Carnival of Monsters

How appropriate that "Carnival of Monsters" was the first story to follow the Doctor's release from exile. For whilst it could easily have taken place at any time during Seasons 8 and 10 (with only the scene-setting addition of an unconvincing Time Lord mission to justify it) it totally befits a return to unshackled adventuring, with Robert Holmes writing as if his imagination had suddenly been uncaged. All through the series history we can see examples where the invention and imagination of the series have been reigned in or restricted. Here the opposite occurs, as we get sea monsters, space carnival people, a time-scooping device, alien insurrections, a Cyberman and an Ogron. All in the same story!

If it was healthy to try and read too much into a writer simply making the best of what the series gave him in scope (no pun intended) one might almost imagine that Robert Holmes was making some kind of point. All the key staples of the Doctors travels (himself, his assistant, the TARDIS and a clutch of monsters) begin the story trapped inside a confined setting before being liberated at the end of the adventure; it could almost be a metaphor for the series setting itself back on track. But if you want to consider it in the simplest way, the ingenuity of this story is the result of the first writer in a long time to be told "do what you like, take him anywhere."

Considering Doctor Who's uniquely open-ended brief - a time machine that can go anywhere, anywhen - it's amazing to look back down the years and see the number of times someone made an effort to box in this wonderfully free remit, and telling to reflect that almost every time it resulted in a lesser quality of story. Holmes himself could found the basis for the argument, with the occasions when he was allowed to start from a completely blank canvas ("The Time Warrior", "Talons of Weng-Chiang" etc.) producing arguably his best work. It now seems a tragic and needless waste that various production teams irritated him by imposing their organisational whims on so many other occasions - "write in the biggest monster we've ever had"; "write the end of this complicated 14-part linked season"; "set it in Seville!" - etc.

The same principle could be expanded to apply to Doctor Who as a whole. The moment anybody ever tried to do something "themed" or hammer a story down with a narrative device that had nothing to do with its plot, what resulted was nearly always less than it could have been otherwise. Writers work best when they aren't told to shoehorn elements into a plot, or put simply if somebody has etched something onto the canvas before you ever pick up a brush, the resulting work is always going to be less "your" work than somebody else's. And when that somebody else has no understanding of what you intended to create in the first place, or worst still isn't even a writer at all, it's going to turn out less art than messy collage.

Which is not to say that Doctor Who should have continued forever in the mould of the Hartnell era; a series can't run for twenty six years without being bound together by some kind of unified point or structure. Or can it? Doctor Who's attempts to branch into structured adventuring read like a list of failed experiments, and where it did work (consigning the series to Earth for the Pertwee era, for example) it's peppered with examples of the show busting to escape; as ultimately it did with "Carnival". One only has to look at the TV Movie for proof that a new series shouldn't begin with any predefined ideas or restrictions. Put him inside the TARDIS with a companion and let everything else be borne from the individual stories. That was, after all, how it always used to work best.