Before Watching
Well, I know that Jean Marsh, last seen as
Richard the Lionheart’s sister Joanna in “The Crusades” is going to have a lot
more to do now. Last we saw Chen was sending her off to assassinate her brother
– who happens to be Bret Vyon – having convinced her that he is a traitor. My
main thought is to ask myself the question – how are they going to spin this
story out for another four episodes – let alone another 8?
I know that one of the coming episodes – The
Feast of Steven (number 7) was the first ever ‘Christmas special’ and has been
widely criticized for being such, especially for the moment when the Doctor
turns to the camera at the end and wishes all the folks at home a Merry
Christmas.
After
Watching
Episode
5
Following the bloodbath of the previous episode
The Doctor, Sara and Steven are the victims of cellular dissemination – which
means they are caught in a primitive transmat beam. Right “they’re moving
through space towards a strange planet, the nature of which we can only guess
at” says the blond one of the two scientists with silly tunics and sillier
pudding bowl haircuts. I’ll have a guess – I said to myself. Bet it’s a jungle
planet. Yep – I was right – and helpfully it’s a jungle planet a lot closer to
Kembel than Earth is.
There’s a lovely scene in which Kevin Stoney
virtually chews up the scenery when his bald henchman Karlton suggests a way of
putting a spin on the travellers’ being sent to Mira as a deliberate security
measure. A word too for Maurice Browning who plays Karlton. He is absolutely
terrific himself, and his reaction to Chen’s little megalomaniac outburst is
priceless.
On Mira we find Steven slapping an unconscious
Sara Kingdom and taking her gun, then footprints appear from nowhere in the
sand, being created by an invisible beast of some kind. I think it’s the first
time that invisible monsters have appeared in Doctor Who. “The Visians. We
can’t see them, but they’re very vicious.” The Doctor helpfully informs us. The
end of episode 5 looks like one of those which Terry Nation wrote in order to
see if Dennis Spooner could write his way out of it – namely the Doctor, Sara
and Steven are surrounded by Daleks, and the Doctor announces that it seems as
if the Daleks have won. Pah, he’ll have something up his sleeve.
Episode
6 – Coronas of the Sun
We start with a stalemate. The Doctor has the
taranium, which means that the Daleks cannot fire at him, because of the effect
it will have on the taranium. This gives the Visians time to attack the Daleks,
and in the confusion, the Doctor and co escape. Their decision to escape on the
Dalek pursuit ship is predictable, but a little disappointing – we’ve already
seen them all escaping on a stolen ship once in this story.
This leads to a terrific confrontation between
Mavic Chen and the Daleks. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone else apart from
the Doctor ever giving a dalek such a dressing down, especially when the news
comes through that the Doctor has stranded the dalek squad on Mira. This leads
the Daleks to take remote control of the spaceship, and again that’s a little
bit of a cop out since that was done with Chen’s ship as well. They break the
dalek control, then find themselves caught in a sort of tractor beam. Now all
the time this has been going on the Doctor has been manufacturing a fake
taranium core. It is Steven’s idea to activate it by using antiquated gravity
force technology. The Doctor and Sara poo poo the idea, so he does it anyway.
It works, but knocks him out, and when he starts to recover he is covered by a
force field. Hmm – bit lucky that. So,
having been brought down on Kembel, the Doctor makes the condition that he will
only hand over the taranium in front of the TARDIS. Which means that he and
Sara can sneak into the TARDIS, Steven can hand it over, then walk into the
TARDIS while the daleks are shooting away his forcefield. It’s all a bit
convenient.
Continuity wise I really want to know how the
Doctor can just hand the key over and have Sara, who has never seen the TARDIS
before, open it without destroying the lock. Cliffhangerwise, it’s a bit of a
damp squib too. The TARDIS lands on an unknown location, and the scanner is on
the blink. Steven goes to open the doors, and the Doctor stops him, announcing
the atmosphere outside is poisonous. That’s it – the cliffhanger. Somehow I
don’t see Terry Nation having sleepless nights about writing himself out of
that one.
Episode
7 – The Feast of Steven
I forgot – this episode is the infamous Feast
of Steven. Dennis Spooner was probably under orders not to write the Doctor
into a hole which would take too long to extract himself from. So it turns out
that we are actually back on Earth. The first bit sees the Doctor invade an
episode of Z Cars. It’s clearly played for laughs, but really isn’t all that
funny, although I dare say it might have raised the odd titter when it was
first shown. Steven steals a police uniform and poses as one of the boys in
blue to rescue the Doctor, who has been arrested coming out of the TARDIS, and
adopts a cod Liverpool accent to do so (Z Cars was set in a fictionalized
Merseyside town called Newtown) and I must admit I half smiled when the Doctor
asks why he’s speaking in the accent, and Steven justifies himself by saying
that everyone else is doing it. Alright, alright, calm down, calm down. After
ten minutes or so’s nonsense they leave in the TARDIS.
