Another Bristol Boys story, unless I’m very much mistaken. I’m tempted
to write a ‘before watching’ here on the one minute principle again, but then I
don’t think I can add a lot more than ‘mutating giant insects’ off the top of
my head. As a mutant myself, I think that I owe them a little more thought. Oh,
the mutant thing. Well, I say that I’m a mutant – it may well be that this is
not technically true, in which case please don’t tell me and thus shatter my
illusions. I was born with an extra rib, what’s called a cervical rib, which is
like a bone spur which sticks out between your neck and your shoulder. It
somehow got crushed down on top of the vein or artery, and it gave me blood
clots, which meant I could have died, came very close to losing my left arm,
and I had to have it surgically removed, along with the blood clots. 3 weeks in
hospital thank you very much. Nevertheless, as I say, I am a mutant myself, and
as such feel that I should treat this story with a little more gravity than
usual. The problem is, I have little or no memory of it. I did remember reading
once that someone commented that the Andrew Smith story “Full Circle” from
season 18 was similar in some concepts, and that one I do remember, so it will
be very interesting to see how true that actually is.
After Watching
The Bristol boys scored a qualified success with their
first story “The Claws of Axos”, and so having successfully achieved the
slightly easier task of writing a decent four parter, now we see their first
attempt at a 6 parter, the 6 parter being the most common format for seasons 8
through 11. It’s maybe illuminating to remind ourselves of the overall verdict
that we formed on the previous story. “Claws of Axos” was a story with some
interesting and original ideas, which were not necessarily perfectly realised
on screen, but nonetheless made an enjoyable whole, even if it wasn’t the best
story of the whole season. Now, good ideas can be spread a bit further in a
four parter without diluting the whole than they can in a 6 parter: in a six
parter you need drama, and you need characters. They don’t necessarily have to
be totally believable, but they have to be interesting, and they have to be
consistent within themselves.
I don’t know if the opening scene was a conscious homage
to the opening of each episode of the original TV series of Monty Python’s
Flying Circus, but surely it must have struck someone in the production office
that when the story opens with a ragged, long haired, extravagantly bearded old
fellow staggering towards the camera, thousands of voices of viewers would
shout in unison “IT’S !” Honestly, if you’re old enough to be familiar with the
original Monty Python TV series I defy you to watch the opening scene and deny
the similarity. This is just there to introduce us to the world of Solos, which
is one of the two main locations of the story, the other being a space station
in orbit above it, Skybase.
The Doctor receives a package from the Time Lords. He
doesn’t know for whom it is intended, but it’s fairly obvious that the TARDIS
will take him to the intended recipient. He warns Jo off accompanying him in a
way in which he must have known would encourage her to jump in the TARDIS after
him, and away they go. The package the Doctor receives is rather odd looking, a
bit like a football which has had unmatched pieces of black pottery stuck all
over its surface. The TARDIS materialises on board Skybase, where the
Administrator, played by Geoffrey Palmer, is about to announce to a group of
Solonian natives that they are about to be granted their independence from the
Earth Empire. Now, what do we remember about empires? That’s right –
Federations-good, Empires – Bad. The Marshal, that is the military commander, doesn’t
like the idea of Independence, and arranges for one of the natives to
assassinate the Administrator.
Right, here’s an odd thing. In this and the previous
season, when a story is set on Earth it’s the military in the person of the
Brigadier and UNIT, or Captain Hart and the Royal Navy, who are the Doctor’s
natural allies, and while they may be misguided they are clearly on the side of
the forces of what is right. It’s the government representatives who are either
stupid, or evil, or both. In a story set in Space, it’s the military
commanders, as in this story, or the quasi military such as Dent in “Colony in
Space”, who are evil and/or stupid, while the government representatives, such
as The Investigator in this story are seen as decent and impartial. Just an
observation. The Marshal is played by Paul Whitsun-Jones, last seen as the
Squire in “The Smugglers”. He is thoroughly evil, and totally consistent in his
portrayal, but for my taste the Marshal is just too one dimensional to sustain
a six parter. I’ll try to explain.
When you threaten someone with death , or death to their
loved ones, and they still double cross you, it should be ample evidence that
they can never be trusted by you, and if you are that sort of person who needs
to make that kind of threat, then you should kill them now. The Marshal never
gets to this point, and the story could be 8, 10, or heaven help us 12 parts,
and he still never would. Which means he is basically unbelievable, and the
story suffers as a result. Enjoy his villainy in the first two or three
episodes by all means, but I can almost guarantee you’ll be sick of it before
episode 6.
The Earth’s Empire is collapsing, and Earth is
withdrawing from its outlying provinces in the way that Rome withdrew from
Britannia in the early 5th century. As it is, Solos has an
atmosphere which is poisonous to human beings, albeit only in the daytime.
Don’t ask. The native inhabitants of Solos look humanoid, at least they start
off looking humanoid, although lately they have developed a rather
disconcerting habit of mutating into giant insects. Maybe Gregor Samsa was a
Solonian! (Not wishing to insult anyone’s
intelligence, but in case you haven’t read it, Gregor Samsa was the first
person protagonist of Franz Kafka’s story “Metamorphosis” in which he woke one
morning from troubled dreams to discover that he had become a giant insect.
Read it. You won’t regret it.) The Marshal’s plan is to have Jaeger, his pet
scientist, find a way to convert the Solonian atmosphere to make it breathable
to humans, at the same time as doing it in a way which annihilates the mutants,
enabling him to take it over as his own private fiefdom.
