield, though actress Deborah Watling hadn’t been approached about reprising her role. After Hopkins early work succeeded in earning approval from Saward and producer John Nathan-Turner, a script for the first episode was commissioned. Hopkins duly wrote it and submitted it, awaiting feedback, with the story potentially featuring in the second or third seasons to feature Colin Baker’s Doctor.
Which, as would prove the case for a number of potential mid-1980s Doctor Who scripts, was when fate intervened. News broke on February 27th, 1985 that production of the series was being suspended, causing an eighteen-month hiatus. Behind the scenes Saward and Nathan-Turner worked to have scripts ready to go for the eventually produced season, only to have Controller of BBC One Michael Grade and BBC Head of Drama Jonathan Powell alter its format and episode count drastically. That decision led to all planned stories being scrapped in favor of The Trial of a Time Lord with Hopkins paid £925 for his work to date. Money which, as Hopkins told Doctor Who Magazine in 2022, “helped put me on the property ladder,” as it came to form part of the down payment on his first house.
Meltdown’s cancellation was only a brief speedbump in Hopkins’ career as he soon contributed episodes to Granada’s Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett, winning an Edgar Allan Poe Award for his adaptation of The Devil’s Foot. Hopkins would get his chance to write for Doctor Who as well via Big Finish, contributing The Last and Other Lives for Paul McGann’s Doctor in addition to an episode of I, Davros focusing on the creator of the Daleks.
Meltdown wouldn’t quite fade into obscurity, however. In 2008, Big Finish began a new range of releases known as Doctor Who – The Lost Stories. With Colin Baker’s era featuring at least a season’s worth of unproduced scripts, it was a natural enough place for Big Finish to start, producing an entire season before branching out into other Doctors. Even then, the hiatus and its impact revealed a number of potential stories that had been left unmade. Among them was Meltdown, with Hopkins afforded the opportunity to finish the script he’d started a quarter-century earlier. It was scripted and preparing to be recorded when, on the 11th of March 2011, the Fukushima nuclear disaster took place. Hopkins and Big Finish made the decision to re-title the serial in light of current events, with it being release the following June under the new title of Power Play.
But whatever its title, was Hopkins script worth the wait to hear?
It’s interesting to note that Hopkins developed the script with Watling’s Victoria in mind even though the actress hadn’t been approached. History, however, suggests that there was perhaps the production office was keeping in mind the production of the 1983 serial Mawdryn Undead. A serial during whose writing which, being set in part around a boy’s school, started out with the return of Ian Chesterton, William Russell’s character from the earliest seasons of the series, in mind. When Russell proved unavailable, rewrites were undertaken to feature Ian Marter as Harry Sullivan instead. Marter’s likewise being unable meant that eventually former UNIT leader Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart played by actor Nicholas Courtney appeared in a rather improbable situation (creating a continuity nightmare for fans that’s even been referenced in Modern Who on TV). Crafting a script that could feature a returning character but not be entirely dependent upon them specifically or incapable of an easy rewrite seems likely to have been a lesson to have come out of that experience.
Unfortunately, that’s also something that’s borne out by actually listening to Power Play. Returning characters were becoming part and parcel of the series even by the mid-1980s and, as Modern Who episodes such as School Reunion with Sarah Jane Smith have shown, can serve both as nostalgia trips but also a chance to explore those characters’ lives beyond the TARDIS. Power Play doesn’t have much to offer for Victoria, catching up with her at least a couple of decades after Patrick Troughton’s Doctor left her behind at the conclusion of Fury From the Deep. True, she’s joined a group of anti-nuclear protesters, but there’s little sense of how she’s grown and changed outside of a few lines about her being older than she was. Not that Victoria in 1967-68 was an especially fleshed out character (something which can be said of many companions of the era), but outside of the odd reference to old adventures, the version of her presented in Power Play could have been almost any companion left on then-modern day Earth that the series could have brought back.
