46: The Invasion - Episodes 5 - 8

Before Watching

Shall I tell you the truth? OK, I will. I did watch this story when it was first broadcast, but other than a succession of images – mostly to do with marching Cybermen, I hadn’t any real memories of the specific story details. Then last summer I was browsing through a British Heart Foundation charity shop (other charity shops are available) and saw that they had a copy of Ian Marter’s Target novelization of the story. Yeah, of course I bought it. So I read it that evening – and yes, I rather enjoyed it too. So I pretty much know what’s going to happen in the rest of the story – the Cybermen will appear, but the story really has been Vaughn’s story so far, and it is going to continue to be so. I haven’t a problem with that.

What I will be interested to see is just how the story can juggle all these foregrounded characters – on the goodies side you have The Doctor, Jamie, Zoe, Isobel Watkins and the Brig and the UNIT boys. Then on the villains’ side you have Vaughan, Packer, the Cyber Planner, and half a dozen Cybermen. Somebody is going to lose out, even in an 8 episode story. I’m pretty much hoping it will be Isobel Watkins. There’s something about her, some indefinable quality which manages to get on my wick and set my teeth on edge. To be fair to Sally Faulkner, the actress who played her, I think she was actually written stupid and incredibly self-centered, but knowing this doesn’t make it any less annoying when she persists in calling the Captain her ‘dolly soldier’. Dolly Soldier?! What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I don’t want to be horrible, but this is one area in which maybe this story can be criticized. As I understand it the original idea was for Professor Travers to be in the story, but Jack Watling was unavailable, which is why they created the character of Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel. Presumably, had Travers been in the story, then part Isobel plays would have been taken instead by Anne Travers, the Professor’s daughter (as opposed to Deborah Watling, who was Jack Watling’s real life daughter.) Anne was a scientist, and more than that a grounded, strong, believable character, and would have been far better in my opinion than this self centred airhead.

Well, as I said, I read the novelization last summer, so I know that even though we’re four episodes in we’ve still got a lot of story to go, and wasting time here won’t accomplish that. So let’s go.

After Watching

Again, ladies and gentlemen, the plan was to not force myself to watch more than two episodes in an evening. Well, that went by the board again, as this set of 4 episodes (disc 2 on the official DVD) were another single sitting job – not because I had to, but because I wanted to. So that means I really enjoyed it, right? Of course – but that is, I enjoyed it on its own terms, as a fine adventure yarn, rather than a piece of great Doctor Who. I’ll try to explain that.

I can’t help thinking that the middle episodes, up to maybe halfway through episode 7, really start to get away from The Doctor, and for the first time since Hartnell’s first season it feels as if the Doctor isn’t really the star of his own show. I think that I know what the problem is too. It’s all in the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT. In this story he becomes little more than a UNIT operative. Ah – you might say – but isn’t that what he is in the Pertwee era a lot of the time, and that seemed to go perfectly well. Yes and no. The Third Doctor’s relationship with UNIT was a little more complicated than it seems to be in this story. In the Third Doctor’s time his relationship with UNIT was pretty much a marriage of convenience. Stuck in Space and Time after being tried by the Time Lords at the end of “The War Games”, UNIT provide a useful base for him to work at trying to get the TARDIS working, and breaking the Time Lord’s Edict. In return, UNIT get to call him their Scientific Advisor, and can avail themselves of the use of his services from time to time. It’s fair to say that the Doctor does not always help UNIT willingly, and there’s often friction between him and the Brig over the methods that UNIT uses – ie – if it’s green, bomb the hell out of it. Well, coming back to “The Invasion” it really is all far too cosy. The Doctor slots quite nicely into the organization, and there’s never the hint of the slightest conflict between himself and the Brig, which maybe would have added a little something extra to the story. After all, the second Doctor is, in my opinion, the least ‘establishment’ of all of the Doctors, and it might have been fun to see how UNIT might have reacted to a little of his inspired anarchy.

Doesn’t Kevin Stoney continue to be outstanding, though? There’s a wonderful, wonderful scene in which Professor Watkins is brought to him, and Watkins wearily concedes that he will have to do as Vaughn says, since Vaughn will surely torture him, and he cannot stand torture. He expresses his desire to kill Vaughan, and Vaughn hands him a gun, and tells him to shoot. You can’t tear your eyes away from the screen while he’s on here – it is played to absolute perfection. Of course, you know that Watkins, a decent man, is not going to be able to shoot Vaughn, because murder is wrong – but then he does! Three bullet holes appear in the chest of Vaughn’s jumper! It transpires that Vaughn has been part cyber converted. What a fabulous, fabulous scene – probably one of my favourite scenes of all of the ones I’ve watched since we started with “An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC”.

Well, we did get to see some more of the Cybermen too. I think I’ve already mentioned that this mark 5 cyberman ( I count the Moonbase and Tomb of the Cybermen separately, since despite their many similarities there is a clear difference in the hand arrangement.) is my favourite design – although there’s also a lot to be said for the mark 7 (Earthshock)  design too. Visually, director Douglas Camfield really gets the best out of them as well. The scenes marching down the steps of St. Paul’s and past The Horn pub are remarkable in as much as they really are every bit as good as the iconic photographs lead you to believe. It would have been nice to get some verbal confrontation between one of them and the Doctor, or Vaughn, but no, in this story it all happens through the Cyberplanner, which is a bit of a shame, and detracted a little from the story for me.

When we got to the denouement, there were echoes in it of the ending of “The Wheel In Space”. What I mean by that is the the Cybermen still need to be guided in from space by a radio signal. Alright, this time it’s the great cyber bomb which is going to destroy the earth, but the principal is the same. How do we deal with it – switch the flippin radio off. Not rocket Science. Mind you, rocket science is what they use to shoot down the cyber ship. I wonder why Derrick Sherwin decided to have UNIT ask the Russians to borrow a rocket to launch a missile at the cybership, rather than the Americans? I wonder what would have really happened in 1968 if the western world had asked the Soviet Union – Can we borrow one of your lovely rockets, please?

I think that “The Invasion” demonstrates just which different factors have to all work together to make a good Doctor Who story. By rights, 8 episodes should be too long to sustain a single story, and really and truly there isn’t really quite enough plot to keep you going here. What makes it work is good – and in some cases great – acting, terrific direction, and design which is far better than it has any right to be for the money that the show could afford to spend. No doubt about it, this was the shape of things to come.

What Have We Learned?

The Cybermen don’t actually have to do that much – just be there looking impressive

UNIT have remarkable resources at their disposal

Kevin Stoney is a class act whenever he is the chief villain

We can add hand grenades and intensified emotions to the ever growing list of things which can kill Cybermen

46: The Invasion - Episodes 1 - 4

Before Watching

It’s probably because it got me at a very impressionable age – 4 or 5 as I recall, but the Invasion style Cyberman is the image that pops into my head whenever I hear the word ‘Cyberman’ It was the first time that they had the helmets with the full ’earmuffs’ for want of a better word. Following on from the suits first seen in “The Wheel in Space” these had costumes made of rubber diving suits sprayed silver. One of the iconic images from 60s Doctor Who – in fact from the whole of classic Doctor Who, is the Cybermen walking down a set of stone steps with the dome of St. Paul’s in the background, an image every bit as arresting as the image of the Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”.

