A Cricketing Time Lord and his Ginger Minx: Doctor/Turlough (Doctor Who)
Title: A Cricketing Time Lord and his Ginger Minx
Author: uktechgirl
Series: Doctor Who
Pairing: Five/Turlough
Spoilers: mild spoilers for all S20/S21; major for Planet of Fire
Notes: I've tried to make this as accessible as possible for new-school Whoies, without boring the old school gang to tears. And if that failed horribly, there are always some nice pictures to look at.
The Doctor/Turlough Ship Manifesto
On the face of it, it’s hardly a match made in heaven: a 750-year-old Time Lord who seems a tad asexual, and the lying, self-serving, cowardly alien who’s been tasked by the forces of bird-on-head-wearing evil to kill him. But seriously, kids: even that makes an odd sort of sense. This is a fandom that used to be mysteriously uptight about the central character having any kind of sex at all, yet of all his incarnations (pre the new series’ profusion of smut), chooses the innocent and naive Fifth Doctor to get the majority of the action. This is a fandom that is supposedly crammed with gay fans, yet maintains a deep anxiety about slashing the Doctor at all. [Insert essay on slash not being anything to do with gay men here, yawn.] This is also a fandom which has over 40 years’ of canon, fans all over the globe, spin-off media that frequently explores the same territory as fanon, and a canon context which allows for the main character to plausibly shag himself - so frankly, all bets are off.
In Doctor Who fandom, anything and everything is possible: has probably already happened: and someone will already know more about it than you anyway. In this context, Five/Turlough seems positively mundane as a proposition.
Welcome to the glorious headache.
The Fifth Doctor
All incarnations of the Doctor retain certain key characteristics: a childlike delight in experience, tempered by the weight of a great intellect; stubbornness; arrogance; curiosity; wit; a fundamental desire to have a positive effect on the universe. Each Doctor retains a distinct personality beyond these aspects: traits which are latent in one regeneration come to the fore in another.
The Fifth Doctor is the vulnerable one. He might be the cleverest thing in the room, but he’s also the most likely to get bonked on the head and tied to a table. He spends most of his first story sleeping in a coffin knocked up by his companions in an effort to stop him from fading from existence altogether, and the theme continues: although he’s a lively chap who dashes from one end of the studio planet to the other at the drop of a hat, he also spends a quite ridiculous amount of time being unconscious. This Doctor seems more emotional, almost more ‘human’ than his predecessors, appearing deeply affected by the consequences of his actions (albeit it in a terribly English, inarticulate, stiff upper lip fashion). Ironically, he’s also the first Doctor to be responsible for the death of a companion, and doubtless the one who would be most affected by the ensuing guilt. His sincerity and nobility are proven in his final story, when he makes the ultimate sacrifice for his companion Peri, and chooses to save her life over his own.
The increased ‘angst’ factor during the Davison era derives in part from the greater level of continuity between stories. Companions appeared actually to remember they’d been possessed by a snake demon or seen a close friend die just last week, which in turn allowed the Doctor to establish a stronger relationship with his companions, and to seem genuinely quite upset when they inevitably decided to leave the TARDIS.
The appeal of the Fifth Doctor really can’t be separated from the appeal of Peter Davison. For a bland-looking chap with no eyebrows, chin or defining features to speak of, he’s inexplicably pleasant to look at. He remains the youngest actor to take the role (a mere 29!), and while fans of McGann and Tennant (the Eighth and Tenth Doctors, respectively) will also contest the title, Five was undoubtedly the first Pretty Doctor. The combination of swishy blond hair, a capacity to produce a beaming smile no matter how ghastly the circumstances, and the tendency to swoon and need rescuing all seem to have made him quite appealing to the Ladies in the audience. He also strips down to a silk bathrobe in Black Orchid, and to his shirtsleeves in Planet of Fire, and for some reason none of us can fathom, the half-moon specs he dons from time to time are also mysteriously appealing.
Anyone whose fannish sensibilities lie in the direction of angst and hurt/comfort are well-served by Five’s tenure: no other Doctor gets put through the physical and emotional wringer on-screen to quite the same degree.
Vislor Turlough
Turlough is, at first sight, a lazy arrogant troublemaker at an English public school: in the opening minutes of Mawdryn Undead he steals a car, goads another boy into joining him, crashes the car in a (questionably) suicidal fashion, lies with terrifying ease about it all being the other boy’s fault, and agrees to a murder a complete stranger on the whim of a decidedly peculiar chap with a duck glued to his head, revealing as he does that he is in fact not from Earth at all. As companion introductions go, it’s certainly memorable.
Turlough is in fact from the planet Trion, sent to Brendon School as a form of punishment after a civil war. But this revelation comes only in his very last story, Planet of Fire: for much of his time travelling aboard the TARDIS, Turlough is a mysterious and potentially malign presence, threatening the Doctor’s life, lying through his teeth, and seizing every opportunity to protect himself, no matter what the cost to anyone else - even once he’s escaped the influence of the Black Guardian. He’s cowardly, selfish, and unapologetically enjoys being cruel to others.
