‘Is this honour? Is this war?’
Battlefield (1989) sees a clash of mythologies, as the progressive, anti-racist, sporadically pacifist Doctor Who
of the late 1980s takes on Britain’s authoritarian, chivalric national
myth of King Arthur. With a script by Ben Aaronovitch, now a bestselling
urban fantasy novelist but then only the writer of the previous year’s
acclaimed Remembrance of the Daleks (1988), it forms with its
predecessor a ‘philosophical pair’, replacing its 1960s setting with an
imagined 1990s and showing a Doctor dealing with the repercussions of
his future actions, rather than his past.
Even as a script Battlefield falls short of complete success,
yet it remains an emotionally literate, politically engaged and
thematically complex piece. It finds areas of overlap between Andrew
Cartmel’s radical conception of Doctor Who and Arthurian myth in
the legend of a past golden age, represented by the return of Brigadier
Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT, and in the identification of the Doctor –
always presented by the series as a wizard, a prophet and a mentor –
with Merlin. It interrogates the patriarchal attitudes of both the
Arthurian myths and 1970s Doctor Who from a contemporary perspective, and questions the attitudes to war found in both.
It also does an exemplary job of worldbuilding, sketching in a
convincing near future based on a handful of lines, and presents a
complex, questionable, even sympathetic villain motivated by a value
system alien to our own. Finally, it raises questions of predestination:
through the other characters’ foreknowledge of the Doctor’s future;
through the fate apparently decreed for Ancelyn and Bambera; and,
perhaps, through the Brigadier’s survival of a story whose structure
seems to demand that he should die.
