“Shada” (season 17, episodes 21-26. Filmed in 1979; never aired.)
In 1979, Douglas Adams, then script editor for Doctor Who, wrote a story for the show in which the villain disastrously shatters into half a dozen fragments of himself that scatter throughout time. That was “City Of Death,” one of the best serials Doctor Who ever did. Later that year, he wrote another one. This time, the story itself exploded, shattered into half a dozen fragments of itself, and scattered throughout time. That was “Shada,” the great lost story of season 17, a half-filmed serial from Tom Baker’s second-to-last season as the Fourth Doctor. And for a long time, people wondered if it too wouldn’t have been one of the greats. But that was back when it was still lost.
It’s oddly appropriate that the last scene of “Shada” begins with the Doctor reading from Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, because despite the persistent efforts over the years to give it life again, “Shada” remains, in all its various and contradictory manifestations, just an old curiosity. It’s not awful, mind you. It’s not anywhere near the toxicity level of something like “The Twin Dilemma,” in which the stupidity is actually painful to watch. No, this is just a thinly written, overly formulaic story, with some clever ideas and a smattering of good Adamsian jokes and Bakerian Doctoring stretched out over a lot of boring filler. “Shada” would never have engendered so much interest if Douglas Adams’ name hadn’t been attached to it.
Still, even if it’s mediocre, it’s worth a look. If nothing else, “Shada” is interesting as a bit of complex pop-culture archaeology. There are at least seven versions of “Shada” floating around out there, ranging from complete adaptations to fragmentary scraps. There’s the original version partially filmed in 1979 by director Pennant Roberts and scrapped by an electricians’ strike. Later, a short clip from the first episode was used in 1983’s “The Five Doctors” after Tom Baker declined to appear in that anniversary show. In 1987, Adams cannibalized both “Shada” and “City Of Death” for the plot of his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, removing the stories from the Doctor Who universe entirely. In 1992, most of what Roberts had filmed in 1979 was assembled by producer John Nathan-Turner and released on home video, with a particularly eccentric Tom Baker narrating what would have happened in the missing scenes, and a new musical score by Keff McCullough. In 2003, Big Finish Productions adapted “Shada” as an audio drama in a reworked version starring Eighth Doctor Paul McGann in place of Baker. More recently, superfan Ian Levine produced a new, BBC-unauthorized Fourth Doctor version that filled out the 1979 recordings with animated scenes akin to the resurrections of “Planet Of Giants” and “The Invasion,” and with a different actor replacing Tom Baker in the missing scenes. And last year, Adams’ estate authorized a novelization by frequent Doctor Who scriptwriter Gareth Roberts. Each of these is different, none is definitive and most are deeply flawed beyond what they all share thanks to Adams’ original script. But they each have their good points and collectively point toward what the best possible version of the story would have been.
The only one of these I haven’t seen is Levine’s version, so although I suspect it improves on the 1992 reconstruction (it would almost have to), I’ll have to ignore it for our purposes here. Instead, I’ll be looking at the Nathan-Turner version and the Big Finish animation, both of which can be found on the newly released “Shada” DVD set. If you want to just sit down and try to enjoy “Shada” as a complete Doctor Who story, you’ll want either the Big Finish animated version or Roberts’ novel. If you want the maximum amount of Douglas Adams humor, go with Dirk Gently. But to appreciate “Shada” as originally conceived—a lighthearted, slightly screwball adventure in the same mode as “City Of Death” with Baker’s Doctor, his girlfriend Romana and his robot dog K9—then you have to watch what there is of the original footage.
The first problem, though, is that the 1992 edit is so incoherent and hard to follow thanks to Nathan-Turner’s poorly written linking narration that I wound up unable to get through it without a copy of Adams’ original script to refer back to. (Here’s one.) But the basic storyline is this: The Doctor and Romana go to Cambridge (Adams’ alma mater) to visit the Doctor’s old friend Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord who has been posing as a Cambridge don for 300 years. Chronotis is old and scatterbrained, but eventually remembers that he called the Doctor to ask him to help a book Chronotis stole from the Time Lords—The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey, which is very old and may hold dangerous secrets. Chronotis doesn’t realize he’s accidentally lent the book to Chris, a grad student. And hot on the trail of the book is a monumentally vain alien named Skagra, who is armed with a mind-sucking sphere and lava-formed servants called Krargs. Skagra is also looking for the Time Lords’ secret prison planet, called Shada, and its most infamous prisoner, the criminal Time Lord Salyavin who has the power to place his mind in other peoples’ minds. Skagra wants this power for himself so that he can replace everyone in the universe with copies of himself. He’s vain, you remember.
Baker, as was often the case, is by far the most entertaining thing about his version of “Shada,” even when he goes too wildly over-the-top in his narration. (“SHAAAAADAAAAA!!!!”) It’s safe to say that without his manic googly-eyed presence, the story loses an essential amount of pure fun—hammy and Shatnerian though he can be in his worst moments, you don’t get Baker’s wild comic unpredictability without that risk. He needed, I think, a director who could tell him when to tone it down, and it’s notable that his self-indulgent overemoting only happens in the narrated bits. In fact, the reconstruction makes the original material seem worse than it actually would have been, which is partly due to the perfunctory linking material, which often fails to carry across essential information about any given scene’s basic plot and mood. McCullough’s grating, cheap-sounding score doesn’t help, ruining several jokes by drowning the dialogue in heavy-handed synths.
Having said that, there’s no reason to think the 1979 strike didn’t kill a story that wasn’t already pretty weak. To start with, the script was a hasty, half-hearted concept from the beginning, according to Adams himself. In M.J. Simpson’s Adams biography Hitchhiker, Adams says of this era that “Doctor Who at that point was quite literally driving me mad. I had far more work to do on the scripts than I expected, and it was hurting my radio stuff, which put a lot of pressure on me.” He wasn’t kidding: Adams’ tenure on Doctor Who coincided with him writing the second Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy radio series, the first Hitch-Hikers book, and the pilot script for the Hitch-Hikers TV series. By the end, he was feeling frustrated at both Doctor Who and the BBC for their institutional resistance to change, and burned out by his workload. “Shada” was clearly doomed from the beginning: Adams’ original idea was completely different, involving the Doctor getting sick of fighting evil and deciding to retire, and was rejected by his boss, producer Graham Williams, on the grounds that it was too silly and undermined the series as a whole. But Adams kept pitching it anyway, and three days before a script was due, finally realized Williams wasn’t going to blink. So he came up with “Shada” as “a last-minute panic thing to do. Didn’t particularly like it. I thought it was rather thin—at most a mediocre four parter stretched out over six parts.” He also claimed he only gave his permission for the 1992 reconstruction because of a paperwork mistake.
Still, I think Adams could have made “Shada” work on paper if he’d given himself more time (or at least had better luck with inspiration, considering that he wrote “City Of Death” under similar deadline pressure). What he wound up with was sadly formulaic, just another installation of the much-used “Doctor foils plot of megalomaniacal evil genius” plot that rested on cliches instead of subverting them as Adams did in his best work. And it’s at least two episodes too long, stretched out by chase scenes and other filler that obscures how inconsequential the story really is at its heart. Adam’s “Shada” pitch to Graham Williams had another layer to it revolving around the ethics of capital punishment as seen through the story of Salyavin/Chronotis. But nothing of this made it to screen, and may not even have made it past Adams’ early drafts. And although Chronotis is a terrific character, charmingly daft and incorrigible enough that even the eccentric Doctor lectures him about his recklessness, the other guest stars are awfully thin—neither Chris nor Claire serve any real purpose than to allow the Doctor, Romana, or Chronotis to tell them the plot.