Part of his appeal lies in exactly those traits. In the context of a potentially rather dull TARDIS with its ‘nice’ Doctor and ‘nice’ companions (well, Nyssa, anyway), his brooding presence punctures the tweeness, providing a subtler foil than Tegan. Smirking Turlough, relishing the chance to deride Earth at every opportunity, has an undeniable charm. But Turlough is a victim as much as he is a bully: his instinct for self-preservation derives from necessity, his bargain with the devil evidence of his desperation. He is ‘bad’ through circumstance as much as choice: he refuses to kill the Doctor as ordered, and gradually displays a streak of bravery, often covered by embarrassed avowals of his cowardice.
This mass of contradictions is often hard to unravel, and thus provides fandom with plenty to play with. Turlough plays both ends against the middle in Enlightenment, and even the Doctor seems surprised by some of his machinations. In Warriors of the Deep, he flits between flinging himself into danger on behalf of his colleagues, and flatly refusing to take the slightest risk for them. But Turlough, crucially, learns from his time with the Doctor. In Frontios, he feigns cowardice, but contrives to return to a genuinely dangerous situation, purely to help others. In Planet of Fire, despite initial reluctance, he embarks on a course of action he believes will, at best, return him to his hated life of exile. Under the Doctor’s tutelage, he learns to trust other people, and himself. (Awww.)
Turlough was an attempt to develop the companion role in a new direction, and, as is inevitably the case with the Whoniverse, the debate still rages as to how well it worked. The difficulty with having an ‘evil’ companion was what to do with him between evil deeds: as Davison put it, ‘you had to lock him up in episode one and let him out in episode four’. More successful was the effort to introduce a mysterious companion, whose origins were obscure: the English schoolboy who knows about transmat capsules and loathes Earth with a passion was an intriguing prospect, and (surprisingly, given that it seems to have been made up as they went along) his ultimate backstory holds up brilliantly with what went before, adding an extra dimension to his earlier stories.
Mark Strickson doesn’t always have the best material to work with: he spends an extraordinary amount of time standing in empty corridors emoting at a lightbulb. But Turlough, unlike many companions, appears in his first story fully-formed, complete with a range of mannerisms: from his first scene, pouting, sneering, and wearing his boater at a decidedly jaunty angle, he’s a consistent and convincing figure.
He’s a funny-looking beggar, Stricko: skinny and angular and ginger as they come (though look out for Enlightenment, for which they apparently decided he wasn’t ginger enough and dyed him an interesting shade of burgundy) - but no less appealing for that. Turlough’s inexplicable insistence on wearing his supposedly much-loathed school uniform sets many a fetishist’s heart a-flutter, not least because as school uniforms go, this one has unusually tight trousers. His sole deviation from the uniform occurs in Planet of Fire, where the infamous short shorts and still more infamous speedos make their appearance. Rarely has a companion worn so little :) Turlough’s tendency to get tied up, locked up, beaten up, or all of the above has also endeared him to fans of the angsty/hurt/comfort/kink persuasion.
Slashing the Doctor
Slashing the Doctor (whichever regeneration) is the kind of thing that seems to bother some portions of the old-school fandom more because it implies he’s a sexual being than from fear of him gaying it up. Similarly, a certain category of fan is likely to reject the concept of any Doctor/Companion pairing purely because of the implied hierarchy within their relationship. The Doctor often has a paternal relationship with his companions, who are invariably quite a lot younger than him, considerably less ‘experienced’, and also not the same species.
Turlough dodges many of these squicks quite neatly. Despite the school uniform, he’s quite obviously an adult. He’s not an innocent, naively wandering into the TARDIS by accident: he stays first to fulfil his bargain with duck-man, then because he chooses to. He’s a capable chap, able to hold conversations about made-up skience better than most. The Doctor even allows him to get his hands on his precious TARDIS console. (That isn’t actually a euphemism, but it is probably a metaphor.)
Slash =/= Gay, by any stretch. But it is worth noting that Turlough is fairly explicitly coded as gay within canon (as near as is plausible in a show which avoids sex entirely). We first meet him in an English public school, and he’s gussied up in an emphatically traditional version of the uniform complete with boater and wing collar. (The BBC adaptation of Brideshead Revisited aired only a few years previously, and similarly exploited the gay connotations of Edwardian formalwear.) Turlough’s interaction with Tegan largely takes the form of a contest for the Doctor, both jostling for sexual attention. Rescuing a bikini-clad Peri, he seems entertainingly repulsed by her cleavage. In the audio Loups-Garoux, he effectively ‘comes out’: although the Doctor assumes Rosa the teenage wolf-slayer is his girlfriend, Turlough seems astonished by the very idea, and is desperate to correct him.
