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If The Ark is evidence that there’s a limit to how well Doctor Who can challenge the legacies of empire, The Celestial Toymaker has increasingly been held up as proof that it’s not just a question of limitations. Rather, Doctor Who is an essentially imperialist product: perpetuating “the racial superiority of the world’s colonisers over the colonised.”

The main piece of evidence for this is the character of the Toymaker, played by British actor Michael Gough. Unfortunately, however, there are some problems with discussing how Gough actually plays the character. Despite the survival of the previous serial (The Ark) which marked an end to a period plagued by absent episodes, Doctor Who remains a fragmentary series. The Celestial Toymaker was a four-part serial credited to Brian Hayles, but rewritten substantially by both Donald Tosh and Gerry Davis. It survives in audio recordings, publicity photographs and a single episode—episode four, “The Final Test.”

Most of what survives of Gough’s actual performance is half of a performance—three episodes where the most we can do is interpret how Gough performs his line-readings. That said, photographs alone are enough for the case against the Toymaker to be mounted.

Dressed in the robes of an imperial Chinese bureaucrat, or Mandarin, the optics of the Toymaker are less than ideal. Visually he’s immediately distinct from characters such as the Doctor, Dodo or Steven—Othered, even. Both Dodo and Steven are dressed as if they were characters from the 1960s. This is actually true of Dodo and, despite deriving from a Buck Rogers tradition of science fiction, this has increasingly been how Steven has been framed. It’s only the Doctor who doesn’t really look of the 1960s, and even then he has long been costumed as an Edwardian gentleman—an image drawn from Britain’s past. He remains rooted in a specifically British aesthetic, something that isn’t true for the Toymaker. When Gough plays the Toymaker opposite the show’s established leads, the Mandarin robes his character wears visually emphasise the differences between them.

This costuming decision is eerily reminiscent of a problem we detected throughout 1965—a problem that predated the period overseen by producer John Wiles and story editor Donald Tosh. It wasn’t ever just a problem within Doctor Who either: from the Hood in ITV’s Thunderbirds to the thuggee cult in the Beatles film Help!, there was a trend in British media towards racially othering antagonistic and villainous characters. Most recently we’ve discussed this in reference to Mavic Chen in The Dalek’s Master Plan, a character who was a “cunning, avaricious” fifth columnist collaborating with the Daleks in his pursuit of political power. In the case of The Dalek’s Master Plan, at least, the reasons for this racial othering was rooted in the serial’s indebtedness to the future-war genre. This genre of fiction arose in the late 19^th century during a period of “new developments in scientific discovery and military technology, [and] uncertainties over the balance of power in Europe,” cultural conditions which aren’t entirely different to those of the Cold War. The future-war genre is the tradition of science fiction from which Buck Rogers—and, at least initially, Steven Taylor—emerge. Looking at Buck Rogers we can see how “uncertainties over the balance of power in Europe” during a period of scientific and technological advancement manifested in ugly, racialised ways. Rogers, ostensibly a heroic figure, must help “white America reassert itself and ‘exterminate’ the occupying force” of alien invaders, who had “‘originated as a hybrid somewhere in the dark fastness of interior Asia.’” This trend to racially other antagonists is rooted in anxieties about the present, an attempt to construct an external enemy over whom the white races can violently “reassert” themselves. In a character like Mavic Chen or the Hood, at least, we can see Eastern antagonists performing acts of infiltration and subversion—threatening the integrity of a Euro-American world order.

Does this explain the Toymaker, though?

After all, in Thunderbirds the Hood is clearly a “cunning” antagonist whose actions threaten the world—requiring the intervention of “white America” in the form of International Rescue to, with their fleet of Thunderbirds, “reassert” or restore some sense of order. Mavic Chen is clearly a fifth columnist in league with the very real hegemonic threat posed by the Daleks—and his racial otherness emphasised by the decision to have actor Kevin Stoney wear prosthetic eyelids and blackface makeup.

Perhaps the Toymaker is cunning, but avaricious? A subversive fifth columnist? At the very least, in other Eastern-coded antagonists of this period we can see some trace indebtedness to the deep-rooted xenophobia of the future-war genre. If the Toymaker is a further example of racism in British media from the 1960s, he’s racist in ways distinct from this specific tradition of science fiction.

