Tag Archives: Jo Grant

The Legacy of Time – The Sacrifice of Jo Grant

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Written by Guy Adams and directed by Ken Bentley.

The Legacy of Time episode 3.

Spoiler-free verdict: The Legacy of Time finds itself a second standout in an emotional high point that places meaningful character interaction first.

Recommended pre-listening: The Sirens of Time, Lies in Ruins, The Split Infinitive

***

The best fanservice is the sort that can be meaningful both for those in love with a thing, and those who never were. The Sacrifice of Jo Grant is such fanservice. The UNIT era is a low point of my personal investment in Doctor Who. But this episode manages to stir, because of how it uses its nostalgic affection for an era to find new emotional meaning.

The highlight of this episode, of course, comes from facing the marvelous portrait of adult Jo Grant provided by Russell T Davies for The Sarah Jane Adventures with her incarnation of the Doctor again. The expected beats are, of course, beautiful; Guy Adams continues his take of Jo as in love with her Doctor from Tidal Wave in the UNIT range, and it works just as well here as it did there, with climactic confessions and high stakes whipping up a frenzy of a climax. But the best scenes aren’t the big ones. For me, the standout moment is Jo confronting this Doctor about vegetarianism, an ideal he never held, but one she came to expect of him. It’s a sharp, mature discussion of ethics on a topic that can all too often be preachy, and even has in other Jo Grant stories this year. Not only did it succeed in making me contemplate vegetarianism, but it succeeded in saying something meaningful and new about the ways people rub off on each other through two beloved icons, helping me understand the love for them, too.

The use of modern UNIT leads here is less of a headlining feature, and successful, but less remarkable. Both Treolar and Culshaw put in strong performances recreating their characters, but unlike Jo Grant, Kate Stewart is not a character that has had much space to stand on her own terms outside her relationship with a Doctor Who icon, and thus her internal debate over contacting her father is a bit more perfunctory. I do like that, rather than go with “no changing history”, Kate is allowed to use the plot situation to make something good happen. But on the flip side, while hearing her speak to the Brigadier is new, it ends up not saying much of note. Similarly, while it’s delightful hearing Osgood lauded as a genius by the Doctor and geeking out over him, those are beats we’d seen from her in her debut. Jo turns out to be the catalyst for the most relationships here as well, and I could listen to her and Osgood hanging out at water parks forever.

Ultimately, and rightly, the plot chooses not to get up to much to facilitate these relationship beats. There’s some guff about holes in time, leading to some action scenarios in Osgood’s c-plot offering varying levels of thrills, but the real draw here is the time a group of characters get to spend together as a result. There’s never a real sense that Jo will end up sacrificing herself, or that Kate will destroy history as a result of messing up with her dad, but the situations are handled fully on the emotional level of the characters, elevating them far above the fairly simple events. It’s a celebration, and it feels like one.

Beyond that, there’s a fundamental niceness to this episode, which makes it a nice contrast to the other set high point, the bitter Lies in Ruins. For example, when Kate falls for an obvious alien impersonation of Osgood, nobody blames her, all agreeing that trusting Osgood was the right call and that Kate couldn’t have known. And, of course, as mentioned previously, Kate’s interaction with her father isn’t treated as a threat to history, but rather as a chance. Ultimately, the whole time travel plot comes down to that, with even its big sacrifice beat coming down to the Doctor cheating with time travel while the Time Lords look the other way. What we get here is a story about how the Sirens’ destruction of time isn’t so much a major threat as it is an opportunity to have a few more quality moments with relationships long lost. There’s just something tremendously pleasant about that.

Maybe we can’t have this every day. Maybe it doesn’t make for the most interesting hour on a plot level. But it’s so lovingly written and positive, with an eye for sharp character work, that you aren’t left wishing for anything else.

The Sacrifice of Jo Grant is exactly the sort of fanservice you want from an anniversary.

9/10

Short Trips – Still Life

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Written by Max Curtis.