OMG their love is so speshul and 4EVA!!!!1!, or, Why this isn’t an OTP
Giving the Doctor (any of him) an OTP (het or slash) is just plain daft. I’m not sure I completely buy the idea of ordinary humans having a secure and fulfilling long-term relationship which survives all upheavals no matter what: the notion that a Time Lord who lives for centuries and regenerates into different bodies - with wonky new personality traits to match - might ever ‘settle down’ with a singular someone is barmy. The idea of Turlough happily filling that role is no less silly.
That’s where the interesting part happens, though. Five and Turlough are not meant for one another. They aren’t a perfect partnership of hearts and flowers. They’re two quite fucked-up individuals who share a handful of traits and experiences (exile from their homes, secrecy, emotional inarticulacy) which are precisely the kind of things which should stop them being in a relationship with anyone, let alone each other. The appeal is as much in why it really isn’t going to work as in the sweet bits where, for a little while, it might.
As an OTP, it’s a bit lacking on the One and the True front, but, like the ginger minx, it’s refreshingly honest about that.
Let’s Look At The Evidence
‘I never know what you’re thinking, Turlough. That’s what makes you such an interesting travelling companion.’ (The Doctor, Singularity)
First, a little note on canon. The Whoniverse is mental and no one has a clue what counts as canon. We have TV episodes dating from 1963 onwards, although lots of the early ones have been lost due to the BBC setting fire to them (oh how I wish I was joking), and also there are films with Peter Cushing and no one knows what to do with them. The First Doctor has a grand-daughter, but certainly never had sex, because he was woven on a loom, except possibly he wasn’t. The Eighth Doctor exists in a radio version of an abandoned Fourth Doctor storyline (twice, played by two different people), and in a TV movie (the Fox co-production starring Paul McGann, in which he claims to be half-human and kisses a lady), and in a series of spinoff novels (the EDAs), in which he definitely shags a lady and subtextually shags/fancies various blokes, and in a series of audio plays, in which he certainly discusses love with a lady. And then there are the NAs, and the PDAs, and the other BF audios, and the Marvel comics, and that bit you imagined on Noel’s House Party that WASN’T REAL.
And then the new series came along in 2005 with Nine and Ten and reset the whole business anyway, what with handholding being positively de riguer.
So, canon: impossible to define. The TV episodes are straightforwardly canon: as for the rest, it’s up to you. But the following are Things which involve Five and Turlough. (For the uninitiated, old-school Doctor Who stories usually took the form of 4 weekly/bi-weekly 25 minute episodes, so each story listed comprised 4 episodes, unless stated otherwise.)
Visual
Mawdryn Undead
Terminus
Enlightenment
(aka The Black Guardian Trilogy)
The King’s Demons (2-parter)
Anniversary Special: The Five Doctors (dvd available) (feature-length)
Warriors of the Deep
The Awakening (2-parter)
Frontios
Resurrection of the Daleks (dvd available)
Planet of Fire
Caves of Androzani (Turlough appears with the other companions in a brief cameo) (dvd available)
(There are also Target novelisations of these stories, available second-hand.)
For those new to the pairing, the Black Guardian trilogy is essential viewing, although Terminus isn’t a patch on the other two. The Five Doctors contains some lovely handholding early on, although Turlough fades into the background; The Awakening shows us a charmingly jealous Turlough; Frontios isn’t especially slashy, but Turlough features prominently, and it’s one of the strongest stories of the era. Planet of Fire is, again, essential viewing: it’s a genuinely underrated story, and viewed through a slash lens, is fascinating stuff. (For those who are limited to dvds, The Five Doctors is probably the one to go for, followed by a letter to the BBC demanding that they release the Black Guardian trilogy on DVD immediately.)
For the purist obscurists: Doctor Who: Lust in Space: a drama-documentary examining whether or not DW was sexist in its use of companions. As well as numerous clips from the show, Strickson features prominently as Prosecutor, wearing a funny hat and getting slightly better lines than Sophie Aldred. If you’re a fan of self-referential brain-aches and crap puns, this is a gem: otherwise, worth a viewing for curiosity value, and for mockery of its woeful attempt at a grrrlpower ending.
Books:
(available second-hand from the obvious online retailers)
Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, Tony Attwood
The Lords of the Storm, David McIntee
The Crystal Bucephalus, Craig Hinton
Deep Blue, Mark Morris
The King of Terror, Keith Topping
None of them are especially slashy, but The King of Terror is famously the one in which Turlough gets an anal probe. Avoid Earthlink Dilemma like the plague: it’s dire.
Audios
Big Finish produce audio plays featuring the original cast, and the results are often wonderful. The three featuring the Fifth Doctor and Turlough are
Phantasmagoria
Loups-Garoux
Singularity
Singularity is a good yarn, but Loups-Garoux is ESSENTIAL: as well as a riotous laugh, it’s slashy as hell. If you’re at all keen on either of the characters, let alone the slash, this is more worth owning than most of the TV episodes. Brilliant. Buy it now.
The Obligatory Personal Bit
I hated Turlough when I first saw him. He was a snotty public schoolboy. He was cruel. He was English. He was ginger. Above all, he was willing to drop a rock on the head of my beloved Doctor. (I should add, I was eight years old at the time, and such things are hard to forgive.)
