Before
Watching
2007 was a great year for Doctor Who. David Tennant
had in the previous season made his debut as the Doctor, and very quickly
earned a reputation as the best Doctor since Tom Baker, and many would say, the
best Doctor bar none. In this, his second season, he would continue to go from
strength to strength. The third episode was called “Gridlock”, and if you’re a
fan of the revived series you may well remember it. Now, one of the most
interesting things for me was that when the evil aliens at the bottom of the
motorway are revealed, they turn out to be Macra. I have never watched “The
Macra Terror” and never read the novelization, but nonetheless I knew that this
was the return of an old monster. Yes, the very first series saw the returns of
the Autons and Nestene, and the Daleks, and the second series saw the return of
the Cybermen. With respect, these are all more recent Doctor Who monsters,
better known Doctor Who monsters, and more popular Doctor Who monsters than the
Macra. So why exactly Russell T. Davies decided to exhume them for this story I
don’t know, but maybe he had been a fan of “The Macra Terror” in the past? It
suggests that there may be something to this story, anyway, something about it
really worth watching, and so, even though all 4 episodes are missing and we
are back in the land of telesnaps, we’ll give it a fair hearing. . . er . . .
viewing.
After
Watching
In some ways this was a very familiar story,
even though I’ve never seen it before.
It’s
set in a holiday camp/resort I was immediately put in mind of the Sylvester
McCoy story “Delta and the Bannermen”. It strikes me that a holiday camp is a
really good setting for a Doctor Who story. It isn’t always easy to take
something which should, by rights, be associated with fun and enjoyment, and
give it a sinister twist, but when it’s done well you can end up with something
memorably chilling. Personally, I’ve always thought of holiday camps as
something slightly unpleasant and unwholesome anyway. That very British idea of
organized and regimented fun has always struck me as rather oppressive and
brought out my rebellious streak.
It’s
another chance for the Doctor to take on Totalitarianism Again, I was reminded of another Sylvester McCoy story, “The Happiness
Patrol”, which also portrays a Society in which expressing unhappiness can
bring severe penalties. In “The Macra Terror” the travelers have landed on a
future Earth colony, where the whole colony is an organized holiday camp. On
arrival they are welcomed by The Controller, whose photograph appears on a
giant screen, while his booming voice exhorts his fellow colonists to greater
efforts in their work. If that puts you in mind of Big Brother from George
Orwell’s “1984”, well, it did me too. A little later on, after the travelers
have started to ask awkward questions about the colony, efforts are made to
reprogram and indoctrinate them during their sleep – again, no doubt inspired
by “1984”, and room 101 in particular.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise when you find
echoes of Nazism, Fascism and Totalitarianism in some of the societies and
civilizations that the Doctor encounters. Most of the writers in the first
decade of the show had lived through World War II, and were well aware of the
atrocities committed by the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and his
contemporaries. Ian Stuart Black, whose last Doctor Who story this was, had
served in the war himself, and he wasn’t the only Doctor Who writer to have
done so. Totalitarianism was, and still is, an easily recognizable evil.
The interesting aspect of Totalitarianism that
“The Macra Terror” sets out to exploit is the way that whole populations can be
manipulated, and what can happen to the individual who sees through the
exploitation, and tries to alert his fellow citizens. What gives this story
slightly more depth is that you come to realise that the humans seemingly
oppressing their fellow humans are themselves not evil, but being manipulated
by the Macra, which wouldn’t come across without some very good performances
from such fine actors as Peter Jeffrey, who plays the Pilot, pretty much the
Controller’s deputy on the ground, if you like.
A
companion gets brainwashed, but in the end overcomes the conditioning, and
saves the day. In this case,
it’s Ben, who succumbs to the nighttime conditioning, and turns in his friends
as subversives. The last time we saw this happen was in “The War Machines”
where both Dodo and Polly were brainwashed by VOTAN, sorry, WOTAN. Now, I
thought that this was well done in the story. In the third Doctor’s era, as we
shall see in the fullness of time, all it would take would be for someone to
give the Doctor just a hint of a glassy stare and he’d be reaching for a shiny
pendant and dehypnotising them. All Troughton’s Doctor does is to keep gently
reminding Ben that he’s letting down his friends, and he isn’t acting like he
normally does, and eventually it works, and Ben breaks his conditioning. Now,
that’s the Doctor.
Giant
monsters based on Earth creatures. Okay, not insects this time, and
it’s interesting to speculate why exactly the team who made this one settled on
crab monsters. I suppose it’s not unreasonable to suggest that they can look
threatening, and they’re not insects, which had already been done. This is the basic idea. The Macra are in
charge of the colony, and have been for a long time. The voice of the
Controller is actually the voice of the Macra. The holiday camp fun and games
are there to distract the humans from the fact that they are being manipulated.
The Macra need the humans to mine gas, which is poisonous to the humans, but
essential to the Macra themselves. Which was something different, since I did
wonder whether we were going to find out that the Macra were actually farming the
humans to eat them eventually. Nope, and that was something.
The basic problem with the Macra, for me, is
that we see so little of them. We see quite a bit of individual claws, but very
little of the full Macra prop, and when we do get to see it, it seems very
poorly lit and difficult to make out any details. One thing I can say though –
it’s certainly very big. Maybe that was the problem. However, when you’re
selling the show on the fact that these creatures are meant to be terrifying,
hence the title of the story, then you probably have to do more than show us
the odd giant claw now and again, impressive those these are at stages.
Male
companions being forced to dance. This has actually happened before, rather than foreshadowing something
which will happen again in the show’s future. I think particularly of Peter
Purves in The Celestial Toymaker. That doesn’t exist because the episode is
lost, and neither does Jamie’s Highland Fling. Shame.
-------------------------------------------------------
Ok, as I said, then, this reminds me of quite a
few other Doctor Who stories, but let’s deal with it on its own terms, now.
It’s only a 4 parter, which is probably right, in fact, I can’t help thinking
it might have been even better as a three parter. There’s quite a lot of Jamie
making his way down tunnels, meeting Macra, struggling against Macra, escaping
from Macra – you get the gist of it, I’m sure. Also the cliffhanger at the end
of episode 2 is the controller appearing live on screen, and being attacked by
a giant claw – proof enough of the Macra’s existence, I would have thought. But
even this doesn’t break the conditioning, so episode three we go back to still
arguing about whether they exist or not, despite the fact that everyone has
seen one now. I don’t really get that.
Nevertheless, this is an Ian Stuart Black story
– his last for Doctor Who, as it happens, and you often get something
interesting in his stories which you haven’t had before in Doctor Who. I think
it’s fair to say that none of them came across as complete successes, but all
of them have something of interest going on them which means they stay in the
memory far longer than the average Doctor Who story of the same era.
What Have We Learned?
As I always suspected, Holiday Camps are sinister places
The Doctor doesn't have to use de-hypnotising techniques to dehypnotise people
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