From The Final Test: 23 April 1966 The Celestial Toymaker was a series of pure imagination that I would put up there with Alice In Wonderland from literature. You can still see this final episode of the series, but the other three are now lost. It is the pay-off that offered such a sense of relief at the story's outcome, but without being able to see all of it you might not realise it these days. Still, that's no reason on its own to ignore it. I suppose The Toymaker had about him similar attributes to House in The Doctor's Wife, or The Dreamlord from Amy's Choice: he was all-powerful in his own domain. Now a familiar theme, this was the first time that Doctor Who had explored that notion. In this series The Toymaker is like the queen from Alice In Wonderland. We were genuinely fearful for The Doctor and his companions. It was unsettling in a new way. The Toymaker inhabited a world that was acutely real to children, if not so relevant to adults. It had children's games played on electric floors that might kill you. It had nursery rhymes that acted like witches' spells being cast upon you and it had inescapable rituals in which you were always going to turn out as the victim. Most of all it looked like our dear old 'grandfather Doctor' was going to lose. If The Doctor were to lose the murderous Tri-Logic game then he surrendered everything to the Toymaker: his knowledge, his power and even his memories. If he should win then the world itself was destroyed along with he and his companions. Self-destruct was no solution either, since The Celestial Toymaker was akin to some sort of demi-god who could rebuild his world at will, simply and easily. The Doctor's solution was clever. He instructs the final winning move of the game from within the TARDIS, thus allowing him to escape the domain at the very moment it collapsed. So many of the best pay-offs in many genres involve the impossible escape. Alice takes control of her dream instead of letting it victimise her and the Dreamlord is faced down by standing up to him. The story of The Celestial Toymaker offers us the hope that the tyrant can also be defeated, no matter how powerful he at first appears.
Hello, I'm Paul Hammans, terminal 'Who' obsessive, F1 fan, reader of arcane literature about ideas and generalist scribbler. To paraphrase someone much better at aphorisms than I: I strive to write something worth reading and when I cannot do that I try to do something worth writing. I have my own Dr Who oriented blog at http://www.exanima.co.uk