I really, genuinely, didn’t ‘get’ Turlough for years. I just thought he was a git. And then, once I ‘got’ him as an interesting, nuanced, developing character, it still took a little while to get round to the slashiness of it all. I have no clue what it was that tipped the scale: one day I was reading a certain toga!fic (linked below) and feeling enormously uncomfortable with the whole idea: at some later point, I reread it and thought it made perfect sense. I do know that Five/Turlough is, however, the inevitable Whoniverse slash OTP. Captain Jack may come and go (ahem); the Master will always want to get a look in; but Five/Turlough is where we slashy types all end up, sooner or later. They are ‘the little black dress of fandom’ ((C) spiritedchaos): ever-reliable for all occasions.
Fandom
The DW slash fandom remains a small (but expanding) club: although the presence of Jack Harkness, the show’s first openly bisexual character, prompted a flurry of Nine/Jack stories, and the Eighth Doctor is canonically a bit gay, there really isn’t a wealth of slash, and some portions of the old-school fandom remain resistant to the whole idea. dw_slash is doing much to redress the balance, and the revival of the series in 2005 seems to have prompted a revival of old-school slash fic and artwork. It’s a small, laid-back community that welcomes new members with glee. Although this is a slash pairing, however, it’s worth noting that a lot of the fanwork out there is not sexually explicit: while there’s pr0n if you want it, the complexity of the relationship is explored as avidly as the smut.
Fic
sweetsorcery’s toga!fic, When in Rome (locked post - join dw_slash to read), is officially The One That Got Me, and is a wonderful introductory fic for the wary: not so much ‘aliens made us do it’, as ‘historical figures made us think about it till we volunteered’. Throw in some wonderful period detail, a perfectly characterised pair of blushing heroes, and some togas, and the result will surely sway the most determined.
Kitty Fisher’s novella Dreaming of England (NC17) is a Five/Master/Turlough epic. It’s got a boatload of non-con, BDSM, violent scenarios, and a kicker of a climax, but there’s a good deal of wonderful dialogue and genuine romance too if you prefer some light with your dark. There’s some purple prose in there, but it’s a justified classic.
taleya is mistress of short, angsty, visceral Five/Turlough: her work tends towards the introspective, dark elements of their characters, realising the potential inherent in canon stories when they aren’t required to appeal to kiddies. The slash level is often in the eye of the beholder, but the characterisation is second to none. Misconceptions (NC17, slash) and Bereft (G, slash-y) are particular favourites.
Viridian5 offers up some gobsmacking Doctor/Turlough in the three-part story Time and Again (NC17). A wonderful insight into Turlough’s psychology in the first part; a prequel which explains why the Fifth Doctor looks quite so pleased to see Turlough in Mawdryn Undead; and a sequel in which the Eighth Doctor seeks out his old lover for obvious but also profound reasons (and offers the best ‘what Turlough did next’ storyline imaginable in the process).
This potential for ‘unusual’ slashy goodness inherent in the Whoniverse has been exploited gloriously by Desdemon in the mind-boggling Ouroboros (PG13): Ten/Turlough, though it’s Five/Turlough really, and also Ten/Turlough again...
Fortunately, there’s a regularly updated list of Five/Turlough fic to keep you up to speed. (Yes, I did write quite a lot of it. Ahem.)
Fanart
A selection from the tiny pool of wonderful Who fanartists.
Valentine by spiritedchaos - unadulterated fluff
Two Boys and a Pair o’ Docs by vandonovan - Five/Turlough versus Four/Adric
Vulnerability by tekiclutch - eerie underwater bondage
Cake by theowinterwood - cookery in a gay disco (adorable cartoon in the same post)
Cartoony Turlough by burnmybody - not technically slash, but he’s probably thinking about it
Vidding
Mine, I’m afraid, but if you need persuading, or just want a fix of their most suggestive moments, you could do worse. Shameless and tongue-in-cheek abuse of canon to the tune of ‘Do Ya Wanna?’ by Franz Ferdinand:
YouTube
download here (13MB, wmv)
Resources:
Factual:
BBC Doctor Who: classic series
Wikipedia: Doctor Who; the Fifth Doctor; Turlough
Fanfiction:
Five/Turlough masterlist
who_otp shiplist - all Doctors, all companions, all pairings
A Teaspoon and an Open Mind - fiction archive for Doctor Who (gen, het, slash)
Images:
Tragical History Tour
Doctor Who Image Archive
BBC Classic Series Galleries
Livejournal:
dw_slash (all Doctors: fic, artwork, discussion)
davison_era (Fifth Doctor: discussion, fic, icons etc: gen/het/slash-friendly)
gingerminx (The Temple of Turlough)
who_otp (for all Doctor Who pairings)
500year_diary (Who fanart: all ratings welcome)
Manifesto written July 2006
Images from Tragical History Tour, BBC, or own caps. Sorry some of them are so crappy.