Going on what I’ve seen in the 4 previous Cybermen stories, though, maybe the Cybermen do have most appeal to younger children, for I’m afraid that I’ve started to find myself falling out of love with them as a feature of classic Doctor Who. I’ll try to put that into context.

An imposing visual image is great for a Doctor Who monster/villain, and it’s a really important starting place. But in the same way that a well-conceived and written monster is going to struggle with viewers if it looks ridiculous in the first place, a visually interesting monster is not going to be enough if it is just a one dimensional motiveless malignity. Which, come to think of it, is an accusation that can be levelled at the Daleks. We’ll take a look at the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Daleks and Cybermen afterwards, I think. So, coming back to Cybermen –

they were once humanoids from earth’s twin planet Mondas whose reliance on mechanical replacements for body parts eventually led to them becoming essentially cyborgs, who have also removed useless things like emotions from their organic brains. Ok – so far so good. What are they like, then?

The Cybermen are warriors, bent on the conquest and domination of other races. Ok – why?

They are superior to other races, therefore it is logical that other races should be converted to Cybermen as well, since they would then be a higher form of life too. Ah, now here we have a problem. You see the Cybermen have been defeated in 4 consecutive adventures by human beings. So shouldn’t they come to the conclusion that logically, through beating them 4 – 0. The humans are therefore superior beings, and they, the Cybermen, should leave them alone?

Ah.

Part of the problem I’m having with the Cybermen at the moment is that they are so physically superior to their human enemies that they shouls be able to carry out their plans through sheer brute force. Look, take the Moonbase. The Cybermen can function perfectly well in a vacuum. So why don’t they just walk up to the outside of the Moonbase, and start punching holes in the dome. The base would have run out of tea trays sooner or later, surely. They seem to go out of their way to make things difficult for themselves, and this is something which becomes difficult to accept after a while.

Daleks v. Cybermen

I don’t know that you can argue that the Daleks and the Cybermen were the two most iconic monsters to feature in classic Doctor Who. There’s a host of well-conceived, well realised monsters who appeared in one story, and never returned, and there are even some other popular monsters who appeared in more than one story – the Autons, Ice Warriors and Sontarans being three that spring to mind off the top of my head. None of them though featured in anything like the number of stories, and generated anything like the amount of speculation about back story as the Daleks and Cybermen.

Were the Cybermen conceived as an alternative to the Daleks, bearing in mind Terry Nation’s desire to take his creation off to America and attempt to make a series about them? That’s one view that has gained a certain amount of support over the years. Me, I don’t know. The fact is that Season 4, which saw Hartnell’s regeneration into Troughton, while it featured the first two Cybermen stories, “The Tenth Planet” and “The Moonbase”, also featured two Dalek stories. After that, though, Terry Nation did take his Daleks off to the USA, and it wasn’t until the 9^th season that they’d return in “The Day of the Daleks”. In the meantime, 2 Cybermen stories featured in Troughton’s series 5, and one, “The Invasion”, in Series 6. In this story, “The Invasion”, it is the Cybermen who are used as the monsters in the first UNIT story, which was very much a dry run for Bryant and Sherwin’s plans to create an Earthbound series from season 7 onwards, which suggests that at this time the Cybermen were looking to be the number 1 monster of the show.

All of which makes it all the more perplexing that there was no Cyberman story throughout the Jon Pertwee Era, until Season 12, which was Tom Baker’s first. I think that there’s maybe an answer to this in the fact that maybe Kit Pedler didn’t want to come up with another Cyberman story, and the production team might have been wary of asking another writer to start from scratch with them. Maybe, also the team were wary of having a monster come back for a second crack at invading Earth. The Daleks, for example, didn’t return after “The Day of the Daleks” until season 10 and crucially after the Time Lords had lifted the ban on the Doctor travelling through time and space.

Looking forward past that, the Daleks featured in 2 Tom Baker stories – season 12’s “Genesis of the Daleks” and the disappointing season 17 story “Destiny of the Daleks”. Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe, the great script editor – producer team who made the first 3 seasons of Tom Baker’s tenure – were not great fans of the Daleks, and even persuaded Terry nation to pen “The Android Invasion” rather than another Dalek story. The Cybermen did not feature again until Peter Davison’s first season, when they were exhumed to marvelous effect in the highly praised “Earthshock”. Not for the first time the Cybermen had undergone a radical redesign, and this firmly reestablished them as a recurring monster throughout the rest of the run of the classic series.

The Daleks, of course never needed such a radical redesign. In fact you could argue that the most obvious redesign of the Daleks occurred between their appearences in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and “The Chase”, where two horizontal metal bands around the top of the Daleks’ bodies were replaced by vertical bars, which I believe were supposed to be solar cells, which enabled the Daleks to convert solar energy to static electricity.

I always used to wonder who would win in a fight between Daleks and Cybermen – a question which was pretty clearly answered during David Tennant’s time in the ‘new’ series. (It seems odd to talk of something which is 10 years and 8 series old as new). If you had to fight one, certainly, you’d be better off fighting a cyberman. Apart from anything else, there have been so many ways to kill a cyberman over the years, while the Daleks are tough critters, even if it is remarkably easy to sneak up behind one, and put something over its eyestalk, while you bash its gun out of its housing.

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Hmm – I know I’m rambling on a bit here, so let me just tell you how I’m going to review this story, and then we’ll get on with it. If you cast your mind back to “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, you’ll maybe remember that I reviewed it in three installments of 4 episodes each. That worked well enough as far as I was concerned, and so I’m going to split my “The Invasion” Review into two parts.

After Watching

This isn’t the first animation I’ve seen. Off the top of my head “The Reign of Terror”, “The Tenth Planet”, “The Moonbase” and “The Ice Warriors” all have animated episodes. I have to say, though, that episode 1 of “The Invasion” is my favourite. I’m not really sure what made me like it more than the others, unless, maybe, that it is a particularly good episode – which it is. Actually, the first 4 all are.

Let’s have a quick look at the story so far. The TARDIS’ technical issues continue at the start of the first episode, as it materializes in space since the landing control is stuck. Don’t question it, just go with the flow. A spaceship on the far side of the moon fires at it, and it only just manages to materialize on Earth at the last second. Now, one of the original ideas of the story was, I think, that they would link up with Professor Travers from “The Web of Fear” and “The Abominable Snowmen”, but Jack Watling was unavailable, and so the characters of Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel were substituted. The Doctor calls on Professor Watkins to ask for his help in repairing the TARDIS circuits which have been damaged, and finds that he has not been seen for a while. He decides to pay a call on International Electromatics, the firm he has been working for, and meets the boss, Mr. Tobias Vaughn. Vaughn is particularly interested in the TARDIS circuits, and the Doctor has little choice but to leave them with him. As he and Jamie leave Vaughn, two shady men trail them, and eventually pick them up in a car, which then takes them to an airbase. Much to his surprise, the Doctor is reunited with the former Colonel Lethbridge Stewart from “The Web of Fear”, now promoted to Brigadier. The Brigadier is now running UNIT – that’s United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. UNIT themselves are investigating Vaughn and IE, and the Brigadier enlists the Doctor’s help.

