I set myself a little challenge before I sat down to write my little
‘before watching’ preamble. Take a piece of paper, and write down as many words
to do with The Curse of Peladon as you can think of in one minute. This is what
I came up with – Ice warriors, furry monster, David Troughton, Hard Boiled egg
with an eye, Venusian lullaby, miners, bad haircuts, proposal of marriage. I
was impressed – I didn’t think that I remembered that much about it. The furry
monster is named, if I recall correctly, Aggador (dor – dor , push pineapple ,
shake the tree). David Troughton, last seen in “The War Games” plays King
Peladon, and the Hard Boiled egg is one of the more extravagant alien designs
for Doctor Who, being Alpha Centauri from, er, Alpha Centauri. The Venusian
Lullaby is what I think the Doctor uses to tame Aggador, the miners are the
ones with the bad haircuts which make them look like they are doing a very bad
impression of Dickie Davies (ask your parents or grandparents to explain that
cultural reference). Mind you, it does occur to me that I could be mixing up
this story with the sequel, “The Monster of Peladon”, but time will surely
tell. I’m sure that the King, believing Jo to be a princess, proposes marriage
to her in the last episode, but she turns him down. We know who she really has
the hots for, don’t we? That’s right. Begins with D and ends with Octor.
After Watching
At the start of the story it appears that the Doctor is
really starting to get somewhere with the TARDIS repairs, since he says that
this is a test flight to Jo. Now, I do have a bit of a problem with this. The
Doctor said clearly in “The Claws of Axos” that he’d had all of his memory of
dematerialisation theory wiped by the Time Lords, and so even if he could have
got the TARDIS working – not impossible but highly unlikely since it needed the
Master’s expertise to make even a short hop in The Claws of Axos, and even then
the Time Lords set it to continually return to Earth – even if he could have
got it working, he wouldn’t have known how to work it anyway. Now, ok, at the
end of the story the Doctor ruefully reflects that it was probably the work of
the Time Lords that allowed him to make the trip, but I just found this post
hoc explanation a little clumsy and half hearted.
I’m told that this story was inspired by the UK’s entry
into the EEC, which was only a year away when the story was broadcast in
January 1972.I understand that, but it’s very hard to see David Troughton’s
dashing young King Peladon as Edward Heath. What a horrible thought. Right, the
test flight of the TARDIS brings the Doctor and Jo to Peladon, at exactly the
time that a delegation from the Galactic Federation arrives to decide upon
whether Peladon will be allowed to join or not. Now, if we’re taking the
European anaglagoy a step further, there’s no guarantee that this story would
necessarily be saying that joining the Federation/EEC would be a good thing,
although it soon becomes clear that this is exactly what it’s saying. The
Federation? Would that by any chance be inspired by Star Trek? We all know that
when it comes to Space, Federations – good, Empires – bad. Although since we
live in the UK hereditary monarchies are obviously fine by us as well. Which is
just as well since Peladon is a hereditary monarchy, although it’s far from a
constitutional one. The king’s word is law, which is fine when you have a good
liberal monarch like Peladon. It’s Peladon (the king) who wants Peladon (the
planet) to join the Federation. He has two advisors, who irresistibly remind me
of the little angel and devil that used to pop up on Tom’s shoulders now and
then in the Tom and Jerry cartoons to symbolise whenever Tom was on the horns
of a moral dilemma. Torbis, the Chancellor, representing temporal power, is the
angel, trumpeting the benefits of joining the Federation, and Hepesh, the High
Priest, representing organised religion, is the devil, trumpeting the need to
maintain the ancient tradtions of Peladon. You can only take the analogy so
far, mind you, since the Torbis the angel is murdered not long after the start
of episode one, and Peladon alone represents the forces of progress on Peladon.
So while it may be a little bit of a cliché to have the representative of
organised religion being the most reactionary character, setting his face
against progress and in favour of the maintenance of the status quo, it’s still
quite satisfying, since this is exactly the sort of thing that we tend to want
to see the Doctor standing up against.