Doctor Who belongs to other people. Yay for them.
Author: uktechgirl
Series: Doctor Who
Pairing: Five/Turlough
Spoilers: mild spoilers for all S20/S21; major for Planet of Fire
Notes: I've tried to make this as accessible as possible for new-school Whoies, without boring the old school gang to tears. And if that failed horribly, there are always some nice pictures to look at.
The Doctor/Turlough Ship Manifesto
On the face of it, it’s hardly a match made in heaven: a 750-year-old Time Lord who seems a tad asexual, and the lying, self-serving, cowardly alien who’s been tasked by the forces of bird-on-head-wearing evil to kill him. But seriously, kids: even that makes an odd sort of sense. This is a fandom that used to be mysteriously uptight about the central character having any kind of sex at all, yet of all his incarnations (pre the new series’ profusion of smut), chooses the innocent and naive Fifth Doctor to get the majority of the action. This is a fandom that is supposedly crammed with gay fans, yet maintains a deep anxiety about slashing the Doctor at all. [Insert essay on slash not being anything to do with gay men here, yawn.] This is also a fandom which has over 40 years’ of canon, fans all over the globe, spin-off media that frequently explores the same territory as fanon, and a canon context which allows for the main character to plausibly shag himself - so frankly, all bets are off.
In Doctor Who fandom, anything and everything is possible: has probably already happened: and someone will already know more about it than you anyway. In this context, Five/Turlough seems positively mundane as a proposition.
Welcome to the glorious headache.
The Fifth Doctor
All incarnations of the Doctor retain certain key characteristics: a childlike delight in experience, tempered by the weight of a great intellect; stubbornness; arrogance; curiosity; wit; a fundamental desire to have a positive effect on the universe. Each Doctor retains a distinct personality beyond these aspects: traits which are latent in one regeneration come to the fore in another.
The Fifth Doctor is the vulnerable one. He might be the cleverest thing in the room, but he’s also the most likely to get bonked on the head and tied to a table. He spends most of his first story sleeping in a coffin knocked up by his companions in an effort to stop him from fading from existence altogether, and the theme continues: although he’s a lively chap who dashes from one end of the studio planet to the other at the drop of a hat, he also spends a quite ridiculous amount of time being unconscious. This Doctor seems more emotional, almost more ‘human’ than his predecessors, appearing deeply affected by the consequences of his actions (albeit it in a terribly English, inarticulate, stiff upper lip fashion). Ironically, he’s also the first Doctor to be responsible for the death of a companion, and doubtless the one who would be most affected by the ensuing guilt. His sincerity and nobility are proven in his final story, when he makes the ultimate sacrifice for his companion Peri, and chooses to save her life over his own.
The increased ‘angst’ factor during the Davison era derives in part from the greater level of continuity between stories. Companions appeared actually to remember they’d been possessed by a snake demon or seen a close friend die just last week, which in turn allowed the Doctor to establish a stronger relationship with his companions, and to seem genuinely quite upset when they inevitably decided to leave the TARDIS.
The appeal of the Fifth Doctor really can’t be separated from the appeal of Peter Davison. For a bland-looking chap with no eyebrows, chin or defining features to speak of, he’s inexplicably pleasant to look at. He remains the youngest actor to take the role (a mere 29!), and while fans of McGann and Tennant (the Eighth and Tenth Doctors, respectively) will also contest the title, Five was undoubtedly the first Pretty Doctor. The combination of swishy blond hair, a capacity to produce a beaming smile no matter how ghastly the circumstances, and the tendency to swoon and need rescuing all seem to have made him quite appealing to the Ladies in the audience. He also strips down to a silk bathrobe in Black Orchid, and to his shirtsleeves in Planet of Fire, and for some reason none of us can fathom, the half-moon specs he dons from time to time are also mysteriously appealing.
Anyone whose fannish sensibilities lie in the direction of angst and hurt/comfort are well-served by Five’s tenure: no other Doctor gets put through the physical and emotional wringer on-screen to quite the same degree.
Vislor Turlough
Turlough is, at first sight, a lazy arrogant troublemaker at an English public school: in the opening minutes of Mawdryn Undead he steals a car, goads another boy into joining him, crashes the car in a (questionably) suicidal fashion, lies with terrifying ease about it all being the other boy’s fault, and agrees to a murder a complete stranger on the whim of a decidedly peculiar chap with a duck glued to his head, revealing as he does that he is in fact not from Earth at all. As companion introductions go, it’s certainly memorable.
Turlough is in fact from the planet Trion, sent to Brendon School as a form of punishment after a civil war. But this revelation comes only in his very last story, Planet of Fire: for much of his time travelling aboard the TARDIS, Turlough is a mysterious and potentially malign presence, threatening the Doctor’s life, lying through his teeth, and seizing every opportunity to protect himself, no matter what the cost to anyone else - even once he’s escaped the influence of the Black Guardian. He’s cowardly, selfish, and unapologetically enjoys being cruel to others.