As they’re going Sara says that she has
forgotten about the Daleks for a moment, to which the Doctor replies “My dear,
you must never forget about the Daleks.” Yet the episode continues to do
precisely that. Now we materialize in silent movie era Hollywood. This bit may
have been better in the live action original, but as a recon it’s pretty poor,
especially since the first couple of minutes are so noisy you can’t really
understand what’s happening. Alright, I’m being churlish. There are a couple of
chuckles in this second half of the episode. It’s obviously meant to be tongue
in cheek – hence the use of old silent movie caption cards to the accompaniment
of tinkly wobbly cinema piano music. I liked it when the Doctor told the
actress in the recreation of Valentino’s the Sheikh to put some clothes on for
instance. It’s not a great line, but it’s something, as is ‘this is a mad
house, it’s all full of Arabs!’ You wouldn’t get away with that line now.
Finally the interminable Hollywood sequence ends, and the Doctor produces a
bottle of champers, gives a glass to Sara and Steven, and the wishes all of us
at home a Merry Christmas – arrghhh!
Look, it is what it is. This episode contributes
nothing whatsoever to The Daleks’ Masterplan other than making the original
audience wait for a fortnight for the story to continue rather than a week. So
you have to judge it on its own merits. Considering that Terry Nation did have
a pedigree as a comedy writer, having written for Arthur Haynes (means nothing
to you now, but he was big back in the early 60s), considering that then the
comedy is forced, and lumpy. I have seen some rather kinder reviews suggest
that this episode is actually about the show cleverly mocking itself. Well,
maybe the first half is. But even so, the purpose of the show is to entertain,
and while it might well have done just that to an unsophisticated Christmas
audience back in the 60s, it struggled with me in 2015, and ultimately, it
lost.
Episode
8 – Volcano
Interesting title. The Daleks have a bit of a
problem with volcanoes – as I recall the Doctor turned their Bedfordshire mine
into a volcano in the climax of the Dalek Invasion of Earth. Right, we’re back
to the story in this episode. Daleks, Chen and a couple of other knobbly bobbly
and spiky aliens gathered to watch the test of the Time Destructor. The Daleks
decide to use one of them, Trantis, the spiky one, as a guinea pig. When the
Daleks discover that the core is the problem they round on Chen and accuse him
of giving them useless taranium.
“It came from Uranus, I know it did!” he
remonstrates. Hmm. Is that Dennis Spooner giving the less mature among the
grown ups a better laugh than the whole of the previous episode offered, I
wonder? In an episode full of surprises, an even better laugh was given when we
got something straight out of the opening of Douglas Adams’ “Life the Universe
and Everything” when the TARDIS materialized in Lord’s cricket ground, and the
commentators carried straight on with their commentary, speculating on the
effect that the appearance could have on the match if it stayed for a
speculative 10 minutes. Of course, this aired long before Douglas Adams wrote
the 3rd Hitchhikers’ book. Adams was script editor of the show for
Tom Baker’s penultimate season, and a big fan of the show when a child, so the
chances are that the passage from his book must have been inspired – if only at
a subconscious memory – by this episode. It must have seemed even funnier when
first broadcast, since there wasn’t the book to compare it with back then.
So, the TARDIS, which has been chased – a la
the Chase – lands on a volcanic planet, and the Doctor announces sadly that
they haven’t shaken off the chaser. Who turns out to be – well well well, our
old friend the Monk. Alright, I knew this was going to happen, but the original
audience didn’t. It must have been a lovely surprise when a door in a large
rock opened, the background music changed completely, and out popped good old
Peter Butterworth. The meddlesome one is after his revenge, and he messes about
with the lock on the TARDIS. The interplay between the Doctor and the Monk when
they find him, about to drop a rock on their heads (is that a deliberate echo
of the Doctor’s actions in An Unearthly Child?) are as good as ever. His plan,
apparently, is to maroon the Doctor in the same way that he was marooned by the
Doctor. It works too, until the Doctor does something fancy with his ring –
it’s impossible to see exactly what on the recon, and it works.
So, we have the TARDIS and the Monk’s TARDIS in
the time space continuum, and just to complicate matters further, a Time
machine arrives from Skaro, and Chen and a Dalek squad set off in it. This one
looks a bit better than the MFI table inspired design from The Chase. The last
few minutes remind us that this would have been shown at New Year, as the
TARDIS lands in London on New Year’s Eve, and the episode ends with the Daleks
chanting exultantly that now the death squad are on their way nothing can stop
them and conquest is assured. A triumph of hope over experience there,
methinks.
So that’s episodes 5 – 8. I was actually really
rather starting to enjoy the story when the Feast of Steven came along. I mean,
I can understand why they did it – the gritty gloom of what had gone before in
the previous 6 episodes is hardly Christmas fare after all, but I kind of wish
they hadn’t. Especially considering how much episode 8 actually had going for
it. Well, two thirds of the way through now, so I confidently expect to be able
to make it all the way.
What
Have We Learned
You
can make your own personal force field just by pratting around with a gravity
force generator and a fake taranium core
You
can bypass the dimensional stabilizer of a TARDIS, but it will give you a very
bumpy ride if you do so.
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