The delegate from earth has not yet arrived, and so the
Doctor poses as said delegate, making Jo out to be an Earth princess whom he
has brought along to serve in an observer capacity. This is shades of the way
he assumes the identity of the Examiner from Earth in “The Power of the
Daleks”. As one of the delegates who will decide on Peladon’s application to
become a member of the Federation the Doctor joins possibly the most diverse
set of alien beings seen in one story since “The Daleks’ Master Plan”. There
are , firstly Alpha Centauri – from Alpha Centauri, which is a star rather than
a planet, but we’ll let that go- who is
sort of a cross between Doctor Octopus (from Spiderman), Humpty Dumpty and a
shower curtain, Arcturus from Arcturus (likewise) who is a cross between a
hostess trolly, a selection of black boxes and lava lamps, an upturned goldfish
bowl, and a shrunken head sitting in a nest of green sticks, and two Ice
Warriors from Mars.
Hepesh it turns out isn’t just against the idea of
joining the Federation, he is actively trying to prevent it by driving the
delegates away. He invokes the spirit of Aggedor, a sacred beast of Peladon,
which is really a beast he caught and
trapped on the other side of the planet. Although the Doctor is originally
convinced that the Ice Warriors are up to skulduggery, it transpires that it is
none other than delegate Arcturus. He has been in cahoots with Hepesh, seeing
Peladon’s exclusion from the Federation as an opportunity to give Arcturus
which is lacking in minerals the chance to fully exploit the mineral wealth of
Peladon. This wrong footing over the Ice warriors is actually one of the
cleverest things about this story, and not something to be expected from the
fairly strait laced adventure stories that Brian Hayles served us up in the
last two Ice Warriors stories. Jo has never met them before, but the Doctor has
told them of their previous desire to conquer the Earth, and when Jo confronts
them with this, Izlyr, who wears the smoother armoud with the bigger helmet
denoting him as the leader, confirms that they were previously a race of
warriors, but now they have changed and seen the folly of their ways. So more
Nice Warriors now then? The amazing thing is that for this story at least, this
is absolutely true, and Jo is right when she cautions the Doctor against
assuming that the Ice Warriors must automatically be the villains of the piece.
Ah, Jo. It’s easy to get annoyed for Jo in this story,
for she does and thinks so much that is right at times, and yet all she gets
from the Doctor is abuse because she runs along to save him when he is singing
a Venusian Lullaby to Aggedor to tame him. When it turns out that it is not the
Ice Warriors who have been responsible for the mayhem I’d have forgiven her if
she took his sonic screwdriver, and, with the words ‘ I told you so!’, shoved
it right up his mighty proboscis. Her loyalty to the Doctor seems total at this
point in the development of her character. After the Doctor has been caught in
the secret temple to Aggedor he is accused of sacrilege, a crime against which
it is not even permitted to make a defence. Huh? Jo pleads with Peladon not to
impose the death sentence, and the laws of Peladon being what they are, all
Peladon can do is to commute the Doctor’s sentence to one of trial by combat.
Jo has asked him to do more, and to go further to prove to her that she can
believe in him. By failing to do that he guarantees that Jo will not accept his
eventual proposal of marriage. He failed to act to save the life of her beloved
Doctor, that’s enough for a start. But even more than that, he failed to act
LIKE the Doctor, who would surely have forgotten about what it says in the
statute books, and in Jo’s eyes, by failing to act like the Doctor in that
situation he has proven himself unworthy of her.
So, after Hepesh’s final act of rebellion is defeated
when he is mauled by an enraged Aggedor, Jo just has time to reject Peladon’s
proposal, and it’s all aboard the Skylark for a quick trip home. And as a
story? Well, it isn’t the Third Doctor’s first trip to an alien planet, but
it’s the first of any great interest, the first which makes a serious attempt
to depict at least something of an alien society. “The Curse of Peladon” works
through good pacing, and once again, being a 4 parter helped tremendously with
this, and a willingness to convey just enough through info dumping expositions,
and never when it would get in the way of the story.
What Have We
Learned?
The Doctor,
although perfectly charming when he is ready to show it, can act like a pig to
Jo at times.
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