Part of his appeal lies in exactly those traits. In the context of a potentially rather dull TARDIS with its ‘nice’ Doctor and ‘nice’ companions (well, Nyssa, anyway), his brooding presence punctures the tweeness, providing a subtler foil than Tegan. Smirking Turlough, relishing the chance to deride Earth at every opportunity, has an undeniable charm. But Turlough is a victim as much as he is a bully: his instinct for self-preservation derives from necessity, his bargain with the devil evidence of his desperation. He is ‘bad’ through circumstance as much as choice: he refuses to kill the Doctor as ordered, and gradually displays a streak of bravery, often covered by embarrassed avowals of his cowardice.
This mass of contradictions is often hard to unravel, and thus provides fandom with plenty to play with. Turlough plays both ends against the middle in Enlightenment, and even the Doctor seems surprised by some of his machinations. In Warriors of the Deep, he flits between flinging himself into danger on behalf of his colleagues, and flatly refusing to take the slightest risk for them. But Turlough, crucially, learns from his time with the Doctor. In Frontios, he feigns cowardice, but contrives to return to a genuinely dangerous situation, purely to help others. In Planet of Fire, despite initial reluctance, he embarks on a course of action he believes will, at best, return him to his hated life of exile. Under the Doctor’s tutelage, he learns to trust other people, and himself. (Awww.)
Turlough was an attempt to develop the companion role in a new direction, and, as is inevitably the case with the Whoniverse, the debate still rages as to how well it worked. The difficulty with having an ‘evil’ companion was what to do with him between evil deeds: as Davison put it, ‘you had to lock him up in episode one and let him out in episode four’. More successful was the effort to introduce a mysterious companion, whose origins were obscure: the English schoolboy who knows about transmat capsules and loathes Earth with a passion was an intriguing prospect, and (surprisingly, given that it seems to have been made up as they went along) his ultimate backstory holds up brilliantly with what went before, adding an extra dimension to his earlier stories.
Mark Strickson doesn’t always have the best material to work with: he spends an extraordinary amount of time standing in empty corridors emoting at a lightbulb. But Turlough, unlike many companions, appears in his first story fully-formed, complete with a range of mannerisms: from his first scene, pouting, sneering, and wearing his boater at a decidedly jaunty angle, he’s a consistent and convincing figure.
He’s a funny-looking beggar, Stricko: skinny and angular and ginger as they come (though look out for Enlightenment, for which they apparently decided he wasn’t ginger enough and dyed him an interesting shade of burgundy) - but no less appealing for that. Turlough’s inexplicable insistence on wearing his supposedly much-loathed school uniform sets many a fetishist’s heart a-flutter, not least because as school uniforms go, this one has unusually tight trousers. His sole deviation from the uniform occurs in Planet of Fire, where the infamous short shorts and still more infamous speedos make their appearance. Rarely has a companion worn so little :) Turlough’s tendency to get tied up, locked up, beaten up, or all of the above has also endeared him to fans of the angsty/hurt/comfort/kink persuasion.
Slashing the Doctor
Slashing the Doctor (whichever regeneration) is the kind of thing that seems to bother some portions of the old-school fandom more because it implies he’s a sexual being than from fear of him gaying it up. Similarly, a certain category of fan is likely to reject the concept of any Doctor/Companion pairing purely because of the implied hierarchy within their relationship. The Doctor often has a paternal relationship with his companions, who are invariably quite a lot younger than him, considerably less ‘experienced’, and also not the same species.
Turlough dodges many of these squicks quite neatly. Despite the school uniform, he’s quite obviously an adult. He’s not an innocent, naively wandering into the TARDIS by accident: he stays first to fulfil his bargain with duck-man, then because he chooses to. He’s a capable chap, able to hold conversations about made-up skience better than most. The Doctor even allows him to get his hands on his precious TARDIS console. (That isn’t actually a euphemism, but it is probably a metaphor.)
Slash =/= Gay, by any stretch. But it is worth noting that Turlough is fairly explicitly coded as gay within canon (as near as is plausible in a show which avoids sex entirely). We first meet him in an English public school, and he’s gussied up in an emphatically traditional version of the uniform complete with boater and wing collar. (The BBC adaptation of Brideshead Revisited aired only a few years previously, and similarly exploited the gay connotations of Edwardian formalwear.) Turlough’s interaction with Tegan largely takes the form of a contest for the Doctor, both jostling for sexual attention. Rescuing a bikini-clad Peri, he seems entertainingly repulsed by her cleavage. In the audio Loups-Garoux, he effectively ‘comes out’: although the Doctor assumes Rosa the teenage wolf-slayer is his girlfriend, Turlough seems astonished by the very idea, and is desperate to correct him.
OMG their love is so speshul and 4EVA!!!!1!, or, Why this isn’t an OTP
Giving the Doctor (any of him) an OTP (het or slash) is just plain daft. I’m not sure I completely buy the idea of ordinary humans having a secure and fulfilling long-term relationship which survives all upheavals no matter what: the notion that a Time Lord who lives for centuries and regenerates into different bodies - with wonky new personality traits to match - might ever ‘settle down’ with a singular someone is barmy. The idea of Turlough happily filling that role is no less silly.
