Season 10

Here’s the ratings for the stories that made up season 10: -

DWM Mighty 200/ 2014 poll

The Green Death – 39/30

The Three Doctors – 58/51

Carnival of Monsters – 62/64

Frontier in Space – 113/ 127

Planet of the Daleks – 118/ 123

My Ratings

The Green Death

The Three Doctors

Carnival of Monsters

Planet of the Daleks

Frontier in Space

Yes, I tend to agree with the ranking in the 2014 poll, although I agree with both polls that there is precious little to choose between “Frontier in Space” and “Planet of the Daleks”. I am so delighted that fandom in general rates “The Green Death” so highly. It’s a serious candidate for the best Pertwee story so far as far as I’m concerned. In a way it’s quite ironic that in this, the first season in which the Doctor has been able to travel freely since the end of the first story of the season, “The Three Doctors”, the finest story is actually an Earth based, full blown UNIT story – possibly the last great UNIT story, although we shall make our own minds up about that as the next couple of seasons progress. Well, for me one of the keynotes of the season was the Doctor’s gradual realisation of just how fond he was becoming of Jo Grant – the instances of him being a pig towards her have been noticeably far fewer. His leaving scene at the end of “The Green Death” was actually one of the strongest scenes of the era, and proved that when given the opportunity, Pertwee could do quiet emotion just as well as Hartnell or Troughton.

As a whole season, season 10 had more variety than any Pertwee season so far, more variety than any other season since season 6, Troughton’s last, and maybe even season 4. Maybe it is the benefit of hindsight that makes me say that “The Green Death” had something of the feeling of the end of an era. Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks would still be around in season 11, but both were coming towards the end of their time on the show. In Dicks’ case, Robert Holmes was being groomed to take over as script editor and shadowed Dicks throughout season 11. According to Richard Molesworth’s biography, Holmes used to joke that this meant him doing the work, and Terrance Dicks popping in to see how things were coming along on the way to the golf course. Holmes and Dicks were friends, so I’m sure that this was an exaggeration, but nevertheless it did reflect that the show was heading in a new direction. For example, it’s telling that there will be no UNIT story totally set on 20^th century Earth in this season – the two ostensibly UNIT stories , “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” and “Planet of the Spiders” involve time manipulation and travelling through space respectively.

That’s all ahead of us. For now, we can look back on season 10, a season that was a transitional one, with some great highlights, and while some of the stories will never be among my personal favourites, all of them were consistently watchable. 

69: The Green Death

Before Watching

Of “The Green Death” I remember precious little at the moment, other than giant maggots and slime. And Jo Grant leaving. I was quite upset about that at the time, not realizing that, just as Jon Pertwee would be soon replaced by an even greater Doctor, Jo Grant was to be replaced by an even greater companion. Just my opinion, of course. But I’m right.

This is one of the last UNIT stories, and one of the last Pertwee stories set entirely on Earth. Maybe this is why I can remember so little about it when compared against, let’s say the other stories of the 10^th season.

“The Green Death” was scripted by Robert Sloman, whose other contributions towards Doctor Who were writing “The Daemons” in conjunction with Barry Letts, the show’s producer, and Jon Pertwee’s last story, “Planet of the Spiders”. Now, regarding “The Daemons”, any story with Roger Delgado’s Master in it has an unfair advantage before it starts, and when I watched it recently I found it an enjoyable enough romp. For me, “Planet of the Spiders” hasn’t fared so well, although I promise to give it a fair hearing when I sit own to watch it again in a couple of weeks’ time. Really, as I’m a confirmed arachnophobe it should have given me the willies, but those spiders just weren’t convincing enough. There was too much padding, especially in the chase scene with Lupton, where Jon Pertwee was given his head and allowed to use a range of vehicles, none of which seemed all that necessary. There was yet another Time Lord we’d never heard of before, who apparently was the Doctor’s mentor, and who helped the Doctor regenerate. Sorry – this is meant to be a review of “The Green Death”. I’m just hoping – well, I’m just hoping that this is better than “Planet of the Spiders”, otherwise it could be a long 6 episodes.

After Watching

Wow. I loved this. I mean, maybe this is just me, but be fair, wasn’t that terrific? Which is a weird thing for me to say when you think that I didn’t think that much of it when it was first transmitted. But then I was 9 years old at the time, I suppose, and a lot of it must have gone over my head. All of the principals are in marvellous form here, and it kind of showed for me that when a Unit story worked it could be really good – in fact there’s probably a good argument for saying that this was the last really good Unit story.

As a story, the basic premise isn’t that promising. This is what it boils down to. A giant sentient supercomputer going by the acronym BOSS takes over the head of multinational chemical company. (actually you could say that it takes over the head of the Head of a multinational chemical company) The company pumps industrial waste into a disused section of a coal mine which kills anyone who touches it, yet also it alters the DNA of maggots, and said maggots become three foot long armour plated acid spitting super-maggots, and tunnel out of the mine after it is closed off by explosives. This is all part of the supercomputer’s plan to subjugate humanity, and impose order and regulation upon a chaotic world – you get the drift. Yet for all the seeming drawbacks of this particular scenario it is actually exceptionally watchable.

With the megalomaniac supercomputer this is crossing ground which has already been well trodden in “The war Machines”, and will be well trodden again in years to come. Yet for me, BOSS works a lot better than WOTAN ever did. For one thing, it turns out that this computer does have a personality. A rather smug, arrogant and barking mad personality, granted, but it does make for a more interesting story. It has a couple of good lines as well, telling Stevens, its human catspaw “That's how you get your kicks like the good little Nietzschean you are.” You don’t get lines like that in your average Terry Nation.

