Science fiction is, I suppose by default, pretty damn weird. As with everything, how much of it you believe or are willing to accept is going to vary from person to person but there are some concepts that everyone is happy with. Space travel is possible (with varying degrees of accuracy depending on the story), people are happy that you can see the pulses of light coming out of ray guns travel across the screen or that they have that weird pyjama stripe effect to show them firing and that aliens are allowed to completely bypass all known theories of evolution (the Sense Sphere, of course, being the first ever planet that formed with perfectly flat surfaces everywhere for Sensorites to walk about on). There are some areas which people agree on but with wildly different ideas about what’s likely, time travel and changing time being one of them, and there are some concepts that absolutely no one thinks will happen (insert name of terrible sports team winning a major trophy). Doctor Who, as we’ve seen, doesn’t really know where it stands on the changing time aspect of things and mostly hopes that no-one will question what impact the Doctor has on the universe as a whole (except this blog of course!). For “The Crusade” though, there’s the other sci-fi biggie that is pretty much universally accepted but definitely causes problems here. Everyone, everywhere in the universe speaks English. Or, if you’re watching Doctor Who in Germany, everyone speaks German.
“Star Trek” has spent quite a lot of its franchises showing just how they developed their universal translator, from the early days of poor quality communication in “Enterprise” to seamless instantaneous translation by the time of “ST: SNG”. Doctor Who has never really had that luxury and, on television at least, it wasn’t even addressed until “The Masque of Mandragora” where it became a one off vital plot point and then the only other classic series story that made something of it was “The Leisure Hive” (expanded universe books etc have made more of it in earlier eras but yeah, we’ll get there eventually). In the revival, “The Christmas Invasion” made a big thing of translation issues and confirmed what the classic series had gone with, that it’s a combination of Doctor AND TARDIS that gives the companions the ability to speak Gallifreyan (well, the Doctor apparently thinks they are according to “The Beast Below”). So why, of all stories, have I chosen “The Crusade” to bring this up? For the simple reason that history has something interesting to say about the characters in this tale and it, once again, allows us to revisit “The Aztecs” and it’s stance on changing history.
The changing history part possibly breaks the record for the earliest time in a story that the Doctor or companion seemingly has a direct and large scale impact on events. The story opens with King Richard and company in the woods observed, from the bushes, by the Saracens. We get the TARDIS landing (which will be revisited in another blog) and, within four lines of dialogue, Barbara is kidnapped and Ian has knocked out a Saracen. Approximately fifteen lines of dialogue from the TARDIS crew in total, everyone is thoroughly involved in sword fights, kidnappings, dragging injured people out of the way and generally pretty much hitting every possible tickbox in the category of “interfering”. Unlike, say, “The Reign of Terror” where our leads don’t really get involved with the big players of the French Revolution too much, in “The Crusade” we’re already hobnobbing with the King by the end of episode one and acting as emissaries in episode 2. The assumption is that, at the end of the story, absolutely everything is as history wanted it to be in the first place but trying to work out just how Barbara getting kidnapped and interacting with locals, Ian getting knighted and so forth corresponds to our timeline is possibly the work of someone with a PhD that combines detailed research into the period AND a very good grasp of temporal mechanics. If anyone knows of such a person, their input would be welcome.
Out of all the issues with getting involved with history, the one that bugs me most in this particular tale is Barbara getting kidnapped and potentially ending up as a Sheherazade figure, whilst fellow kidnapee Des Preaux tries to pass himself off as the King. I would really love to be able to pop into the scenes in Saladin’s Throne Room and pass round bits of paper and ask everyone to write down what language they think they’re speaking and everyone else is speaking. Though I’m not massively well read up on this part of history, weirdly I do know one thing. Saladin didn’t speak any European languages and when a truce was finally sorted, it was done with very heavy reliance on translators. So just what did everyone hear? Barbara, by this time, is probably very well conditioned to accept that everyone around her is speaking English but it’s strange that at no point does Saladin either question just how come his prisoners are so fluent in Turkish or Kurdish OR not call for his translator. There’s also the follow on aspect of changing time. How much of this story does Saladin remember? If the TARDIS is so instrumental in the translation process and it’s allegedly something that the Doctor allows his friends to share, is there some sort of bubble in the timeline now where Saladin initially tries to discuss the truce without the aid of a translator because he now assumes that the other side speak his language? Or does the TARDIS delete key bits of information from his mind as it leaves the time period in order to keep history more or less in line with how it’s written in its databanks.
The language issue also presents an interesting possibility outside of this story. In “The Crusade”, time is on track until the TARDIS arrives and it’s only once our travelling heroes are on the scene that the language issue even crops up. In other stories though it’s more of an issue. Let’s use a story that we’ve already covered to illustrate the point. Let’s go back to Marinus, the most “thorough” planet we’ve visited (ie we saw far more of it than just one building/city). What language is being spoken? Suppose this story were to be set on the Earth. We need a city with its amazing rule of law (for no reason other than it allegedly birthed democracy we’ll go for Greece), you’ve got mountains (Switzerland), you’ve got Morphotron (hmmm, a place where everyone thinks they’re getting it all without thinking of the cost… Ibiza?), jungles (Borneo) and then there’s Arbitan and the Voord. If Marinus was a real planet, is it likely that everyone speaks exactly the same language everywhere? Or how about going even more extreme and revisiting “The Dead Planet” with Daleks and Thals. And, looking ahead, every time someone invades the Earth (random choice, “The Seeds of Death”) and is there before the TARDIS arrives, they can communicate with ease. So yes, I have a theory. Mankind is probably quite a “new” species in terms of the universe. Are we fully evolved, or has our evolution stalled? If we’ve grown up in such a secluded spot, have other species evolved in areas of the universe where there’s a much higher density of telepathic species that for the vast number of life forms, language isn’t actually a “thing”? One possibility is that when the Ice Warriors turn up on the Moon, they aren’t actually speaking English but they’ve got some small portion of their brain that allows “meaning” to be transmitted and received, and actually they’re all speaking some form of Martian but sending out a low level telepathic signal that allows us to interpret it as English? That would certainly explains stories like “The Curse of Peladon” where no-one seems to even be worried about needing translators present for so many languages. This means that one day, suddenly, we might find there’s a small but ever growing number of people on the Earth that aren’t impacted by a language barrier and we all get to speak to each other fluently and without worry of being misunderstood? Okay, it’s unlikely in the real world, but in the universe of Doctor Who, there’s bound to be some interspecies breeding eventually (“Delta and the Bannermen” I’m looking in your direction) so we might just break that barrier. All we need is the language of love, then the language of telepathy and, who knows, one day we might even be able to translate what politicians are actually saying… or is that possibly just a hope too far?