Spoiler-free verdict: A gorgeous emotional piece, rich with thematic depth and resonance and some wonderful high concept work.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

Well, that was pretty damn incredible, wasn’t it?

Classic Who has something of an awkward space in regards to characterization. There are many beloved companions, Jo Grant chief among them, but so few experience consistent growth or development. Jo, for her part, was a character elevated to spectacular heights through a winning performance by Katy Manning, but who existed as a character consciously designed as someone less strong-willed and story-defining than her predecessor. This makes her both remarkable and frustrating, remarkable because of how much she transcends to be as spectacular a character as she does, frustrating because she never quite escapes those roots. The flip side of that is, there’s a lot of blank space within her problematic confines to paint in. Enter Max Curtis, who beautifully does just that.

It’s remarkable to think that, in the 48 years since the character’s debut, nobody has ever thought to tell a story about Jo Grant’s parents (her mother still has yet to be named). Filling in this gap is immediately satisfying, and told with a sensitive touch that grips from the off. The opening scene in particular is just masterful, an instantly relatable slice of life moment far from the science-fiction conceits of Who, but which nonetheless fits into this world perfectly. But more than that, it’s built on treating the weaknesses built into Jo Grant as wonderful quirks of humanity. Of course the character designed to be a bit of a ditz got lost as a kid. And equally, of course the ditz brave enough to become a secret agent wasn’t scared so much by that as not remembering the moment she let go of her father’s hand.

This is, ultimately, a story built around all the oddities, charms, and failings of Jo Grant as a character. Facing an impulsive, clumsy, and full of heart character like her with the chance to stop time, just for a bit, to say goodbye to her father is a scenario that offers endless pathos specific to her, both in what we know of her and what needed filling in. She makes massive, selfish mistakes here in taking the Bloodline’s offer of the device, but they’re never treated as anything less than infinitely human and infinitely understandable. That it’s an obvious scam in the end, with a clever twist about the true nature of the three presses on the device she’s granted hitting that inevitable endpoint home with style, is beside the point. It’s what Jo Grant would do in all her humanity, and that’s why it’s a story worth telling.

Gorgeous as the high concepts are, they aren’t the focus here. That makes for one moment of weakness, in that the Bloodline selling the life essence of their victims, while an interesting idea, in no way fully materializes as a villainous plot, least of all because it’s presented as a snake-oil cure alongside very real ones like the timepiece this story is built around. As such, those stakes are hard to buy, and the Bloodline’s scam mostly ends up a patchy footnote in a far stronger story. But it’s a Short Trip, and hell, it’s already running on the longer side. I can accept skating over the spacey stakes, particularly when the human ones are so incredibly strong.

In the end, what matters here is the time Jo Grant gets to spend with her father, Terry, not talking about impending death or grief, or even the shocking fact that Jo fights aliens for a living, but about capturing the moments they have together, through painting. Perhaps the cleverest choice of all, in fact, is taking a story about a dying father and refusing to show the death, instead just ending on them sharing one of a dwindling number of moments together learning still lifes. This could have been a story that was more obvious and eventful, big alien action and heartwrenching deaths. But as with the fan-favorite ending to The Green Death, sometimes dialing things back and focusing on small moments has more weight than anything else could.

“While there’s still life, there’s still time”, says the Doctor, and the triple-meaning of the title carries so much weight. It, of course, references the frozen time Jo creates, as well as the paintings she shares with her father, and the final words the Third Doctor will finally share with Sarah Jane. Recontextualizing this Doctor’s final speech from Planet of the Spiders into a musing on the art of paint and capturing frozen moments in time creates something deeply stirring, in keeping with the Pertwee era’s fleeting moments of Buddhist philosophy and odd poetry that occasionaly burst forth from its military action r exterior. These are moments worth preserving to last forever, and Still Life succeeds in drawing them out and highlighting their art.

I am not, to be honest, often a fan of the era this story pays homage to. But I am a huge, huge fan of the era as this story sees it. This is a wonderful story full of love and grace, and I don’t think I’ll be likely to stop raving about it anytime soon.

10/10