Meanwhile, Zoe and Isobel have become bored waiting for the Doctor. They go to IE to find them, and Zoe ends up giving the computer in reception a stroke. The two girls are captured and put on ice by Packer, Vaughn’s security chief. When they return to Isobel’s flat, Jamie and the Doctor learn that the girls have gone to IE, and stage a rescue operation, after another encounter with Vaughn and Packer. With the help of a UNIT helicopter they escape. Vaughn isn’t daunted, as he has hypnotic control over General Rutlidge, who has the power to order the Brigadier to cease the UNIT operation. This doesn’t stop the Doctor, since together with Jamie he takes a canoe along the London sewers in order to gain secret entry to the IE warehouse. It is in the sewers that they catch their first sight of a Cyberman being activated. Phew!

You’ve probably noticed that the first Cyberman in the story doesn’t appear until the last few seconds of the 4^th episode – halfway through the story. Considering that this is a story which provided us with many of our archetypal images of classic series Cybermen you’d think that this is a drawback. And you’d be wrong to think so. Without any word of a lie, I am thoroughly enjoying this story so far. There’s so much to enjoy here, after all.

There’s Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughan for a start. He hasn’t been in the show since the previous epic length story, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” where he brilliantly played the dastardly Mavic Chen. In a totally different way, Vaughn is every bit as good a villain as Chen, and that’s saying something. There are some actors who bring something special to the show in every story they appear – I think of the great Philip Madoc, of course, and of the Bernards – Kay, Horsfall and Archard - and Kevin Stoney firmly belongs within this illustrious band. A quick google tells me that he makes a third and final appearance in the next cyberman story – “Revenge of the Cybermen” from Tom Baker’s first season. Vaughn, in some ways, is a close cousin of Chen. Chen, if you remember, betrayed his race while allying himself to the Daleks, believing that he would be able to double cross them when the time came, never expecting them to double cross him. Vaughn has already announced his plan to use his allies to conquer Earth, and then use the machine that Professor Watkins is in the process of perfecting to dispose of them. His baiting of the brutish Packer all adds to the texture of the show, and the depth of his characterization.

Actually, I say brutish, for on the page, that’s what Packer is. Yet on screen there’s something else going on here, I think. Hacker is played by Peter Halliday, and while being in no way puny, he isn’t the huge dominating physical thug that you might have expected, And yet it still worked. It took me a while to work out why, and then it struck me – rather than being the school bully himself, Packer is actually the school bully’s crony. I don’t know if you ever used to watch Grange Hill, but if you did you’d maybe remember the most noteworthy of all the bullies, one ‘Gripper’ Stebson. Gripper always had a couple of weasel faced individuals hanging around him. That’s who Packer is, and that’s just how Peter Halliday is playing him. A brainless thug wouldn’t care about his boss double crossing the Cybermen, and he wouldn’t are about Unit’s response to firing at their helicopter, while Packer does. Nice work, in a show which really isn’t short on acting quality.

This is the first appearance of UNIT in the show, and it’s pretty different from what we came to know and love in the Jon Pertwee era. In Jon Pertwee’s time, UNIT was always more about the Task force than the Intelligence. This is the opposite. The Brigadier first appears in a very hi tech control room inside what looks like a Lockheed Hercules transport plane, and UNIT have clearly been doing their homework in gathering information and intelligence on Vaughn. In fact, I found myself asking – what happens to the Brig between this story and Spearhead from Space to make him lose his imagination and so much of his effectiveness? Come to think of it, what the hell happened to the control room on the Hercules too? Someone should look in the Brig’s suspiciously large garage, me thinks.

In many ways the experience of watching this is uncannily reminiscent of watching a Jon Pertwee story – hardly surprising what with UNIT, and being set on contemporary Earth, I suppose. But there’s the whole tone of it as well. It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, but I don’t necessarily think that this is the kind of story that plays to Patrick Troughton’s strengths. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he is as good in the part as ever, only after the first couple of episodes I can’t help starting to get the feeling that the Doctor himself is getting lost in the story. Maybe it’s just that there’s so many goodies competing for your attention – Kevin Stoney’s masterclass in acting villainy, UNIT, the nagging doubt in your mind that maybe the Cybermen really aren’t going to ever make an appearance at all.  Well, we’ll see.

I mentioned that the first appearance of an actual Cyberman didn’t happen until right at the last gasp of episode 4. That’s true, but this doesn’t take account of the Cyber Planner. Now, in “The Wheel In Space” you might recall that the Cybermen were not led by a Cyber Controller with a big head and no accordion on his chest, but by a cyber controller made, so it seemed, out of a water balloon and half a dozen wire coat hangers. Now the cyber planner in the Invasion is at least a little more impressive, and housed behind a sliding door in Vaughn’s office. I don’t know, though, for me having the Cybermen led by this machine makes them more and more like dull robots – which is not how the Cybermen were conceived, I’m afraid.

What Have We Learned?

The Colonel has been promoted

UNIT seems to have a lot of money to play with in the 60s – and must have been the victim of severe government funding cutbacks by the time that Jon Pertwee first darkened their doors. 

45: The Mind Robber

Before Watching

I’ve mentioned this particular stories several times before, so you won’t be surprised to see me say that I’m pretty familiar with it even before we start our critical viewing. Familiar? Who am I kidding? I bloody love this story. I can’t turn off the voice of the 4 year old me who watched entranced as the Doctor and Jamie (mark 2) taunted Zoe before pulling her out of what I thought was a giant drum, but actually turned out to be a jar. So in a way this review is going to be self-defeating, since I can’t necessarily be critical of the story, in the proper sense of the world. Actually, that’s probably not too bad a thing for me. I’d hate it if I could ever watch this story and be dismissive or blasé about it.

After Watching

Right, a quick question. How much do I love “The Mind Robber”. Answer – well, if it helps, I planned to do what I usually do, two episodes in one evening. After episode 2 I just kept on watching until I’d sat through all five, then for good measure I followed it up with the documentary on the making of the story which is one of the special features on the DVD. A while ago, when I was reviewing “The Web of Fear” in Season Five, I made the point that the official BBC DVD is disappointing in the lack of special features. The other side of the coin is that I probably wouldn’t have been complaining at all if the usual official BBC DVDs didn’t provide you with some very nice goodies. In this case it was a documentary called “The Fact of Fiction”,  all about the making of “The Mind Robber” which lasted slightly more than half an hour.

Right then, the genesis of the story is that producer Peter Bryant and Story Editor Derrick Sherwin really wanted Peter Ling to write for Doctor Who. For the uninitiated, Peter Ling was the co-creator of the long running and inexplicably popular ITV soap opera, Crossroads. Given a virtual free hand, Peter Ling really wanted to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, which can be seen in the number of sources that he drew upon for “The Mind Robber”. Now, as we saw with the last story, the production team du jour had a problem with Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s “The Dominators” which was the previous story we reviewed. The decision was made to cut it from 6 episodes to 5. An extra episode had to be added to “The Mind Robber” – yet Peter Ling’s story wouldn’t stretch to 5 episodes. Thank heavens they made the decision for Derrick Sherwin to write a whole new episode 1, after which Peter Ling’s story would begin. If they’d tried to pad the action of “The Mind Robber” as it was to fill five episodes I think it would have had a hugely detrimental effect to the story. So Derrick Sherwin had to write, in effect, a 1 episode story, which could use no new sets, and no actors other than the regular cast. Does that sound familiar? To me this sounds very like the brief under which “The Edge of Destruction” was produced in season one. To be fair, in the end, they did utilize some robot costumes which had been made for an episode of “Out of the Unknown” and painted a sort of primrose yellow to appear white when filmed.