Let’s set aside questions of the future-war genre, then, and instead return to Nancy Wang Yuen. The last time we engaged with Yuen was when holding The Crusade up for scrutiny, unpacking the ways in which racism reveals itself in its casting, direction and writing. Of course, engaging with Yuen comes with an important caveat. My focus is on Doctor Who and the British television industry where Yuen’s is specifically the American film industry. That said, Yuen’s points can still apply to Doctor Who. Her observation that Hollywood’s early films featured “yellowface performances of Asians as diabolical, inscrutable, and exotic foreigners” identifies a broader trend of which the future-war genre is merely a small part. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a 1961 film featuring Mickey Rooney in yellowface, is clearly an example of such a film featuring “performances of Asians as… exotic foreigners” that isn’t xenophobic science fiction.

So does Yuen’s broader description of yellowface performance, not tied to the concerns and aesthetics of a single genre, better reflect the Toymaker’s character? Unlike Stoney’s performance as Chen, or even Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Gough isn’t wearing makeup. This alone isn’t much of a defence though if The Celestial Toymaker is merely filing off the serial numbers so as to “recycle the same offensive stereotypes.”

He’s certainly a diabolical figure, a bored being residing within his own lonely hell with “no one to play [games] against.” Should an individual play his games and lose they are condemned to “become [his] toy forever.” That said, a villain being diabolical doesn’t inherently mean that they are “yellowface performances of Asians.” The Daleks are diabolical and inscrutable creatures, but they’re estranged figures who have come to signify a myriad of themes from Cold War anxieties to capitalist exploitation. Bennett, who dressed himself up as the inscrutable Koquillion in The Rescue to emotionally control Vicki, was not a yellowface performance. The Toymaker being diabolical is, by itself, not enough to damn him. What does that is the specific combination of a diabolical villain dressed in a Mandarin costume, framing him as exotic and foreign in contrast to the very British protagonists. The use of costuming seemingly colour-codes the diabolical villain for the audience’s convenience.

The casting of Gough as the Toymaker, as is true of Stoney as Chen, is further representative of a more institutionalised and material racism. Yuen writes that blackface and yellowface portrayals also served the purpose of denying job opportunities to people of colour. It’s something that’s not unique to Hollywood—clearly this form of job exclusion can also be see in casting white actors to portray characters like Mavic Chen or the Mandarin-dressed Toymaker.

It would be naïve to assume that the issues with Mavic Chen or the Toymaker would be resolved simply by more diverse casting practices, but then we have previously seen how even an incrementally more diverse production team can push against racism built into the institutions of the industry. Zienia Merton’s casting as Ping-Cho in Marco Polo, directed by Waris Hussein, remains proof that Doctor Who can quite easily cast non-white actors in these prominent roles—it’s just chosen not to. Merton’s casting, however, is also a damning statistic. Even if Doctor Who was more capable of narratively challenging the legacy of British imperialism within television and the wider culture of the 1960s, from 1963 into 1966 it has only cast one non-white actor in a prominent guest role.

Addressing the question of race in The Celestial Toymaker is important—especially now in 2020, during a historical moment defined by renewed efforts to overturn systems continuing to enshrine the racial superiority of the world’s colonisers over the colonised. Even if The Celestial Toymaker is hardly the most egregious racial fuck-up that Doctor Who has done by 1966, this shouldn’t be taken as exoneration. Rather, it’s further proof of how Doctor Who and British media of this period continue to struggle with depictions of race. The legacy of the British Empire continues to grip the cultural zeitgeist, continuing to whisper its belief in “the racial superiority of the world’s colonisers over the colonised” even as the colonised cast off the shackles of empire.

Although the figure of the Toymaker reveals the ways in which Doctor Who—and Britain more broadly—are failing to change, The Celestial Toymaker continues an ongoing project to redefine the nature of the programme and the character of the Doctor.

Through the three serials that both Tosh and Wiles produced, there was a clear move towards framing the Doctor as a more distanced character. In some respects it’s easy to see this as a return to the character’s original portrayal, as seen in early episodes such as “An Unearthly Child” or serials like The Dead Planet. In these episodes the Doctor was depicted as a Trickster figure willing to manipulate his fellow time travellers to satiate his own curiosities. What was also apparent in these episodes, however, was the way in which William Hartnell used the camera to cultivate a conspiratorial alliance with his audience—forming a para-social bond that softened some of his pricklier qualities. Even if depicting the Doctor in a more distanced way seems like a return to these first principles, there appear to have been efforts to strain this para-social bond. The final surviving shots of The Myth Makers, for instance, appeared to deny Hartnell the use of the camera to connect with his audience: instead, he averted his gaze as he denied Katarina’s suggestion that he was in some way a god.

