The Happiness Patrol

Happiness shall prevail.

The Happiness Patrol is a story that seems to rate in the lower middle of most fan's lists. I don't know that I've ever run into anyone that raved over it but I have heard of several fans that despise it, mostly due to the Kandy Man. I've been of a mixed mind on this one as it is hard to overlook a prejudice that significant, but I found that I've had a better appreciation of some of the Seventh Doctor stories than general fandom so I'm trying to keep an open mind.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Ace arrive on the Earth colony of Terra Alpha, which the Doctor had been meaning to look into for a while due to troubling rumors. He and Ace walk around a bit and run into a census taker named Trevor Sigma. When they come back to the TARDIS they find a squad from the Happiness Patrol painting it pink, having just returned from the execution of a killjoy (someone not happy). The Doctor and Ace manage to get themselves arrested and taken to a waiting area.

The colony is run by a woman named Helen A who works with a sadistic henchman called the Kandy Man. Helen A sends out a message of happiness to the citizens before having a man executed by being smothered to death in tube of fondant sent up from the Kandy Man. Her address is watched by another man in the holding area who used to be a joke writer for Helen A. However, he began investigating disappearances in the colony and was sent away. As he relates this to the Doctor and Ace, Helen A sends a charge through the machine he is using and electrocutes him.

The Doctor and Ace disable a booby trap on a patrol cart and leave the waiting area. They soon split up with Ace surrendering to the Happiness Patrol on the pretext of wanting to join them. She is taken back to the Patrol HQ where she befriends a member of the patrol named Susan Q, who is becoming disillusioned with life in the colony and on the patrol.

The Doctor meets a tourist named Earl Sigma who has been trapped on the colony and now working against the regime. To avoid a patrol, they dash into a building only to find that it is the Kandy Man's kitchen where he prepares to use them to experiment on. He places them in chairs for testing his sweets on but the Doctor tricks him into knocking over a bottle of lemonade, which causes his feet to stick to the floor (being made of confectionary). The Doctor and Earl flee into the underground tunnels.

Ace and Susan Q are taken from the Patrol HQ to another waiting area where they are sentenced to execution. This movement is observed by creatures living in the tunnels. The Doctor and Earl run into these creatures, who are the natives of the planet. The Doctor recognizes slogans they picked up from overhearing Ace and they recognize him as a friend.

The natives escort the Doctor through the sewers and let him and Earl out near where Trevor Sigma is conducting business. Earl leaves and the Doctor overrides Trevor and they head off to see Helen A. Helen A greets Trevor warmly but the Doctor takes command and warns Helen A to change how things are done on the colony. She dismisses him and the Doctor walks out.

After meeting the Doctor, one of the natives conducts a raid on the holding area and rescues Ace. Susan Q had already been taken away for execution. Upon learning of the escape, Helen A sends her pet Stigorax, Fifi, into the sewers after them. Ace blows up the tunnel with a can of Nitro-9, before slipping down another shaft.

The Doctor heads back towards the Kandy Kitchen, stopping a pair of snipers who had been firing on a crowd of striking workers on his way. He finds the Kandy Man still suck to the floor where he left him. He offers to free the Kandy Man if he diverts the flow of fondant, preventing another execution. The Kandy Man agrees and changes the flow of the fondant just before Susan Q is to be killed. The change in pipe flow also causes Ace and her native guide to be dropped into the execution area where she is rearrested.

Trevor Sigma informs Helen A that per galactic law, Susan Q and Ace cannot be executed by the same method if it fails once. She then orders the two women to be taken to the forum for public execution.

Knowing that he would attack him again, the Doctor resticks the Kandy Man to the floor and heads off to find Ace. He learns from posters being put up of Ace's impending execution in the forum. The Doctor signals Earl Sigma who joins up with striking factory workers to head towards the forum. As the Happiness Patrol approaches with Ace, the Doctor breaks into wild laughter. Earl and the strikers approach, also laughing and acting overly silly. With all acting in apparently happiness, the patrol is confused on what to do. The Doctor, Ace, Susan Q and Earl all slip away in a vehicle while the squad leader, Pricilla P turns and arrests her lieutenant Daisy K for her confusion.

Helen A sends Fifi, who survived Ace's Nitro-9 attack, back into the pipes to hunt down the Doctor and his companions. The natives hear Fifi in the pipes and warn the Doctor. The Doctor stops under a factor that has developed a leak and has developed large stalactites of hardened sugar. He has Earl play resonance notes on his harmonica and then runs. The stalactites break off and crush Fifi as she chases them.

Earl and Susan separate from the Doctor and Ace and assist the strikers into becoming full rioters. They overwhelm the Happiness Patrol squads and begin destroying the factories. Helen A recalls Daisy K to the palace, ordering Pricilla P to wait in the holding area. However, Pricilla P is overrun by the rioters and bound before she can regroup the patrol.

The Doctor and Ace head back to the Kandy Kitchen where they overheat the oven and drive the Kandy Man away. He flees into the pipes to escape. The natives enter and take control of the pipes, redirecting fondant through the pipes, destroying the Kandy Man. Seeing his work destroyed, Gilbert M flees the planet with Helen A's husband Joseph C in her private shuttle, leaving her stranded on the planet.

As more factories are destroyed, Helen A flees the palace, leaving Daisy K as the only defense. She is overrun and disarmed by Susan Q. She and Earl Sigma shut down all remaining defenses and controls. The Doctor meanwhile meets Helen A in the streets, confronting her on her desire for happiness. She resists until she sees Fifi's dead body lying near by, brought up by the Doctor. Seeing her beloved pet dead breaks her and Helen A collapses around her pet in a fit of sobbing.