That’s where the interesting part happens, though. Five and Turlough are not meant for one another. They aren’t a perfect partnership of hearts and flowers. They’re two quite fucked-up individuals who share a handful of traits and experiences (exile from their homes, secrecy, emotional inarticulacy) which are precisely the kind of things which should stop them being in a relationship with anyone, let alone each other. The appeal is as much in why it really isn’t going to work as in the sweet bits where, for a little while, it might.
As an OTP, it’s a bit lacking on the One and the True front, but, like the ginger minx, it’s refreshingly honest about that.
Let’s Look At The Evidence
‘I never know what you’re thinking, Turlough. That’s what makes you such an interesting travelling companion.’ (The Doctor, Singularity)
First, a little note on canon. The Whoniverse is mental and no one has a clue what counts as canon. We have TV episodes dating from 1963 onwards, although lots of the early ones have been lost due to the BBC setting fire to them (oh how I wish I was joking), and also there are films with Peter Cushing and no one knows what to do with them. The First Doctor has a grand-daughter, but certainly never had sex, because he was woven on a loom, except possibly he wasn’t. The Eighth Doctor exists in a radio version of an abandoned Fourth Doctor storyline (twice, played by two different people), and in a TV movie (the Fox co-production starring Paul McGann, in which he claims to be half-human and kisses a lady), and in a series of spinoff novels (the EDAs), in which he definitely shags a lady and subtextually shags/fancies various blokes, and in a series of audio plays, in which he certainly discusses love with a lady. And then there are the NAs, and the PDAs, and the other BF audios, and the Marvel comics, and that bit you imagined on Noel’s House Party that WASN’T REAL.
And then the new series came along in 2005 with Nine and Ten and reset the whole business anyway, what with handholding being positively de riguer.
So, canon: impossible to define. The TV episodes are straightforwardly canon: as for the rest, it’s up to you. But the following are Things which involve Five and Turlough. (For the uninitiated, old-school Doctor Who stories usually took the form of 4 weekly/bi-weekly 25 minute episodes, so each story listed comprised 4 episodes, unless stated otherwise.)
Visual
Mawdryn Undead
Terminus
Enlightenment
(aka The Black Guardian Trilogy)
The King’s Demons (2-parter)
Anniversary Special: The Five Doctors (dvd available) (feature-length)
Warriors of the Deep
The Awakening (2-parter)
Frontios
Resurrection of the Daleks (dvd available)
Planet of Fire
Caves of Androzani (Turlough appears with the other companions in a brief cameo) (dvd available)
(There are also Target novelisations of these stories, available second-hand.)
For those new to the pairing, the Black Guardian trilogy is essential viewing, although Terminus isn’t a patch on the other two. The Five Doctors contains some lovely handholding early on, although Turlough fades into the background; The Awakening shows us a charmingly jealous Turlough; Frontios isn’t especially slashy, but Turlough features prominently, and it’s one of the strongest stories of the era. Planet of Fire is, again, essential viewing: it’s a genuinely underrated story, and viewed through a slash lens, is fascinating stuff. (For those who are limited to dvds, The Five Doctors is probably the one to go for, followed by a letter to the BBC demanding that they release the Black Guardian trilogy on DVD immediately.)
For the purist obscurists: Doctor Who: Lust in Space: a drama-documentary examining whether or not DW was sexist in its use of companions. As well as numerous clips from the show, Strickson features prominently as Prosecutor, wearing a funny hat and getting slightly better lines than Sophie Aldred. If you’re a fan of self-referential brain-aches and crap puns, this is a gem: otherwise, worth a viewing for curiosity value, and for mockery of its woeful attempt at a grrrlpower ending.
Books:
(available second-hand from the obvious online retailers)
Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, Tony Attwood
The Lords of the Storm, David McIntee
The Crystal Bucephalus, Craig Hinton
Deep Blue, Mark Morris
The King of Terror, Keith Topping
None of them are especially slashy, but The King of Terror is famously the one in which Turlough gets an anal probe. Avoid Earthlink Dilemma like the plague: it’s dire.
Audios
Big Finish produce audio plays featuring the original cast, and the results are often wonderful. The three featuring the Fifth Doctor and Turlough are
Phantasmagoria
Loups-Garoux
Singularity
Singularity is a good yarn, but Loups-Garoux is ESSENTIAL: as well as a riotous laugh, it’s slashy as hell. If you’re at all keen on either of the characters, let alone the slash, this is more worth owning than most of the TV episodes. Brilliant. Buy it now.
The Obligatory Personal Bit
I hated Turlough when I first saw him. He was a snotty public schoolboy. He was cruel. He was English. He was ginger. Above all, he was willing to drop a rock on the head of my beloved Doctor. (I should add, I was eight years old at the time, and such things are hard to forgive.)