Under the circumstances the episode that Derrick Sherwin then wrote is a masterpiece, and a perfect example of the way you can make limitations in terms of budget actually work in your favour. The cliffhanger at the end of “The Dominators” saw the TARDIS in the path of a volcanic lava flow. Unable to take off properly due to continuing fluid link problems, the Doctor uses the emergency procedures which take the TARDIS outside of normal reality. Some very weird things begin happening. While the Doctor is in the TARDIS’ power room, first Jamie sees his native Scotland on the scanner, at the same time as hearing some rather stirring bagpipe music. No cliché there then. (Sorry. I do honestly love this episode, and the whole story). When Zoe tells him she can’t see it and it’s not real, then Jamie goes off to see the Doctor, and she sees a vision of her home city. In the end the lure of the image is too strong, and Zoe wanders out of the TARDIS into a white void. Jamie goes to look for her, and the pair of them become stranded. When the Doctor realizes what has happened he does not follow immediately, but sits down in a chair, and battles with the mind that is providing these visions. Meanwhile, out in the void Jamie and Zoe find themselves surrounded by strange white robots. The Doctor calls them with his mind, and they walk slowly, tortuously slowly back towards the TARDIS. When they’re a few steps away he rushes out, and drags them back in. This represents possibly the first moment we’ve had time to draw breath, but it proves wrong to do so. Something is drastically wrong with the TARDIS, and suddenly it shatters, leaving the Doctor nowhere to be seen, and Jamie and Zoe clinging helplessly to the TARDIS console as it whirls off into the endless void.

What a start to the story. Although of course it isn’t really a start to the story, since it is so different in style from what will come afterwards. At the start of episode 2 there isn’t really an explanation of how the travelers arrive safely in the forest of words, but then in a way I suppose that it the story saying – Look, it’s surreal. Anything can happen, so deal with it. Right?! – The next part of the story – Peter Ling’s original beginning for the story, has the Doctor and companions initially split up, and having to make their way through what turns out to be a maze, solving various puzzles as they go, and paying the price for failure if they don’t. In the commentary on the DVD all the principal actors who contributed, along with director David Maloney commented on how much they enjoyed working on the story – and how much Patrick Troughton himself enjoyed it – and it seems to be one of those happy production where everyone involved seems inspired to be at their most creative. So, when Frazer Hines was quarantined for a week or so of precious shooting time when he contracted chicken pox, this was actually incorporated into the storyline. A group of lifesized toy soldiers (one of whom was played by Ian Hines, Frazer’s brother incidentally) clank around through most of the episodes, and Jamie goes to attack one, whereupon he is shot, which turns him into a cardboard cutout. The Doctor finds him, and sees that his face has been removed, and he has to choose from sets of eyes, mouths and noses to reassemble it. He gets it wrong, and voila, Jamie can be played for a couple of episodes by actor Hamish Wilson until Frazer Hines is allowed back on set. This looks, and feels as if it has always been supposed to be part of the story.

It’s probably time for me to start drawing some comparisons with “The Celestial Toymaker” from season 3. The stories are similar in the way that the Doctor and companions are taken into a place where the normal laws of causality do not apply, and the master of the domain can shape and alter reality in any way that he chooses. They are similar in the way that various challenges have to be met. So why does “The Mind Robber” work so much better than “The Celestial Toymaker?”. Partly it helps that the travelers have to do so much figuring things out for themselves as they go along – there is no big ninny in an Aladdin costume setting rules, and telling them that their next challenge is going to be even harder than their last etc. etc. What is happening is made clear from episode one of TCT, which works against it, while it takes much longer for it to become clear exactly what is going on and what is at stake in TMR. The level of menace, while still being very much on the level of fantasy, is much greater in this later story, and ‘real’ fictional figures – Gulliver – Rapunzel – The Minotaur and Medusa are quite cleverly woven into it. Mind you, so are a couple of ‘real life’ human beings in Blackbeard and Cyrano de Bergerac, but even that is legitimate when you consider how real lives can become fictionalized over the passage of time.

The story provides a succession of memorable images. The TARDIS console, spinning off into oblivion (while at the same time providing an excellent view of Ms. Padbury’s posterior which has been rightly praised over the years by far better authorities on the subject than me) – The forest of words being revealed to be the pages of a book – the white robots making Jamie and Zoe into fictional characters by squashing them into the pieces of a book. So if a couple of ideas in the script aren’t as well realized as we maybe would have liked – the forest of words, for example, where the scene in the studio in which the characters play the scenes in no way matches the from the top view, then that’s something I find it pretty easy to overlook.

The ending has been criticized by a number of commentators for not really living up to what has gone before. Personally I think it works perfectly well. During the story at odd times we have seen what appears to be the controller of the Land of Fiction, a human being calling himself the Master. (The Time Lord Master, originally played by Roger Delgado, is no connection with this Master, and it will be a couple of seasons before we meet him for the first time.) It turns out that the Master is just a puppet of a supercomputer- whose most obvious part rather resembles the Conscience Machine from “The Keys of Marinus” – a large transparent polyhedron with lots of technical gubbins inside it. The Doctor, having worked his way into the Master’s Lair, enters into a kind of storytelling duel, for the Master sees the Doctor as someone who can take over, and thus enable him to be set free. Not what the computer wants, mind you, for the computer wants to use the Doctor to break free, and make all living creatures part of its domain. Alright, alright, you’ve heard worse than that in the past. Of course, the Doctor is having to work under a handicap, namely, if he mentions himself, then he automatically loses, since he will be making himself into a fictional character. A little too metaphysical? But that’s the genius of this story – you don’t have to take it on that level, but it’s there if you want to. During the battle, the White robots are ordered to attack and destroy, and they end up doing just that to the computer.

Jamie and Zoe are all for leaving the Master where they found him, but the Doctor intercedes for him, and as it is, everything that the computer has done is going to be undone anyway, which allows us to watch the destruction of the TARDIS being reversed. Which brings me to one other link between this story and “The Celestial Toymaker”. One of the more effective features of that story is Peter Stevens’ overgrown schoolboy Cyril, so clearly based on Billy Bunter that Frank Richards’ estate did allegedly complain to the BBC. Now, in the documentary, Peter Ling himself said that he had actually based the character of the Master on Frank Richards! At one point the Master reveals that he has written a series of adventure stories for the Ensign boys’ magazine about Captain Jack Harkaway (hmm – who does that name remind me of?) Actually it was Frank Richards himself who did this.

So, anything more I need to mention? Well, actually, yes. It’s a beautifully acted story, with honours going to Emrys Jones, a very well respected actor of the 40s and 50s, as The Master. We can also applaud a strong performance from Bernard Horsfall as Lemuel Gulliver. All of Gulliver’s lines were actually taken from Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and Horsfall imbues them with great dignity and a real sense of the period in which they were written. No wonder this wasn’t the only Doctor Who story he’d appear in. David Maloney did say that there was a three year rule – that guest star’s had to wait three years between reappearences, so he’d cast Bernard Horsfall in shows three years apart, but that he’d had special dispensation to use him as a Time Lord in “The War Games” , which we’ll come to in a few weeks’ time.

