Doctor Who: The world-building of Robert Holmes
By James Aggas
The best Doctor Who stories featured some amazing world-building, and no one did that better than Robert Holmes – one of the best ever writers for the series.
I was watching my season twelve Blu-ray of Doctor Who earlier today (known as Tom Baker: Complete Season One in the US and Canada), when something occurred to me. It was during a re-watch of Fourth Doctor story The Ark in Space when I was distinctly reminded of one of Robert Holmes’s greatest strengths: world-building.
I touched upon this with my recent analysis of The Deadly Assassin, and how it influenced the behavior, mythology and very look of the Time Lords for decades to come. But this is a key trait that’s featured in many of his stories.
The Ark in Space is a perfect example of this. Across the story’s four episodes, along with telling a thrilling horror in space, Robert Holmes also creates a very fleshed out future history for Earth. He introduces the idea of life on Earth being wiped out in the thirtieth century by solar flares, and humanity surviving in various ways.
The key way it does that is the main focus in this story: the strongest and smartest of humanity being put into suspended animation. They have their own form of communication, their own form of behavior. Everything, from the humans to the future history of Earth to the war with the Wirrn, feels fully fleshed out.
Indeed, this rich history is so good that it’s carried over into the next story, The Sontaran Experiment, where we find out what happened to the other survivors of humanity. In fact, its carried far, far beyond that.
The Beast Below was hardly a direct sequel to The Ark in Space, but it did share its mythology with it.
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)
Shared mythology
An excellent indication of just how strong Robert Holmes’s world-building truly was is how many other writers have used elements of some of those stories, without creating direct sequels to them.
Let me explain. The Time Warrior was a major Third Doctor story that not only introduced Sarah Jane Smith but, just as importantly, introduced the Sontarans for the first time. The monster proved to be so successful that they have since appeared in many subsequent stories since.
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However, it wasn’t just the Sontarans that was added to the mythology with this story. Their war with the Rutans was mentioned for the first time. We had no idea who the Rutans were or what they looked like. However, Terrence Dicks was very clever when he wrote Horror of Fang Rock, where it was revealed at the end that the murderous monster of the story was a Rutan!
Going back to The Ark in Space, the story, or at least the history of it, was directly mentioned in The Beast Below. It may not be the strongest episode by Steven Moffat, but the fact that it explores that part of Doctor Who history while telling a completely different story is definitely a bonus.
And this is what makes Robert Holmes’s world-building so successful and so enduring. Decades after his stories have been written, and writers still want to explore different sides to the history he created. Not just by bringing back old monsters, but also by giving us fresh looks and different perspectives on his stories. And that’s the mark of an excellent writer of science-fiction.
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Are you a fan of Robert Holmes’s stories? Did you enjoy the world-building he created with so many memorable serials? Let us know in the comments below.