I really, genuinely, didn’t ‘get’ Turlough for years. I just thought he was a git. And then, once I ‘got’ him as an interesting, nuanced, developing character, it still took a little while to get round to the slashiness of it all. I have no clue what it was that tipped the scale: one day I was reading a certain toga!fic (linked below) and feeling enormously uncomfortable with the whole idea: at some later point, I reread it and thought it made perfect sense. I do know that Five/Turlough is, however, the inevitable Whoniverse slash OTP. Captain Jack may come and go (ahem); the Master will always want to get a look in; but Five/Turlough is where we slashy types all end up, sooner or later. They are ‘the little black dress of fandom’ ((C) spiritedchaos): ever-reliable for all occasions.
Fandom
The DW slash fandom remains a small (but expanding) club: although the presence of Jack Harkness, the show’s first openly bisexual character, prompted a flurry of Nine/Jack stories, and the Eighth Doctor is canonically a bit gay, there really isn’t a wealth of slash, and some portions of the old-school fandom remain resistant to the whole idea. dw_slash is doing much to redress the balance, and the revival of the series in 2005 seems to have prompted a revival of old-school slash fic and artwork. It’s a small, laid-back community that welcomes new members with glee. Although this is a slash pairing, however, it’s worth noting that a lot of the fanwork out there is not sexually explicit: while there’s pr0n if you want it, the complexity of the relationship is explored as avidly as the smut.
Fic
sweetsorcery’s toga!fic, When in Rome (locked post - join dw_slash to read), is officially The One That Got Me, and is a wonderful introductory fic for the wary: not so much ‘aliens made us do it’, as ‘historical figures made us think about it till we volunteered’. Throw in some wonderful period detail, a perfectly characterised pair of blushing heroes, and some togas, and the result will surely sway the most determined.
Kitty Fisher’s novella Dreaming of England (NC17) is a Five/Master/Turlough epic. It’s got a boatload of non-con, BDSM, violent scenarios, and a kicker of a climax, but there’s a good deal of wonderful dialogue and genuine romance too if you prefer some light with your dark. There’s some purple prose in there, but it’s a justified classic.
taleya is mistress of short, angsty, visceral Five/Turlough: her work tends towards the introspective, dark elements of their characters, realising the potential inherent in canon stories when they aren’t required to appeal to kiddies. The slash level is often in the eye of the beholder, but the characterisation is second to none. Misconceptions (NC17, slash) and Bereft (G, slash-y) are particular favourites.
Viridian5 offers up some gobsmacking Doctor/Turlough in the three-part story Time and Again (NC17). A wonderful insight into Turlough’s psychology in the first part; a prequel which explains why the Fifth Doctor looks quite so pleased to see Turlough in Mawdryn Undead; and a sequel in which the Eighth Doctor seeks out his old lover for obvious but also profound reasons (and offers the best ‘what Turlough did next’ storyline imaginable in the process).
This potential for ‘unusual’ slashy goodness inherent in the Whoniverse has been exploited gloriously by Desdemon in the mind-boggling Ouroboros (PG13): Ten/Turlough, though it’s Five/Turlough really, and also Ten/Turlough again...
Fortunately, there’s a regularly updated list of Five/Turlough fic to keep you up to speed. (Yes, I did write quite a lot of it. Ahem.)
Fanart
A selection from the tiny pool of wonderful Who fanartists.
Valentine by spiritedchaos - unadulterated fluff
Two Boys and a Pair o’ Docs by vandonovan - Five/Turlough versus Four/Adric
Vulnerability by tekiclutch - eerie underwater bondage
Cake by theowinterwood - cookery in a gay disco (adorable cartoon in the same post)
Cartoony Turlough by burnmybody - not technically slash, but he’s probably thinking about it
Vidding
Mine, I’m afraid, but if you need persuading, or just want a fix of their most suggestive moments, you could do worse. Shameless and tongue-in-cheek abuse of canon to the tune of ‘Do Ya Wanna?’ by Franz Ferdinand:
YouTube
download here (13MB, wmv)
Resources:
Factual:
BBC Doctor Who: classic series
Wikipedia: Doctor Who; the Fifth Doctor; Turlough
Fanfiction:
Five/Turlough masterlist
who_otp shiplist - all Doctors, all companions, all pairings
A Teaspoon and an Open Mind - fiction archive for Doctor Who (gen, het, slash)
Images:
Tragical History Tour
Doctor Who Image Archive
BBC Classic Series Galleries
Livejournal:
dw_slash (all Doctors: fic, artwork, discussion)
davison_era (Fifth Doctor: discussion, fic, icons etc: gen/het/slash-friendly)
gingerminx (The Temple of Turlough)
who_otp (for all Doctor Who pairings)
500year_diary (Who fanart: all ratings welcome)
Manifesto written July 2006
Images from Tragical History Tour, BBC, or own caps. Sorry some of them are so crappy.
Doctor Who belongs to other people. Yay for them.