Due to this, we can say that Hartnell’s Doctor has been presented as more distanced from his companions and audience than at any point in the programme’s short history so far. In fact, Katarina is perhaps the companion most responsible for this increased distance. A major part of my reading of The Dalek’s Master Plan hinged upon treating the character as more insightful than either Tosh or Wiles thought she could be. It’s through Katarina, then, that the Doctor is recast as a character with divine or ethereal qualities—something that becomes increasingly important within the context of The Celestial Toymaker.

Let’s put a pin in that for the moment, though.

With this serial we find ourselves lingering in a period of transition that began with The Ark. Both Wiles and Tosh have officially stepped down by this point. Gerry Davis had succeeded Tosh as story editor for the final episode of The Massacre (“Bell of Doom”), while The Celestial Toymaker is the debut of Innes Lloyd as the show’s new producer. As a story that represents a series in transition, however, it finds itself continuing to engage with the themes and agendas of the previous production team. The trend throughout the short Wiles-Tosh era to distance the Doctor is repeated here, explained this time as a result of the Toymaker’s power. It serves as a form of punishment here: as the Toymaker states, “to stop you interfering, I shall have to dematerialise you again.” This marks a change from previous serials such as The Massacre where the Doctor’s absence, although certainly a focus of the plot, was seemingly accidental: the Doctor wandered off in one episode, and wandered back into the narrative in another. Here the Doctor’s disappearance (or dematerialisation) is something done intentionally by the Toymaker in what could be called an act of thematic escalation. Now an antagonist is directly responsible for the Doctor’s literal absence, causing the narrative focus to shit towards Steven and Dodo as they play through his series of games.

The Doctor as an absent, distanced presence isn’t the only way that The Celestial Toymaker can be seen as further pushing the themes of the Wiles-Tosh era. In one crucial way, it also returns to an idea that Tosh oversaw long before Wiles officially succeeded Verity Lambert as producer in late-1965. Tosh’s first credit as story editor was on The Time Meddler: a serial by his predecessor, Dennis Spooner, that introduced a new character (the Monk) who was from “the same place” as the Doctor and possessed his own TARDIS. As such there’s a curious bookending with The Celestial Toymaker: although not outright stated in the serial itself, the Toymaker was conceived as “possibly being another member of the Doctor’s race: a more malevolent version of the Monk.”

Naturally, this raises the spectre of the Time Lords once again.

The Time Lords are still an unnamed spectre, a future echo reverberating backwards into the 1960s from the 1969 serial The War Games. We’ve previously seen how some future writers, specifically Guerrier and Lane, have drawn tension from the Hartnell era’s comparative lack-of-Time-Lords. In Guerrier’s The Time Travellers, the possibility of the Time Lords intruding into the narrative in response to human time travel experiments is treated like some kind of existential threat. Lane doesn’t go so far, but deliberately avoids naming the Time Lords in The Empire of Glass and builds a narrative that views anachronistic knowledge as inherently dangerous—this in spite of connecting his novel to the events of the tenth anniversary story, The Three Doctors. Regardless, both writers suggest that the presence of Time Lords would pose an anachronistic threat to the Hartnell era.

Attempts to introduce members of the Doctor’s race within this period—such as the Monk or, more ambiguously, the Toymaker—are less concerned with ideas of the Time Lords as anachronistic. Spooner, Tosh, Hayles and Davis don’t know what Time Lords are.

That said, the ambiguities surrounding the Toymaker suggests a similar apprehension. Sullivan’s description of the intent behind the Toymaker does contain an element of doubt. That the Toymaker is “another member of the Doctor’s race” is still only a possibility. Perhaps the reason for this is simply a matter of creating the illusion of distance between the Doctor, his companions and the audience without clarifying just how wide that distance can be measured. After all, a key feature of the Tosh-Wiles era was the onset of an anxious mood over the series. It would be in keeping with that established anxiety for the Doctor, and other members of his race, to be held at a vague distance from the human characters: the anxiety emerges from the very uncertainty of just how separated they truly are.

Of course, any discussion of distance and the separation of the Doctor from humanity has to account for costuming. In a serial where the Toymaker wears Mandarin robes, framed as an exotic Other, the Doctor’s Edwardian period dress reinforces an association with Britain. If the Doctor is a distanced figure, the Toymaker is more so.