It’s perhaps also unfortunate too that Watling, despite her enthusiasm for her time on the series, was also not the most adept performer on audio, with line readings that move between bland straight readings off the page to over the top with little range in-between. All of which is a shame given the character was one out of time, as a young woman from Victorian times left in the late 20th century, and a reunion with the person responsible for that decades later offered much in dramatic possibilities, almost all of which Hopkins left unexplored.
This seems a consequence of the script focusing instead on the other two strands of the plot. One of which, as alluded to above, is an experimental nuclear reactor built in the British countryside causing earth tremors and being protested against; the other involves the Pleyarec, a sort of intergalactic police force, pursuing the Doctor for alleged crimes with an older officer working with a much younger member of the force, offering a science fiction twist on a cliché of police fiction. Both ideas are intriguing in their own right, especially with the inclusion of Dominic (played by Miles Jupp) who seems to be the real brains behind the reactor’s operations. The former would have proven timely if the serial had been made to air in 1986 or (more likely) 1987 and the latter is an idea that it took televised Who another two decades to explore with the Judoon. They’re ideas that on their own, should have proven enough to make Power Play worth a listen.
Unfortunately not. The problem is that, even toward the serial’s end, they never mesh together in an entirely cohesive manner. Indeed, Hopkins’ way of doing so is a convoluted mess that the script attempts to excuse with a few lines of unsatisfactory exposition. Like many a young writer, mid-1980s Hopkins was full of ideas but with no real notion of how to bring them together, causing the first half of Power Play to be slow paced and the conclusion to feel rushed. Something that Hopkins returning to finish it a quarter-century later could not fix, either.
Nor is Power Play safe from the mid-1980s Doctor Who issue of its titular hero passively responding to events instead of playing a more dynamic role in proceedings, something that later script editor Andrew Cartmel would call out when he took over from Saward in 1987. It’s a flaw even more apparent in the writing of the Doctor that feels very much in keeping with Baker’s first season, which doesn’t offer Colin Baker much beyond his playing an often-harsh egotist. It’s a serial that is so much of its time that it isn’t endearing but a reminder of the era’s flaws, something which is also clear from Simon Robinson’s score which captures the sometimes frustrating nature of mid-1980s Doctor Who electronic music to intrude upon the story being told instead of supporting it.
Which isn’t to write off Power Play as a whole. Beyond Watling, there’s a solid cast here, led by Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant reprising their 1980s TV roles. Like so many of his TV serials, the writing doesn’t offer Baker much room to manoeuvre beyond a (thankfully unseen on audio) multi-colored coat and a vast ego, but the actor still brings out the best in the material. His scenes with Victoria offer some friendlier and even tender moments, though they are fleeting ones. Thankfully, Bryant as Peri fares far better, full of energy and spunk that stands in contrast to both the Doctor and Victoria. One might even argue that, in the middle episodes, she drives the plot far more than the Doctor does.
Beyond them, Miles Jupp as Dominic is the highlight of the production, offering a cool and calculating villain in the midst of otherwise traditional Who where the temptation would be to be over the top. The supporting cast does decently but isn’t especially memorable, which isn’t their fault. David Warwick as reactor director Dysart or Andrew Dickens and Howard Gossington as Pleyarec officer Leiss and Weska, respectively, do their best with undemanding material. Something which is also true of Victoria Alcock, Greg Donaldson, and James Hayward as the protesters who they admirably flesh out despite cardboard writing. “Admirable” being a phrase worthy of describing much of the cast’s efforts across the board.
Power Play in the end was anything but a lost classic. At best, it might have been an unremarkable piece of mid-1980s Doctor Who if it had made to TV screens in 1986 or 1987. Though, given its themes and world events, there is still a likelihood it might never have made it screens at all or, in the wake of the likes of Edge of Darkness, have been seen as all the more inferior. Doctor Who might have missed out on the nuclear fears of the decade more overtly, but Big Finish’s production suggests that might not have been a great loss.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.