Farewell, Great Macedon by Moris Farhi
1964/2010
And so we slip through time to the far-off year of 2010, an age of smartphones and laptops light years away from Lime Grove. It’s a funny place to zip off to this early in my marathon, I know, but once I was clued into the existence of the Lost Stories range on Big Finish, I got really curious about just what it boasted. One I had on my “want” list just so happened to fit neatly after Marco Polo, which was broadcast at the time this audio was written as a prospective TV script. It’s serendipity.
So, what shall we make of Farewell Great Macedon? It’s obviously a highly competent story with only a few awkward moments (particularly at the very start, with Susan’s inexplicable worries about the afterlife) and I could easily imagine this slotting into the time period we’re traversing right now. Honestly, with as many awkward moments as I’ve spotted so far (and why do they all seem to involve poor Susan?) it fits in all the better for them. Raising paeans asking why this didn’t make it to television is probably a waste of time, because it’s been said before. I’d rather spend this space exploring just where it fits into the canon that’s swiftly unfolding before us.
It’s interesting that this story’s conception came at the time of Doctor Who’s first Hartnell historicals. It is very much of the mould that was only just being set by Marco Polo, and all the more impressive for matching its type so soon. Whatever anyone might think of them now, these types of stories were clearly making an impression, something owed perhaps in part to the BBC’s immaculate work on historical sets and costumes. This story is distant in time and space from the last, showing us the dying days of Alexander the Great’s world-empire. (And wasn’t the great Macedonian himself briefly mentioned in Marco Polo? I wonder.) Throughout this story, the Doctor and his companions watch Alexander’s last days unfold, mostly unwitting of the fact that they were so near the end. The tale moves in the fashion of a Shakespearean tragedy, Alexander’s allies dropping off one by one until only the king himself remains to waste away in the aftermath.
I could spend this whole post taking my first chance at spinning my opinions as an LGBT person on the themes present in this story (and especially the subtext between Alexander and Hephaestion) into the first step on a longer trek about that subject in this marathon. But... I'll save my energy for the televised stories on that front. There's a different long winded spiel I want to go on this time around.
It’s a nice story. A gorgeous one, even, which provided upwards of three hours of happy entertainment while I was busy working, my earbuds popped in. William Russell and Carole Ann Ford are spot-on in their evocation of Bill Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill in a way that was really very heartwarming. I wish I could have stopped my nitpicking. Antiquity is a period of history that I’m reasonably familiar with, and I was certain almost from the start that embellishments were being made. This really shouldn’t be a shocker; every fictionalized historical story does the same thing. Here it’s done to maneuver the pieces of the play into place for the tragedy it wants to spin. Although all of the historical figures portrayed in this story really existed and (for the most part) really died in the manner they did, the timeframe is heavily compressed to move it into the scope of the story. Alexander’s chums Cleitus, Calanus, and Hephaestion all died before this story was set, some of them even several years prior. For his own part, Antipater lived some years longer and served as regent of Alexander’s empire for a time. This is all perfectly forgivable, I think. After all, it would have been a bummer to reach the end of this story and not have the chief antagonist see his comeuppance.
Simple allowances like these don’t really bug me. What stuck with me through this was the mythologizing of history which this story partakes in. The greatest example of this here is in the characterization of Alexander. He comes across in this story as being very easy-going, a true idealist who believes in his vision of uniting East and West, and being particularly skeptical of the divine claims of the likes of Iollas. Farewell Great Macedon plainly goes to considerable lengths to idealize Alexander and almost hold him up to the standard of the Enlightenment-era morals which Ian and Barbara futilely try to introduce to his court. His lapses in character in this story, from his violent temper to his sulkiness to his wartorn track record, are all portrayed chiefly as small foibles possessed by an otherwise great man.
Don’t think that I’m about to launch into some sort of polemic against a man who’s been dead for over two thousand years; there’s no point. It’s not like I even dislike Alexander, because he is a fascinating figure in history. But it very much rubbed me the wrong way to see him idealized in this manner, made part of a mythological Babylon that comes across as more of a fairy tale than a real historical. Even the beautifully rendered Hanging Gardens which dominate the scenery of this story didn’t really exist. This story takes an even bleaker spin on the line from The Aztecs, insisting that “one can no more change the past than you can change the future”. And yet this story that in another time and place might have made it onto a family sci-fi program in the UK’s twentieth century very much does change the past, by presenting it to us in a way that simply makes for a good story. The real Alexander, the man who sought to rule the world and who honestly believed himself to be a son of Zeus, died on a muggy Mesopotamian evening in 323 BCE. But in the form of stories like this, he lives on - and wouldn’t he be proud of how some look up to him?
Farewell, great Macedon.
Unforgettable Dialogue
"Take me into your garden, O Babylon..."
"A man becomes a god by doing the impossible."
"Do you mind, I'm talking!" (Oh, I'd give my left foot to have heard Jacqueline Hill read that line...)
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 11 October 2017.)
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