The surviving members of the Happiness Patrol are placed in work gangs and ordered to help clean up the city. The people take control with Earl Sigma noting that he plans to stay and help supervise. The Doctor and Ace then depart in the TARDIS, which has been repainted its original blue.

Analysis

I either read or heard somewhere that there was discussion of possibly filming this story in black and white to add to its film-noir feel. I don't think that would have worked as the washed out color fits the mood of the story better, but this is clearly Doctor Who does film-noir. I liked this one much more than I was originally expecting. It does have flaws and fairly significant ones at that, but it does it's job well and most of those flaws can be overlooked to enjoy the story as a whole.

I really enjoyed the Seventh Doctor. In fact, if the majority of the Seventh Doctor stories had had him like this, I think he would have taken the position as my favorite Doctor from the Second Doctor. He was not the all-knowing Doctor, but came in suspicious. Once he got the bead, he developed a plan and executed it with nearly flawless precision. Some of that plan even involved facing down and taking the measure of the enemy directly.

I think my favorite moment in the entire story was a throw away scene where the Doctor stops two male members of the patrol who are sniping factory strikers. He walks up directly behind the snipers and stares the gunner straight down. He forces the man to look him in the face and dares him to shoot him. It is a challenge to the will of the shooter and reminded me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy Dufresne literally wills Captain Hadley not to throw him to his death. It was a very well played scene and showed a strength in the Doctor that is sometimes lacking in other stories.

I enjoyed Ace but she was very underused in this story. When she was with the Doctor, she was a tag team partner at best. When she was away from him, she was being held by the Happiness Patrol for most of the time and didn't do much there either. Her interaction with Susan Q was nice but it was rushed in development and still didn't have a major impact on the overall flow of the story. Nice but ultimately forgettable.

I enjoyed nearly all of the secondary characters. Helen A in particular was quite good in that over the top mad way. Drawing on other media, she reminded me of Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I know she was supposed to be a take on Margaret Thatcher but, not being British, I can't speak to that. I also enjoyed the dry and slightly droll performances of her husband and the Kandy Man's creator. The two men were so dry in their delivery that it stood out as quite funny to me.

I also surprisingly enjoyed the fact that Helen A was not simply gunned down as you might expect in a revolution story, such as The Sunmakers. Instead, being forced to confront the shattering of what she viewed as perfection seemed like a more appropriate punishment. In the end she is not just killed off, but instead forced to deal with the reality of pain and suffering and how they complete us as people. It makes her even more pathetic to see her broken and weeping over the carcass of Fifi than it would be to see her own carcass lying in the street.

Going back to the film noir aspect, I enjoyed how this story was shot. I think it would have looked even better on film, but they did a decent job with what they had. There was a grit in the scenes and the lighting was very muted which gave everyone a washed out look, adding to the disassociation between the requirement of happiness and the reality of the situation. There was also a very good use of shadow to hide various flaws that existed in the scenery and in Fifi herself. I also happened to see this off an old VHS recording and the graininess that exists in that medium actually helped the story in my opinion. If I were to rewatch it in a DVD or Blue Ray, I think the clarity of the picture might actually detract from the story due to too much contrast being introduced.

With all of that good stuff there were some flaws, none of which were enough to ruin the story, but they could have made it better. Going off the previous point of the sets, lighting and direction, all of that couldn't fully hide the limitations of the budget. There is a lot of cast and a lot of set and it is obvious that they had to cut corners here and there. The vehicles are essentially go-karts and the flow of fondant never looked impressive enough to actually kill someone. There were a couple of other points where it was just difficult to contain the idea that this was confined on a soundstage. I think if this story had been shot on location in an abandoned warehouse of factory and dressed up from there, I think it would have covered up some of the cheapness that seeped through.

The second flaw that stood out to me was the pacing. A true film-noir needs time to breathe and this story didn't breathe quite enough. So much story was being told that it often a jump from scene to scene without any real clarity in how they got there. It's not as bad as it is in a few other Seventh Doctor stories (such as Ghost Light), but there is still a rushed feeling that shouldn't be there in a noir piece. I don't think expanding it to four episodes would have been the right move as it would have introduced too much padding, but if a scene or two were trimmed or reedited, I think it would have flowed better.

Probably the best scenes for editing (or even outright excisement) would be the Kandy Man scenes and that is my third and largest flaw in the story. The Kandy Man sticks out in this story as so out of place. While everyone else is human and there is a real level of grit, you introduce this sadistic creature that serves almost no point. He supplies the fondant for the executions but other than that, he does nothing in the story. What's more, he appears to be living confectionary and that just seems so out of left field in what is otherwise not much of a science fiction story.

I could forgive the wackiness of the Kandy Man if he had an actual point. But all of his scenes are just the guardian of the Kandy Kitchen, supplying the fuel of execution. This could have easily just been done by Gilbert M himself and those scenes sharply reduced in length, allowing the rest of the story some breathing room. Imagine for example that in Episode Two, instead of the Doctor freeing the Kandy Man to make him divert the fondant in Susan Q's execution, the Doctor instead sneaks behind Gilbert M and forces him to divert the flow by threatening to expose his own lack of happiness. Not only would it have trimmed the scene and given it a more realistic tone, but it would have given extra motivation for Gilbert's flight at the end of the story. I don't hate the Kandy Man the way some fans seem to, but it's just weirdness for weirdness sake and a character that adds nothing to the story at the expense of other more significant elements.

Overall, I enjoyed this story. It lost me in a couple of places, but reeled me back in with a good noir take. It has it's problems, but much like Paradise Towers and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the quality of the performances and the atmosphere salvage the overall story, allowing the good to outweigh the bad. I would like to watch this one again, preferably with a higher quality copy to see if that clarity hurts or helps the overall story.

Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5