Eric Saward's contribution to the show by Rob Matthews 3/4/02
Revelation of the Daleks is for me one of the top five stories in Doctor Who's run. It's also perhaps the bleakest in terms of worldview, and the most littered with scenes of violent death. Now, I'm not a particularly morbid person, and Doctor Who is not a pessimistic show, so this is quite anomalous, but that's partly why it's a success. There's a good quote about this story to be found in David J Howe's TV companion -
"One could point out that the story was not only laced with gratuitous horror, but had main and subsiduary plots which could easily be called unsuitable for a young audience. But using these points as criticisms would, it seems, be missing the point somehow. While they would all be fairly damning to a normal Doctor Who story, the mere fact that all could be levelled at Revelation indicates that it was trying to do something different"Extend that argument across Saward's whole tenure as script editor and you'll see what I'm about to try and get at. Doctor Who was an essentially fun and optimistic show, so its transformation over the course of four or five years into something grim and occasionally sickening in its depiction of violence was bound to raise hackles and yells of disapproval. But that novelty, that difference, is the main reason why I consider the era successful. The Saward years are well-known for their abundance of continuity references - though really the producer was responsible for them -, but the show's history was actually important to those seasons in a far deeper and more subtle way. Matthew Brenner raised a good point in a review of the Fifth Doctor, arguing that where once the universe was a basically wonderful place with a few bad apples trying to spoil it, it became in the Saward era somewhere that was completely rotten until proved otherwise. I agree completely with the argument, but not with the assertion that this was a bad thing.
How can I put this - after many years of battling against bad guys, and seeing innocent people killed in every single battle, you'd have to be unbelievably resilient not to let it get to you in some way. At the risk of weaving everyone's reviews together here, the point was well made by Mike Morris in his Visitation piece that Saward brought a sense of moral tension into the show. The Doctor was no longer getting away from his adventures unscathed because he no longer had a script editor who would let him. Saward addressed certain issues that arose when you looked hard at the history of the show - particularly its attitude to violence -, and a lot of fans perhaps think that in doing so he was just taking Doctor Who too seriously. But I personally don't think there's anything wrong with that approach. The Doctor develops more than ever before as a real character in season 21 precisely because of it. It's only by really challenging the Doctor and his actions that he can remain relevant as someone you view as a hero as opposed to a superhero. The difference of course being that a hero doesn't have the odds stacked in his favour from the start (I've never understood the appeal of Superman). This challenging of the Doctor and his actions was central to the show for all its remaining years, it defined the Virgin NAs, and is still relevant to the BBC books, which are currently (at the time of writing) engaged in making the Doctor more human, less powerful. It was Saward who first started doing this for real. The show was reinvigorated by the dark streak he introduced; it kept the Doctor and the show from resting on their laurels, munching on jelly babies and toppling dictators without a care in the world. It shouldn't have been unnecessarily prolonged, this 'darkest hour' of the series, but fortunately - though more by chance than design - it wasn't. It ended naturally after four seasons, #19 to #22, not a story arc but a thematic arc. And the moral core of the show was strengthened by its willingness to outstare 'the abyss which looks back also'. Think about it - there wasn't a single successful Doctor Who story between the end of season 22 and the beginning of #25. Saward provided the tension and the sheer buildup that made Andrew Cartmel's vision for the show successful.
(that's success in terms of creativity as opposed to audience figures).
Ah, that's the other thing. Vision. I was thinking recently that Eric Saward's contribution to Doctor Who is analogous to Lawrence Miles', in that no-one else can render his vision quite as successfully. The only real way for the novels to stay true to Miles' vision would be for him to write every single one of them. And in the same way, Saward's style is so singular that it occasionally slots awkwardly into scripts that aren't his own. As a script editor he's fascinating but flawed. But as a script writer, he's great.
And as with Lawrence Miles, the main problem is that it's hard to justify letting one man's hugely individualistic vision railroad the whole property. Especially when so many people just don't like it.
Saward hit a good and necessary compromise by scripting several pivotal stories himself - Earthshock, which reinvented the Cybermen and killed off a companion for the first time since Hartnell's era; Resurrection of the Daleks which somehow managed to simultaneously make the Daleks more credible and undermine them, picked up thematic threads left dangling from Genesis, and gave another companion a downbeat departure that was completely without precedent; and Revelation of the Daleks, which closed the show's darkest season with an utterly superb illustration of Saward's maxim that 'when you show violence, you should show that it hurts'.
Saward's a morbid scribe. There's no point in denying that - it's simply the way his writing is inclined. Hell, Revelation is set in a giant funeral parlour on a planet named after death. But that for me is why dark subject matter never seems gratuitous in his hands. It's simply part and parcel of his worldview. And that's not actually a crime, you know. I believe he's fascinated by it, but refute utterly that he revels in it. Revelation is a story that's noteworthy not simply because of the number of violent death scenes, but because of how uniquely memorable they are, how shocking in spite of their frequency. We're used to Daleks yelling 'Exterminate' and zapping people, but when the DJ is murdered you truly feel you've just witnessed something utterly obscene. Jobel's and Tasambeker's pathetic deaths (that's pathetic in the sense of pathos, by the way) are nothing short of poetic in their sad pointlessness. The mutant's forgiveness of Peri and her reaction to it bring a lump to the throat. Then there's Orcini's cuddling up to Bostock's corpse as he detonates his bomb, and Stengos' horrific/heroic entreaties to his daughter to kill him as he transforms into a Dalek. It's an emotionally exhausting story and demonstrates Saward's complete confidence in his own vision for the show.
Of course, it's quite well known amongst fans that Saward was reaching the end of his tether with the series at that point and that he actually wrote the Revelation scripts while on holiday. That he was becoming rather careless about other people's scripts is evident from Vengeance on Varos and Timelash, and that he then lost interest completely is clear from the utter hash he made of Trial of a Timelord. So Revelation was a last, glorious gasp and in an ideal world have been his final script for the show.
As things stand, he stayed too long. But for a while there he was very opposite of the purveyor of cynicism he's made out to be. He was the show's conscience.