I’ve never been a huge game player.
There are board games that I absolutely love – Scrabble, Monopoly, Trivial
Pursuit – and I grew up playing all sorts of them. Video games were always fun,
but I’m not particularly good at them. I didn’t play a lot of the “traditional”
kid games when I was younger, things like Red Rover, Blind Man’s Bluff, etc. As
an adult, I have friends who are HUGE into gaming – board, tabletop roleplay,
video, you name it, but I haven’t really gotten into any new ones. This is all a
prelude to say that “The Celestial Toymaker” as a story was never going to be
thematically my cup of tea. The game angle is interesting, but it was not
enough for me. Unfortunately, even with my game bias aside, this story just
didn’t work for me. It’s not “bad”, but it is uneven and slow.
“The Celestial Toymaker” is not the
worst of Doctor Who, not by a long shot. There are ideas here that are
absolutely genius, not least of which is the Toymaker himself. A seemingly
eternal being, immensely powerful, and most interestingly, someone who has
encountered the Doctor before turn what could have been a silly concept into
something really quite sinister. Michael Gough’s portrayal of the Toymaker is a
joy to watch, coming so close to being over the top, but not ever stepping over
that line. If my memory serves this is also the first instance of the Doctor
facing an adversary who is seemingly all-powerful to the point of being
god-like, even if it’s only in a limited domain. This will show up again and
again in the series, but the Toymaker was here first. The very end of the story
even hints at a return for the Toymaker, which was never to be.
The first three episodes of the story
are missing, so I watched them as reconstructions. I don’t know if that
affected my response or not, but I will admit that the existing episode 4 was
probably my favorite. Cyril the Schoolboy was a much more interesting opponent
for Steven and Dodo than any of the characters in the previous three episodes,
as he seemed much more engaged in their game. I have in my notes that the whole
story seemed like something from the Theater of the Absurd, and the opponents
of Steven and Dodo were just being kind of, well, weird. Cyril was *nasty*,
where say, the playing cards were kind of ridiculous.
This story was made at a time when the
higher-ups in the production team were trying to come up with a way to replace,
or at least remove, William Hartnell. The Doctor is invisible for most of this
story, invisible AND voiceless for a chunk, and never really does anything
until the very end of Episode 4. If it had just been Hartnell’s week for
vacation, I might be a little more forgiving, but it’s kind of clear that the
plan was to see how little of the Doctor was necessary. Peter Purves as Steven
does his usual great job, but he’s saddled with Dodo, who has quickly become my
least favorite companion. She’s shrill, inconsistently written, inconsistently
performed, and kind of unlikable.
“The Celestial Toymaker” is a great
high concept idea, that I really think got let down in the scripting
department. The design isn’t bad, and a lot of use was made of the limited
cast, but it feels that the game/competition elements weren’t really thought
out well. The script just doesn’t come together for me, the puzzles that need
to be solved are just uninteresting and not at all clever, and the character of
the Doctor here is simply wasted. The character of the Toymaker is wonderful,
and I’d love to see it revisited in the new series, where they could maybe do
it a little more justice. (Free story idea for Messrs. Moffat and Chibnall:
Have the Toymaker appear in a Christmas Special. You’re welcome.) Like I said
earlier, it’s not a bad episode, but it is proof that high concept story idea
can only go so far.
NEXT
EPISODE: The Gunfighters
"The Celestial Toymaker" novelization cover, courtesy The TARDIS Data Core at tardis.wikia.com
