Chapter 24
Chancing an Arm
Glospin continues his rounds of the House, stirring it up
and putting in a bad word for the Doctor to anyone he chances
across.
Leela gets her kit off, but this is not a gratuitous "Nyssa
gets her kit off" moment, just our noble savage getting back
to basics.
The ghostly guard captain caught in the transmat chamber is
the forerunner of Inspector MacKenzie of Scotland Yard,
trapped like a display specimen in a drawer in Ghost Light.
The captain's name is pronounced Re-dred. He's an ancestral
cousin to those other Chancellery commanders Hilred and
Andred, all three from the House of Redlooms, which obviously
has militaristic blood programmed in its loom.
I love the idea of an alien housekeeper sifting through the
contents of a bag from Marks and Spencer's food hall.
Cousin Luton is a name in the spirit of Robert Holmes,
whose own track record for silly names is justly legendary.
Apart from Runcible, Unstoffe, Glitz and Dibber, I love
periphery characters like Nellie Gussett and the wonderful
denizens of Megropolis 3, Singe and Hackett. Holmes was truly
great at bringing his locations and characters to life with
bizarre language, quirky personal details and references to
unseen events, people and places. He could create whole worlds
in a couple of sentences and had a gloriously evil sense of
humour. Hence Cousin Luton's suitably gruesome and Holmesian
(I hope) offstage death.
This scene with the fish and the chimney is seriously
surreal, as if the Doctor's homecoming has set off the sort of
unnatural portents that usually foreshadow disasters in
Shakespeare: yawning graves and fiery warriors in the clouds
who drizzle blood in Julius Caesar, or lamentings in the air
and clamouring night birds in Macbeth. Or maybe it's a
miracle? Naturally, the Doctor has a perfectly sound
explanation for it all. How boring! We're Doctor Who fans.
We'd much rather believe the weird version.