The Celestial Toymaker sidesteps questions of its eponymous character’s nature entirely. What little we do know about the Toymaker, for instance that he has “lasted for thousands of years” and “manipulates people and makes them into his playthings,” is information related to the viewer by the Doctor. If there is anything we know of the Toymaker as a character beyond these four episodes, it’s that for some reason the Doctor is already familiar with him.

What happens when we consider the Toymaker alongside the Monk and the Doctor? What vague, ambiguous shape begins to form of this yet-unnamed civilisation the Doctor has left behind?

For starters, all three have been depicted as manipulative figures. This does come with some caveats, of course: the Doctor may be manipulative, but he hasn’t made people “into his playthings” to quite the extent of the Toymaker. Similarly, the ways in which the Monk is a manipulative character are distinct. When looking at The Time Meddler I referenced an idea put forward by Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks whereby theatrical characters, such as Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, might function as a “playwright-director” undone by an eventual “clumsy solo performance.” I argued that this was clearly the case with the Monk, relying on the anachronism-enabling powers of his TARDIS to both rewrite history and actively create a narrative within the space of a television studio. Perhaps the most obvious way that the Monk did this was with a gramophone, using it to create diegetic audio within the serial and thus the illusion of a thriving monastic order deep in worship for the inhabitants of a nearby village.

The Monk, however, was undone by a “clumsy solo performance.” He kept himself separate from those villagers and, once the Doctor had raised their suspicions, they rose up against the Monk. This was all part of a redefining of the historical genre that took place late in the second season predicated on interaction. The Space Museum was the seminal serial that began to establish this new understanding of the past and how historical narratives could work: as the Doctor explained, “we’ve met people, spoken to them and who knows, we might have even influenced them.” In addition to the Monk’s TARDIS being sabotaged, denying him a machine giving him the ability to manipulate space and time, the historical characters the Monk was performing for were influenced to see through his performance and reclaim control of the past from a clumsy “playwright-director.”

This issue of performing for a historical society isn’t really all that relevant to the Toymaker. He seemingly lives in a world of his own creation, one that exists only as long as the Toymaker is winning his games. Yes: if the Toymaker loses “his world will vanish,” forcing him to “build a new one.” The option of a second “clumsy solo performance” isn’t available to the Monk: once his ruse has been discovered he doesn’t have the option of a second go.

Setting that aside we can see some ways in which the Toymaker does appear to function as a “playwright-director,” of a sort. After all, couldn’t we describe the way in which he forces Steven and Dodo to play a series of games as an act of casting: assigning them roles within the narrative that they are expected to perform? Doesn’t he also consider which of his toys would be best suited to opposing Steven and Dodo in these games: clowns would be “very good at games,” while the Heart family “have great experience in a great variety of games.” In fact, as he considers which toy to set against the Doctor’s companion in his final game, the Toymaker explicitly frames them as characters:

TOYMAKER: Clowns! Nursery characters! Playing cards! I was foolish to trust you to play my games for me. You’re all too human, too kind. I must find a more deadly character. Ah! The most deadly character of them all because he looks so innocent. A fat, jolly school boy. I wonder what your friends will make of him, Doctor?

Doctor Who, “The Dancing Floor,” (Brian Hayles)

We can see here the Toymaker consider the needs of his narrative as he decides which of his toys would be best cast as Steven and Dodo’s final opponent. Of course this suggests that the Toymaker is refusing to adopt the role of actor himself—instead he turns to his collection of toys, and is therefore reliant on their ability to adequately perform in his games. They are, it turns out, inadequate.

In the case of the Monk, his ability to function as a “playwright-director” was reliant upon his TARDIS functioning. The Toymaker, by contrast, implicitly lacks one: he has to ask the Doctor to “let [him] have it… [your TARDIS] will be such an amusing toy.”

If he was intended as another member of the Doctor’s own race, the Toymaker introduces new a set of implications. When the Monk first appeared with his own TARDIS in The Time Meddler, his existence suggested a civilisation of time travellers that seemingly mass-produce new models of TARDIS as if they were time-travelling cars (the Monk’s Mark 4 being “fitted with the automatic drift control,” in contrast to the Doctor’s). That the Toymaker appears to lack a TARDIS suggests that, far from being a civilisation of time travellers, there exists a civilisation with mastery over time, relative dimensions and space. How else would we describe the ability to “build a new [world]” if not as mastery over relative dimensions and space? Rather than being something that defines this civilisation, time travel is merely one expression of this mastery.