So let’s return to our starting point. I bloody love the “Mind Robber”, and now, having watched it as part of an ongoing series, if anything I love it even more. Season five, while not devoid of its highlights, presented us with a show which was in serious danger of becoming very samey. Then along comes “The Mind Robber” as weird, imaginative and downright wonderful as anything the show has given us before, while at the same time being completely different. There wasn’t much wrong with a show that could deliver up anything like this. Although the fact that Peter Ling never write for the show again is a shame. A shame if he was asked but never had the time, and shame on the show if he was never asked.

What Have We Learned

Anyone calling himself The Master is usually up to no good.

Fiction is important. It matters. 

44: The Dominators

Before Watching

Aliens with high round shoulders and pudding bowl haircuts. Ridiculous looking blocky robots called Quarks who were never going to catch on even if you’d given away a gallon petrol with each one. That’s about all the Dominators means to me right at this moment. Oh, alright, I know that its reputation really isn’t all that sweet.

I also know that Norman Ashby, the credited writer of the series, is a pseudonym for the writing team of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who scripted one pretty good, and one great story in Season 5. Now, Terry Nation wrote other stories for Doctor Who than his Dalek stories, but these have never been anything like as popular. So I shall be interested to see whether this Haisman and Lincoln non-Yeti story has value in its own right, and has just not been that well regarded because it’s a departure from what they’ve done before.

After Watching

Hmmm. There’s some odd things in this story. Reading about it since watching it I discovered that it was cut short from 6 to 5 episodes, and Haisman and Lincoln were unhappy about it – and also there were rights issues with the Quarks I believe. Like anyone would be interesting in merchandising those! So it’s probably not unfair to say that this was a production carried out under something of a cloud – sadly the Haisman and Lincoln partnership never went on to write for the show again.

On the positive side this was not another base under siege. In fact, if anything, it’s the baddies, the Dominators, whose base is under siege in the last episode. The story, when you boil it down to essentials, is rather simple, and you can see why it was decided to cut it to 5 episodes. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Dulkis, a planet of peace loving humanoids. At the same time a ship belonging to the fleet of the Dominators, a harsh and arrogant race, also lands on Dulkis. The craft needs desperately to refuel. The island it lands on is the site of the Dulcians’ nuclear test. The ship almost immediately absorbs all of the island’s radioactivity. The Dominators’ plan is to drill into the planet where the crust is thinnest, set off a radiation seed device, and refuel on the radiation created through the destruction of the planet. The pacifist Dulcians will be killed when their planet is destroyed.

To some extent we’re treading familiar ground here. Once again we confront the issue of pacifism, and the Dulcians are so pacific that they make the Thals look like a gang of drunk football supporters whose manhood has just been called into question.  The strange minidresses that the men wear only serve to heighten this feeling, which was probably intentional on the designer’s part. I can’t help liking the Dominators’ costumes, though. You’re not quite sure whether it’s just the uniform that they are wearing, or whether their heads really do begin halfway down their chests. Actually, while we’re on the subject of the Dominators themselves, there’s something quite clever going on with them in this show. It’s quite common for a race of megalomaniac aliens bent on domination to be all the same in terms of attitude and behaviour. In this story there are just the two Dominators, Rago the Navigator, and his subordinate, Toba. To put it bluntly, Rago and Toba do not get on at all. Toba has a sadistic streak, and wants nothing more to go around and destroy every Dulcian he can find. This really annoys Rago, who knows how low they are on energy, and the tension and conflict between the two of them does add another level of interest to the story – and this is sorely needed too. Full marks to David Hunter, sorry, Ronald Allen who plays Rago, and Kenneth Ives who plays Toba.

As I said, though, there are some strange things in this story. Which brings me to the Quarks. The Quarks are essentially robots. They’re about four foot tall, no more than that, with two blocky legs, a body like a mini fridge, two arms which are a bit like table legs and which fold out from the body, and a head which is a bit like a ball with a few spikes sticking out of it on top, and on each of the 4 sides. Now, look, for all I know the designers had a budget of about tuppence ha’penny, and did well to come up with what they did. But I can’t see that anyone could think that these robots could ever have the same appeal that the Daleks had. Now, there’s no shame in that – successes like the Daleks – something that strikes such an instant chord with the viewing public – are very rare, and if one turns up during the life of a series then it’s doing well. But then it seems strange that, bearing in mind the limitations of their appearance, the production team seems to have gone out of their way with the choice of voice they have given the Quarks. On the one hand, I’ll give them a couple of brownie points for eschewing the traditional monotonous computer voices you might expect. On the other hand, and I’m not exaggerating this for comic effect, I cannot understand a word that they say in the high pitched tone that they use. Now, in my book, that’s a serious drawback. Still, at least the Quarks do have some serious firepower.

So far though, we have been able to say a mixture of positive and not so positive things about the story. If we’re going to be honest, though, we have to say, or I have to say at least, that the Producer Peter Bryant was probably dead right when he cut the story by an episode because it just wasn’t working. If we examine some of the elements which contribute to the overall story, the exploration of the Dulcians’ pacifism is rather lumpen and heavyhanded when set alongside the way that pacifism is considered in the writers’ own “The Abominable Snowmen”. I don’t know if we’re actually being invited by the writers to feel that it will serve the Dulcians right if their planet gets blown up, but that’s pretty much the impression I got from it.

If a story has enough action, of the right sort, carried out with enough style and panache, then script flaws become far less important. This is one of the failings of “the Dominators”. Yes there’s a bit of toing and froing between the Island of Death and the Capital City, but we’re on pretty much famine rations of action for the first 3 and a half episodes.

It’s not as if this is not a story that didn’t have potential. I for one found the couple of hints we had about the civilization/society that produced the Dominators, and feel that there would have been scope for us to learn a little more, which would have added some much needed depth to the story. As it is though it’s a bit of a waste of two good performers who play them.

Looking at the regulars, then, this is Zoe’s first story as a full-fledged companion, and it’s one of those instances of a story not really knowing what to do with one of the companions. There’s one or two good scenes for her – when she seems completely disinterested by the prospect of exploring with Jamie and the Doctor in episode one, and when the Doctor pricks her pomposity in the Dominator’s ship – which incidentally has rather nicely realized interiors, and certainly competently produced model shots when it takes off. Jamie, though, is pretty well foregrounded as he gets to escape from the quarks more than once, to destroy quarks, and to supply the idea that will finally foil the Dominators’ plans.

Well, there it is, anyway. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to put your finger on why a story doesn’t work very well. Sometimes it isn’t. The script of “The Dominators” wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst we’ve seen by a long chalk. The cast try their best with what they’ve been given, and nobody turns in what I could point to as a bad performance. The model work is decent, and sets and interiors pretty good in my opinion. Is it, I wonder, one of those stories which would have a better reputation if it was only available in recon. On reflection, I doubt it. Some stories just aren’t all that good, and this was one of them.

What Have We Learned?

The Quarks probably sound great . . . if you’re a dog. Otherwise they’re unintelligible.