While we’re talking about this, Jaeger is played by
George Pravda. You may recall him in a more sympathetic role in “The Enemy of
the World”. As I said in the previous volume, on Patrick Troughtons’ stories, I
shall always think of him as the Castellan in my favourite story “The Deadly
Assassin”. Again, as does Paul Whitsun-Jones, George Pravda plays what he is
given very well and with utter conviction – I wouldn’t expect anything
different, but I would have liked again just a little more depth in the
conception of the character. Does he just once or twice feel a twinge about
what he is doing? I don’t know – and I should know. He should be feeling this,
because he’s not barking mad enough not to.
So into this melting pot come the Doctor and Jo. As he
so often does, the Doctor poses as an official from Earth, much to everyone’s
suspicion. After the assassination the Marshal declares martial law, and all
hell breaks loose. As he’s running away and trying to escape, Ky, leader of the
outcast people going through the mutations, touches the Doctor’s package (ooh,
Matron) as he’s running past, and it begins to open. “Jo!” bellows the Doctor,
“follow that hippy!”, or words to that effect, and Jo, being Jo, obliges
implicitly, and the two of them escape to the surface via transporter booth.
The Doctor meanwhile sticks around long enough to convince two guards, Stubbs
and Cotton, that the Marshal is not to be trusted. Right, a word about these
two. It’s nice to see that at least two of the quasi military types on offer
here are human beings rather than unthinking meatheads. It’s even nicer to see
that one of them, Cotton, is black, and he’s not subordinate to Stubbs.
Alright, it’s not a command position, but nonetheless it is a positive role for
a black actor for a change, the first since good old Rudolph Walker’s cameo in
“The War Games”. Which makes it all the more galling when I have to say that
Rick James, who plays Cotton, er. . . well, he just isn’t very good. I’m really
sorry if anyone thinks that this is a racist comment – believe me it’s not
meant to be. I try to be fair to everyone, but there have been times in the
first two volumes when I’ve had to criticise what I think are not very good
acting performances, and I’m sorry to say it, but I think that this is one of
them. He’s trying, but that’s the point. You notice he’s trying. You notice
that he’s acting, and the moment you actually notice that someone is ‘acting’
then they’re not acting very well. Sorry Rick.
Eventually The Doctor, Cotton and Stubbs make it down
into the caverns on Solos, where Jo and Ky are also hiding. The Marshal, who
has overheard Stubbs and Cotton talking with the Doctor, uses poisoned gas to
try to kill them and the mutants, and plastic explosive to blow up the
entrance. Our heroes are saved by a mysterious figure in a silver radiation
suit. This it turns out is Professor Sondergaard. We know this because the
Doctor greets him with “Professor Sondergaard I presume.” Huh? Why does he
presume that? Was there some info dump, some bit of exposition which mentioned
him before that I missed? Actually there might well have been. The dialogue in
this story isn’t what you’d ever call sparkling, and I did find myself tuning
out more than once. Here’s an interesting thing too. The professor, who’s
obviously a goody and an ally for the Doctor, has a German accent. On British
TV for much of the 20th century, a German accent was shorthand for
‘evil megalomaniac’. Much like a British accent in a 1990s Hollywood blockbuster.
Ky has opened his package, and found some old tablets containing a message in
old Solonian symbols nobody can understand. The Doctor and Sondergaard work out
that they are actually explaining that the climate of Solos has 4 seasons, each
of which lasts 2000 years. The mutations happening to the Solonians are part of
a natural process. They leave for Skybase, but on the way the Doctor goes into
a cavern of radiation and retrieves a magic stone which he will later realise
will help him to help Ky complete the radiation cycle. Yes, there is a sort of
scientific explanation given, but when you boil it right down, this is a magic
stone without which our heroes cannot complete their quest.
There is a problem now. This is only episode 4. By
rights the whole thing could be wrapped up very quickly now, and certainly
shouldn’t take more than one more episode, tops. But there’s still two to go. Hence
the introduction of the Investigator from Earth (his guards are in white so you
know that they are all decent chaps) who finds for, then against, then for,
then against the Marshal. There’s more than one imprisonment and escape, and one
of these is a frankly ridiculous escape from a radiation chamber by Jo, Ky and
Cotton. Typically for this story, they get imprisoned in this chamber a second
time. Yes, it was the Marshal who came up with the idea of imprisoning them in
the same place they’d already escaped from once before. At last, at last Ky
gets to complete his mutation. Remember how I called him a hippy earlier? Well,
I wasn’t actually joking much, because now that’s what he becomes, a floating
superbeing, dressed in robes of fluctuating psychedelic colours, who frees Jo,
Cotton and Sondergaards, then flies off and disintegrates the Marshal, before
going off to Solos to help his people mutate into super hippies as well. Bless.
I haven’t in all honesty thought that too many of the
stories since the start of season 7 have suffered drastically from being 6 or
even 7 parters, but this one really was two parts too far. Had it been one of
the ones chosen for a summer omnibus repeat, and edited down to 90 minutes, I
think it would have worked a hell of a lot better. As it is, though, this shows
that as writers of 6 parters, the Bristol Boys were pretty decent 4 parter
writers.
What Have We
Learned?
Somebody really
needs to introduce the Time Lords to the concept of stamps and postcodes.
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