These ideas—time, relative dimensions and space—are the concepts from which the TARDIS derives its acronym. In “An Unearthly Child” these qualities were understood in terms of television, and these associations between the TARDIS and television remained relevant throughout Verity Lambert’s era as producer. If what we are seeing between the Doctor, Monk and Toymaker is a possible civilisation defined by its mastery of these three areas, best encapsulated in the TARDIS acronym, then what we are seeing is the assertion of a civilisation defined by its mastery of the televisual medium.

Or, at least, they’re supposed to.

After all, hasn’t much of the third season been defined by the ways in which it denies the Doctor control of his medium—using the camera to create distance between Hartnell and the audience? Wasn’t the Monk’s flaw that rather than being a master of his medium, he was too reliant upon it? His defeat in both The Time Meddler and The Dalek’s Master Plan is the result of sabotage that renders his TARDIS unusable, suggesting that he only has any narrative power as long as his TARDIS functions properly. Then, of course, the Toymaker doesn’t possess a TARDIS of his own.

So let’s discard the suggestion that this civilisation is defined by mastery. What these three characters share is an ability to manipulate time, relative dimensions and space. Through the image of the TARDIS these properties have long been framed as televisual, and both antagonistic characters function to some extent as “playwright-directors.”

There is a word to describe these distanced beings, and the power they are capable of wielding over televisual diegesis, so let’s take down that pin from earlier.

By this point in the third season, the Doctor has been framed as a divine and ethereal psychopomp. The Monk, introduced by Spooner in the final serial of the show’s second season, also has associations with the divine as a character performing the role of a servant of God. Now we have a serial that introduces a new character, the Toymaker, who the Doctor describes as “celestial” in the first episode (“The Celestial Toyroom”). At long last, let’s unpack what this means.

Amongst the definitions of “celestial,” according to Merriam-Webster, is one that returns us to issues we’ve already discussed at length: “celestial” is a term “relating to China or the Chinese.” This was already evident form the character’s racialised costuming, but let’s press further through those definitions.

“Celestial” additionally carries religious connotations, suggestive of “heaven or divinity,” whilst also “relating to the sky or visible heavens.” It could even mean something “ethereal, otherworldly.” All of this is to say that the term “celestial” can suggest something supernatural or interstellar—perhaps even both—and going into this serial the Doctor has already developed supernatural and interstellar associations. Now we have a character intended to be another member of the Doctor’s race, and he too has these associations. Before The War Games names the Doctor’s race, introducing a concept that Guerrier and Lane will treat as an anachronistic threat to the nature of the Hartnell era, he is already implied to be something god-like.

This has implications for the narrative of The Celestial Toymaker. As previously mentioned, Steven and Dodo are separated from the Doctor and forced to play through a series of games designed by the Toymaker. To prevent the Doctor from “interfering,” the Toymaker dematerialises him.

If we’re allowing a reading whereby the Doctor and Toymaker are god-like characters, however, we must consider the Doctor through the specific divine role he’s previously been associated with: that of a psychopomp, guiding his companions through the afterlife. If the Doctor is a psychopomp—and one whose guidance counts as “interfering,” then does this make the Toymaker a god of the underworld?

If so, then we can see in the figure of the Toymaker the ways in which various trends within Doctor Who continue to bubble away within this renewed period of transition. The Doctor continues to be held at some distance—from the way in which the series conspires to separate him physically from his companions to the ambiguities regarding his true nature. Any answers that I’ve found here rest purely on drawing upon the history of this serial’s production, specifically the idea that the Toymaker might have been intended as a more malevolent version of the Monk. In doing so it reveals the fact that the way this third season has distanced the Doctor ultimately implies something god-like about his nature—that he is a psychopomp, and that he hails from a race of manipulative beings with the ability to influence and control televisual narratives.

And yet the Doctor is also distanced from the Toymaker here. He is, after all, costumed in Edwardian dress—aligned with the history of the British Empire—where the Toymaker is coded along racial lines. Perhaps The Celestial Toymaker is not the worst case of racism within Doctor Who so far. It is, however, proof that Doctor Who remains materially and aesthetically shackled to a legacy of imperialism—a legacy woven into the very fabric of the costumes characters wear, a code by which the audience is expected to judge just how distant and Other a character is intended to be.