If you’re taking people on a tours, any place called anything like The Island Of Death is probably one to avoid

Season Five

That was the famous ‘Monster Season’ then. What can we say about it as a whole? Well, firstly it was far more homogenous than the previous season. The Historicals have gone for one thing. For another, the ‘base under siege’ format is very much to the fore – you can actually argue that only “The Enemy Of The World” is a complete departure from the format. Is this necessarily a good thing? Well, in one way no, because it meant that the weaker stories of the season looked extremely derivative and repetitive. It’s just possible that I would have enjoyed “The Wheel In Space” more if it had come at the end of a more diverse season, for example. Possible – although not extremely likely. On the other hand, if a story like “Fury From The Deep” can stand out amongst the other stories of the season – and for me it does – then it does highlight how good it was.

The Production team had obviously decided by this time what they thought Doctor Who was all about, and for this season they set about providing an unrelenting diet of it. You can’t argue with box office. The fact is that 3 stories from this season made it into the Mighty 200 top 50, and another 2 into the top 100. Comparing it with the first 7 Troughton stories, for those stories the average position in the Mighty 200 works out at 107. For this season it works out as 74. It underlines the fact that people do like good Doctor Who monsters – in this season we had 2 Cybermen stories, 2 Yeti stories, and an Ice Warriors – and one of the other stories, “Fury From The Deep”  had possibly the most frightening scenes we’ve yet seen in Doctor Who. Let’s have a look at the ratings for the season, then: -

Mighty 200 Ratings/ 2014 DWM Poll Ratings

The Web of Fear   23/16

The Tomb of the Cybermen  25/23

Fury From The Deep   41/69

The Abominable Snowmen   59/87

The Ice Warriors   78/141

The Enemy of the World 139/56

The Wheel in Space  156/177

My Ratings

The Abominable Snowmen

Tomb of the Cybermen

Fury from the Deep

The Web of Fear

The Ice Warriors

The Wheel in Space

The Enemy of the World

I do wonder whether, if the Mighty 200 poll was retaken, the positions of both “The Web of Fear” and “The Enemy of the World” would change now that they can actually be seen. As always, this is a purely personal choice. It is very difficult to judge recons against stories that exist in their entirety. As things stand, though, I enjoyed “The Abominable Snowmen” more than I enjoyed any other story this season. I feel bad that the two David Whitaker stories are so far down, yet there really isn’t much to choose between the bottom 4 of my list. 

43: The Wheel in Space

Before Watching

Well, it’s David Whitaker again, so I expect the unexpected. Can he do for the Cybermen what he did for the Daleks last season? Well, possibly so, but then again possibly not. Maybe I’m wrong, but of the Hartnell and Troughton Cyberman stories, this one alone doesn’t seem to have any great fan following at all. I enjoyed “The Tenth Planet” “The Moonbase” and “Tomb of the Cybermen” very much – I’ll say more about watching “The Invasion” as a very young child when we get to it. All three of those stories have their admirers and defenders, though, as well as their critics. The poor old “The Wheel In Space” doesn’t seem to be much of a magnet for positive comment at all, though.

Well, some stories come into fashion and then go out of fashion again, some stories with a lowly reputation deserve a better one, and some stories have a lowly reputation because that’s all that they deserve.  Which one this turns out to be we’ll find out over the course of the next couple of evenings.

After Watching

You know, I got quite nostalgic when the mercury fluid links in the TARDIS started going tonto at the start of this one. It made me quite nostalgic for the first season, when those pesky fluid links were always seeming to cause trouble for the crew. David Whitaker, who wrote this story, based on Kit Pedler’s outlines, was the script editor for the first season, so that’s probably why he chose to use this malarkey to explain the TARDIS making an emergency materialisation on the Silver Carrier, an abandoned and drifting spaceship.

Right, on board the carrier there is a servo robot. This is a very curious looking thing. It has a pair of stubby, articulated legs, a huge stubby, well, fat, body, a head and arms. Now, I know I’m picking unnecessary holes, but the thing is, any good cyberneticist would tell you that it is extremely difficult to make any robot ‘walk’ on articulated legs like a human (unless it’s a costume with a little man inside) so if they could do that, why couldn’t they put all of its gubbins into a smaller and neater body? It just looks odd. Mind you, the tubby one is a murderous little imp too. It nearly does for the Doctor and Jamie and they need to be rescued by astronauts from the Wheel.

Okay, the Wheel. We’re back into fairly familiar territory here. The Wheel – a space station shaped like a wheel, hence the name – is the base which is going to undergo siege. For the first couple of episodes at least this proved to be quite a leisurely story. The Commander, named Jarvis Bennett in this one, I think, is similarly hardboiled to all the others we’ve seen since “The Tenth Planet”. Right, I don’t like to be nasty to actors who are doing the best job that they can in circumstances where rehearsal time was probably extremely limited, and the opportunity for retakes even more so. But I have to say this, the guy who plays Jarvis Bennett is noticeably bad. He starts off at full shriek, and never takes it down even half a notch. This means he has nowhere to go, and indeed his characterisation doesn’t. Just a little soft pedalling in just one or two scenes would create light and shade in his performance, which would make such a difference. There is none, which means that although he certainly isn’t wooden, he comes across as rather hammy and trying too hard. As a digression, purely for pleasure I recently watched Sylvester McCoy’s “Dragonfire”, the last story to feature Bonnie Langford. (Incidentally, that is probably the first time I have written a sentence containing the words- Bonnie – Langford – and – pleasure – without also containing the word – isn’t.) Now, poor old Bonnie Langford, she does get some stick for her acting, but then when you watch a show she’s in, you can see why. It’s not that she isn’t trying – it’s that she is trying too hard. She is acting,and that’s the problem, because you can actually see and hear that she’s acting. Compare her to Sophie Aldred, a proper actress, in the scenes with just Mel and Ace, and it’s all the more obvious. Well, it’s like this for me with Bennett. He has obviously latched onto the idea that his character is a vicious, bullying bore, and by crikey he’s never going to let you forget it in any line that he says.

It’s highlighted too by the fact that there is actually some good acting surrounding the ham that Bennett is providing. Gemma Corwin, played by Anne Ridler particularly shines. She might not be a sultry siren like Tanya Lernov, nor have the pixieish cuteness of Zoe, but she’s strong, intelligent and resourceful, and it’s a tragedy that she gets killed by the Cybermen, and to add insult to injury, at the end of the story control of the base is assumed by brainless Zoe-hating surfer boy Leo Ryan. When Tanya entwines her hand around his towards the end I almost threw up.

Leaving aside performances, then, there certainly seems to be a bit of a bullying culture all round on board the Wheel. Which brings me to Zoe Heriot, played by Wendy Padbury. Right, I need to be careful what I say here. I fully appreciate a couple of facts: -

One) - The ladies who played the companions in the 60s are all old enough now to be my mother (although only just about old enough in Deborah Watling’s and Wendy Padbury’s cases)

Two) In the shows themselves, they were all in their early 20s (apart from Barbara – special case), which means that I am certainly old enough now to be their father.

So any comments I make about their attractiveness or otherwise can get very icky.

Fact is though, that Wendy Padbury’s Zoe is extremely cute.

