The Celestial Toymaker

The TARDIS has been waylaid in a mysterious dimension ruled by the enigmatic Celestial Toymaker. The Doctor knows this being of old and warns Steven and Dodo not to fall victim to his tricks before he himself is taken away from them and forced to play a trilogic game. Steven and Dodo are thrust into the Toymaker’s games with his collection of dolls as their opponents, and they must finish playing them before the Doctor makes the 1023^rd move in his game, otherwise they will all be doomed to remain in the Toymaker’s realm as his playthings. The saying is it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, but the stakes are significantly higher in the Toymaker’s realm…

Science fiction loves to make toys into sinister objects, and sometimes what is produced borders on the horrific. Toymaker is by no means an Annabelle but the toys that do inhabit the dollhouse are in some ways creepier when the viewer realizes that these are actual people who did not escape the Toymaker’s games. Their motivation to play the games is to beat Steven and Dodo and win their own freedom back, or that’s at least the subtext, and they cheat, they lie and resort to all sorts of dirty tricks. Each game that Steven and Dodo are forced to play has a deadly consequence to losing, be it to get stuck dancing forever or being electrocuted stepping on the wrong part of the floor and the prize at the end of the game is the TARDIS… or a fake one. The rogues gallery they face is comprised of some of what one might find in a 1960s child's toy collection: a toy soldier, royalty from a deck of cards and even some creepy expressionless dancing dolls. The worst of their competition? It’s a tie between the nasty Cyril or the clown duo Clara and Joey. 

But Steven and Dodo prove to be an effective team together, effectively carrying the weight of the story between them with the Doctor sidelined. While Dodo just gets to act spunky as usual we see Steven has progressed in stature on board the TARDIS and looks like he is helping pilot the ship as the story opens, and again at the end. Continuity wise there is a mention of the Refusians when the Doctor starts to fade off, but as far as anyone can tell there could have been any amount of time passing between the conclusion of The Ark and the start of Toymaker.

The Doctor is hardly in the story, at least physically. William Hartnell needed another vacation and the Doctor was thus cleverly rendered invisible by the Toymaker, so the most that is seen of him for the bulk of the story is one hand floating about moving the pieces of the trilogic game. An interesting bit of background on this one: the original plan with making the Doctor disappear was to make him reappear in a new body with a new actor, thus removing William Hartnell from the title role (he was becoming a problem to work with due to his failing health and the production team realized they were going to have to do something to replace him - but that was not yet to be). The Doctor does, however, know the Toymaker, and speaks to him as if he were speaking once more to the Monk. Does this mean the Toymaker is one of the Doctor’s own people? His power over the Doctor suggests that he is not of the same race and may well be his match and potential nemesis, but there’s no more background given to how the Doctor knows this man and what happened the first time they met. The Toymaker is often referred to as malevolent, but I don’t see him dripping with that same brand of evil; he’s just bored and powerful and something of a psychopath.

 

I came across another review of this one some time ago and found a fascinating rant about how the Toymaker’s character is actually a tremendous racist jab at the Chinese as the Toymaker dresses in Chinese garb but does not go so far as to don the dreaded yellowface. Even the word “celestial” seems to have been a word attributed to the Chinese, or at least in times past it was common to refer to China as the Celestial Empire. The commentary I read after the article had one voice demanding that the episode tapes be burned, which made me wonder if this was a sincere reaction or someone who knew right well that episodes 1, 2 and 3 are missing and was just taking the piss out of another revisionist politically correct fan. Yes, all that exists of the tale is the last episode and the lead in material at the conclusion of The Ark; the rest I enjoyed on audio MP3. The first time I enjoyed the story, though, was by reading the Target novel penned by script editor Gerry Davis and newcomer Alison Bingeman back in 1986, and it was as true to the original as it could be given the lack of source reference material.

But we all know this is not going to end the Toymaker's way, and there's going to be a clever escape, and a lead right into the next episode... yur darn tooin'...

NEXT EPISODE: THE GUNFIGHTERS