Not that any of the blokes on the base seem to think so. In fact, the men certainly, and also some of the women on the Wheel, seem to have it in for Zoe and bully her because she has the brains of a supercomputer, with all of the social sophistication of one too. In particular there’s the afore mentioned Leo Ryan, a blonde haired bloke who only has eyes for Tanya, the Russian crew member, who is, to be frank, a complete jerk towards her. I’d love to tell him one of my favourite quotes, from no less an authority than Bill Gates “Remember to be nice to geeks. Chances are that you’ll end up working for one.” She makes for an interesting character, since this is the first attempt at a companion who is supposedly as intelligent as the Doctor himself. Bet she’s screaming with the rest of them before the end of episode 4 – I told myself within a couple of minutes of her first appearance.

The Cybermen, then. As for design the baggy suits are gone, being replaced by a costume which is pretty much just one step away from the classic “Invasion” Cybermen design. The main difference is that the helmets look pretty much the same as in “The Moonbase” and “The Tomb Of The Cybermen” apart from the fact that tear drop holes have been added to the eves, and a dribble hole to the bottom of the mouth. Their physically impressive appearance is emphasized by the fact that there are some seriously tall actors inside these costumes. Personally, I found the reconstructed scene where Cybermen were hatching from eggs (yes, honestly) visually intriguing, although extremely difficult to understand in the context of what Cybermen are actually supposed to be – that is, humans who have replaced their bodies with mechanical bodies.

I do think that the Cybermen are wasted in this story though. For one thing some of their menace is detracted from by the way that they tend to rock back and forward while they are talking. I don’t get that, apart from the fact that it gives the actors something to do. The strange device which is giving them orders looks as if it has been built from a couple of coat hangers and a water balloon. Then there is the party of Cybermen who walk across space – and I don’t mean spacewalk either – to the Wheel, flapping movements with their arms being their only concession to the fact that they are in space.

Their purpose it turns out is to take over the Wheel and use the radio transmitter to direct the Cyber fleet to the Earth. OK – that’s simple enough, and there’s no way that it was a story that should have taken 6 episodes to tell. So you get the whole convoluted Trojan Horse story of the Cybermen sending cybermats in spheres which melt into the hull of the Wheel – good trick if you can do that – and the cybermats, which are larger and more impressive than those in Tomb, destroy the Bernalium which is used to power the Wheel’s laser cannon. Thus the crew on the Wheel send a couple of men to bring bernalium from the silver carrier, and they get hypnotised into carrying the Cybermen over in the bernalium box etc. etc. It’s all so unnecessary. The Cybermen have all this power and hardware – it just doesn’t compute that they wouldn’t have their own sat nav.

Also the same problem that dogged the other Cyberman stories is evident in this one. At the climax, they are just so easy to defeat. The Doctor boosts the repaired laser cannons – bye bye cyberships. Effective, but not very uplifting.

So all in all, something of a disappointing end to Season Five – a story which for me is only really at all memorable for the introduction of Zoe.

What Have We Learned

Quick setting plastic is the latest addition to the every growing list of things that can kill Cybermen

Nerd baiting will be just as popular in the future as it is today

42: Fury From The Deep

Before Watching

I know : -

a) that this is another companion’s departure story. Victoria will be staying behind at the end of this one. I’m not really sure why, but I am sure that all will be revealed as the story develops.

b) this is a story about foam and giant seaweed.

That’s about it as regards what I know about the story. Well, apart from the fact that it’s another story for which no episodes exist. We’ve just had that nice run of all of “The Enemy of the World”, and most of “The Web of Fear”, with only one Web recon to put up with, but I’m afraid that they’re back with a vengeance for the next week or two. Only one episode exists of the final story of season 5 –“ The Wheel in Space”. I probably shouldn’t be looking so far forward now, but after this we’re definitely on the home stretch in Season 6, where only one story – “The Space Pirates” – is completely recon, and no less than 4 stories are complete. Well, that’s to come. Meanwhile, on with “Fury from the Deep”.

After Watching

Ladies and gentlemen, today’s version of the hard boiled commander who is cracking up will be played by Victor Maddern and called Robson – not Hobson, but Robson. The base under siege will be played by an offshore drilling complex, and the alien nasties will be played by some foam producing giant seaweed. Alright, it’s easy to say that this story is returning to season five’s preferred format, but I don’t want to give you the impression that this story is without merit.

Things that make “Fury from the Deep” memorable

I’m not the first and I certainly won’t be the last to note that this is the first story in which the sonic screwdriver makes its appearance. In this story a screwdriver, really, is all that it is – but it’s powers will increase exponentially as time goes by throughout classic Doctor Who, until Eric Saward has a terileptil to stamp on it in “The Visitation”- possibly for one of the same reasons why K9 was discarded – he just ended up making life too easy for the Doctor.

The foamy seaweed monster. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, a man in a suit will almost always look like a man in a suit. Psychotic vegetation usually plays well in science fiction television and films – think Day of the Triffids and the Tom Baker story “The Seeds of Doom” to name but two. We’ve only got photographs – and a few snatched seconds of live action from the last episode to go on – but this was a pretty effective monster. I’ll say more about Mr. Oak and Mr. Quills a little later, but I also thought the way that some of the guests acted out possession by the creatures was really very effectively done. Robson, Victor Maddern’s character, was such a complete contrast under possession compared with what he was like before. Under the influence of the aliens, he is unnaturally quiet and calm, and all the more frightening because of it.

The build up to Victoria’s departure. Maybe this is just me, but I thought that this whole build up to Victoria’s tearful farewell was really well handled. It made me think about Victoria as a character in her own right, than as just another in a line of female assistants. After all, it’s really not that long ago – 6 stories to be precise, that she had to join the crew because of the death of her father on Skaro, saving the Doctor. I thought that there was more than a trace of guilt as well as compassion that led to the Doctor taking her on board, and there’s an underplayed conflict going on between the two of them throughout this story. Victoria, it seems, has come to the end of her tether with the constant moving around, and the constant threats to life and limb. As far as the Doctor is concerned, that’s what makes life so interesting. So while it might have been nice to see Victoria elucidate a little more her statement that she couldn’t face going back to Victorian times – why ever not? – it was still well done the tender way that the Doctor accepted Victoria’s misgivings about leaving with him and Jamie, and gave her the time and space to make up her mind. There is also maybe just a little hint that she and Jamie might have become a little more than travelling companions if she’d stayed. He wants the Doctor to stop her from going, and she tearfully forces him to promise that he won’t leave without saying goodbye.

What might well be the show’s first great guest star double act. Double acts like Jago and Lightfoot in “The Talons of Weng Chiang”, Garon and Unstoffe in “The Ribos Operation” and Glitz and Dibber in “The Trial of a Time Lord” are seen as being very much a hallmark of the late great Robert Holmes, and indeed they were. However here we have the first example of one, and it’s a season before Holmes’ first scripts for the show. Oak and Quills are two technicians who are caught in the foam and taken over by the foam. They pose as two unctuous repairmen, and perform a lovely scene with one of the female characters which starts off in very comedic vein – in fact they remind me a little of Wint and Kidd from Diamonds are Forever – but then takes a very dark turn indeed, as the two characters mouths open what seems to be impossibly widely, and they start spewing gas at her. In fact, that has to be one of the truly scariest scenes in the 5 seasons I’ve watched so far.

Some innovative direction. I will come clean and admit that I’ve read Michael Briant’s memoir, which contains a few pages on the making of “Fury From The Deep” We’re lucky that the great shot of the TARDIS spinning down into the water still exists, that was a neat idea. I liked the use of helicopters as well, although it’s difficult to know just how effective they would be when we only have photographs to go on.

---------------

Well, OK, it’s not perfect. I’m not saying that this would necessarily have been better as a four parter, but there’s enough fat on the joint that you could have easily trimmed off one episode and it would possibly have made the story move more smoothly. Maybe this is just me, too, but I was a little disappointed that the weed’s purpose and motivation was simply global conquest. To what end? For what purpose? I mean at least with the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors, you knew what was driving them onwards. With the weed – well it just seems that it is doing it because it can, and that’s never the greatest reason. Likewise, the fact that it turns out to be susceptible to Victoria’s screams is a bit of a let down –although not noticeably more than the Cybermen’s susceptibility to radiation/gravity/nail varnish remover (delete where applicable) or the Ice Warrior’s reaction to heat. But hey, for atmosphere, and sheer scariness, this scores pretty well, all things considered.

What Have We Learned?

Life in the TARDIS with the Doctor is not necessarily always a barrel of laughs.

41:The Web of Fear

Before Watching

You may remember the big fuss a couple of years ago when the BBC announced that they had recovered all the lost episodes of “Enemy of the World” and all bar one of “The Web of Fear” Now, as you know if you’ve been with me for any great length of time,  I loved the Target novelization of “The Abominable Snowmen” when I read it in about 1975. I really looked forward to reading “The Web of Fear” when it was published, and then, as often happens when you build up to a sequel, I wasn’t quite so taken with it when it first came out. Still, let’s be positive. Looking at the ingredients for “Web of Fear”– Patrick Troughton – Fraser Hines – Yetis – London Underground – First appearance of the Brigadier (only a colonel in this one) – they’re enough to give me the confidence that this should be a pretty positive experience, especially bearing in mind how much I enjoyed Haisman and Lincoln’s “The Abominable Snowmen” which was mostly recon.

After Watching

My opinion? Well, despite the generally extremely positive fan response to this story when it first went online, and the DVD first came out, I found it to be a bit of a curate’s egg if I’m totally honest. As I watched I found myself thinking that this story has got some great positives, but also some flaws. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Flaws

For one thing it’s a 6 parter, one of which doesn’t exist. The BBC telesnaps reconstruction is perfectly functional, but it’s not great, especially considering that on some of the Troughton DVDs – “The Moonbase”, “The Ice Warriors” and “The Invasion”, for example, they have actually used animation to go with the audio of the missing episodes. Animation of the kind that was used in “The Moonbase” or “The Ice Warriors” would have certainly been an improvement on what they’ve given us. This was a bit disappointing. While we’re on the subject, there were no extra features on my DVD which was a huge disappointment. It smacks of rush releasing the thing. I think that this calls for a small digression. You can get Doctor Who stories in two places on DVD. There are the DVDs which came with the Doctor Who DVD Files Magazines – and what you get in these are what you pay for – the episodes themselves with no special features. Then there’s the official BBC DVDs, which in my experience are often excellent in terms of the special features and bonuses that you get. For example, at the same time as I bought this one, I also bought the Legacy Collection, which is actually the current Shada DVD, and the amount of bonuses you get in that one gives you real value for money, which “The Web of Fear” doesn’t. Still, I digress, and back to “The Web of Fear”.

I’ll be honest, it was all getting a bit samey too. I mean there is some amazing set design work which has gone on for this serial. None of it was shot on the London Underground, and yet it looks so like it that London Underground famously wrote to the BBC complaining about unauthorized filming in their tunnels and stations. But, I was getting so sick of tunnels and stations that it came as a real relief when the soldiers had to face a yeti attack above ground. Being more positive, this actually came at exactly the right time in the story to break it up a little.

The yeti themselves sadly didn’t quite live up to the yeti I created in my imagination when I read the books. When you’re a die-hard fan of classic Doctor Who you should be pretty good at silencing the inner voice which cackles ‘man in a suit – man in a suit!’ every time you see an alien, but I sometimes found it difficult in this one. I’m not convinced that the yeti redesign for this story, headlamp eyes and all, is really an improvement on what we saw in “The Abominable Snowmen”. 

The ‘comedy Welsh’ soldier played by Derek Pyott really got up my nose at one point, and I almost found myself hoping that Lethbridge Stewart would take out his pistol and shoot the cowardly git for insubordination.

- and yet –

The story aims for an atmosphere of claustrophobia, and boy, does it get one, which is a real departure from what we saw in “The Abominable Snowmen”. I liked the basic premise at the start of the story – that Professor Travers brought a yeti back to England after his adventures in “The Abominable Snowmen”. Years later he was forced by financial circumstances to sell it to a private museum. He tries to buy it back, but the current owner (and I’m sorry to play the racism card again here, but he is a rather insulting Jewish caricature) refuses. Well, needless to say, the yeti becomes reactivated and causes mayhem, and this is the start of the Great Intelligence’s next attempt to gain corporeal form and take over the world nyaah haaa haaa.

There’s nothing original about my next point, but it is one which should be stressed every time that anyone writes seriously about this story. Speaking as a lifelong lover of the London Underground railway, these sets are extremely convincing. In fact parts of some of the stations which are overdue for a makeover still look like this. We’ve seen how contemporary London serves as a wonderful backdrop to both “The Dalek Invasion of earth” and “The War Machines” and this is a very new twist on that idea. Because of the setting, there is an ongoing contrast between the gloomy murk of the tunnels and the harsh artificial lighting of the station areas, and this only adds to the atmosphere.

I remember the late Michael Winner being interviewed by Barry Norman about his film “Death Wish 2” once, and he said words to the effect of – Well, it’s a sequel, Barry, and we all know about sequels. In Rocky 2, Rocky didn’t go off and become a missionary, so  in Death Wish 2 it’s ugly old Charlie Bronson shooting up the muggers again.- All of which is a very entertaining way of making the point that sequels very often retell the same story as the original, sort of like the law of diminishing returns. Actually, in subtle yet important ways, “The Web of Fear” does not tell the same story as “The Abominable Snowmen”. In this one the identity of the traitor under the control of the great Intelligence is not made clear until very late on, after several red herrings – one of whom is the Colonel/Brigadier himself – are presented to us. For another thing, this time The Great Intelligence is now after the Doctor’s body. I bet he says that to all of the Time Lords. The Doctor is really up for a mental battle with it as well, and it takes Jamie to pull him away from the machinery. Would he have defeated the Great Intelligence? We won’t know.

I’m sure I read rumours that plans were afoot for Haisman and Lincoln to write a third yeti story with a final showdown between the Doctor and the Great Intelligence – (we’d have to wait for Matt Smith for this final showdown to happen). I don’t know how much truth there is in that. I know that there next, and last, story for Doctor Who was “The Dominators” which we’ll be reviewing in a couple of weeks, since it’s the first story of season 6.

What have we learned?

Let sleeping yetis lie.

That Lethbridge-Stewart chap is a useful character. We could use him again , you know.

Has the Doctor had his last encounter with the Great Intelligence? Not yeti.