Watching it, I was surprised how really rather sickening and repulsive the green pulsating goo and the maggots still looked today. Watching the documentary in the extras with the BBC DVD, I was intrigued to see that the maggots weren’t all, as I had previously heard, made from condoms. Actually the special effects people used a variety of several different construction methods including glove puppet and mechanical puppet, depending on the kind of shot that was required. The results are effective, and considering the time that this story was made, really rather remarkably so. Less so the adult insect. It really wasn’t brilliantly realised , and the flying effects were not good. Thankfully they didn’t last that long. I had to chuckle when the creature was brought down dead, and the Doctor examined it saying “What a beautiful creature!” I do wonder how Jon Pertwee managed to keep a straight face saying that one.

While we’re raising the few negatives there are about this story, as we now know, this is where the third Doctor sows the seeds of his eventual destruction by visiting Metebelis Three after threatening to do so for ages. Now, the studio jungle scenes are as good as always, but as for the gigantic avian feet and talons that swoop on the Doctor – well, I’m sorry, but it’s a no from me, Simon. It is rare, though, for such an inconsequential moment in one serial to come back and be used in the way that it is a season later. There’s a strange and inconsistent use of CSO at one point. Most of the scenes on the hillside outside the mine were clearly shot on location. However there is one which makes such obvious use of CSO that it looks ridiculous. All I can think of is that they must have found late on that they needed to reshoot the scene, and didn’t have time and money to go back on location to do it. Oh, and while I think of it there’s the obligatory UNIT “bomb the hell out of them” scene. This scene was a good example of the principle  - if you can’t do it well, then do something different -.

Helicopter Watch

The bombing run is carried out by a tiny one man helicopter, and it’s so unimpressive it would probably have been better just to have the Brig being told over the phone that the bombing run had been completed.

I’ve lived in South Wales for the best part of three decades now, and so much of it must have rubbed off on me that I can get rather defensive about bad accents and patronizing clichés. This does all start off a little bit like it should have been titled “How Green Death Was My Valley” But I found that as the show went on this didn’t seem quite so much of a problem. Not accent wise, anyway, since there’s quite a few really genuine Welsh accents in the mix. I noticed good old Talfryn Thomas when the Doctor descended into the mine for the first time.  I remembered him from being a guest star in a few episodes of “Dad’s Army”. Now I can tell you from personal experience that his accent is the real McCoy. The exteriors looked dead right for the South Wales valleys too – probably because that’s where they were filmed.

Since we’re mentioning performances at this point, we’ll talk about the guest stars. Now there’s definite on-screen chemistry between Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan who  play Jo Grant and Professor Jones, but then that’s hardly surprising since there was off-screen chemistry between them at the time as well. I believe that they were engaged at the time, although the relationship ended. A mention for Tony Adams, making an early TV appearance here as one of Stevens’ flunkeys. He disappears about halfway through the story, because he was taken ill, but this didn’t have any hugely detrimental effect on his career. He went on to play Doctor Neville Bywaters in General Hospital, and then Adam Chance in theat perennial favourite of lovers of bad TV, Crossroads. Acting bouquets, though, go to Jerome Willis, who plays Stevens. He is a terrific villain, and to add to that, his conversion to the light at the end of the story was convincing enough to make his sacrifice at the end rather moving.

How did people view this story’s eco agenda when it was first shown? I ask the question because it just seems right on the money today. When the story was written, alternative ‘clean’ energy, edible fungus and textured vegetable protein, and the dangers of genetic modification were all on the agenda, but pretty much on the fringes of national consciousness, while it’s fair to say that they all firmly in the mainstream today. As a result you don’t have to be a genius to see that this story has a remarkable resonance when you watch it today.

We can’t ignore the fact that this is Jo Grant’s last story. It’s always been fairly clear to those of us who look for that sort of thing, that Jo has confused feelings towards the Doctor. He is obviously a father figure towards her, yet at the same time her feelings are a lot more complicated than that. So when she meets a rather hippyish, young, long haired, Nobel prize winning scientist called Professor Jones, with whom she gets off on the wrong foot at their first meeting, it’s pretty much a given that we’re going to be hearing wedding bells – well, engagement bells anyway, at the end of the story. Actually this does give us a really rather good end to the story. The Doctor slips away from the engagement party, and gives a rueful look as he drives Bessie away into the twilight. He’s going to be lonely, we know. What we don’t know at this point is that in the very next story he’ll get the pleasure of the company of wonderful Liz Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith. Ahh, the lucky swine.

What Have We Learned?

Even at this late stage the production team were capable of pulling a great UNIT story out of the bag.

Today’s Science fiction can sometimes become tomorrow’s science fact.

 

68: Planet of the Daleks

Before Watching

There’s a body of opinion that suggests that this story is a virtual retread of “The Daleks” from the first season. In fact I wouldn’t mind betting that this was the story that, when he asked the production team what they thought about it, they replied – We love your story Terry – we loved it every time you’ve sold it to us in the past. – Well, I cannot tell a lie, I liked this one when I watched it as a kid. I like the escape from the city where the Doctor and his Thal companions all made a sort of parachute/balloon affair and used it to ascend the rising hot air in a ventilation shaft. Very cool.

My recollection of that this story dovetailed out of “Frontier in Space”, and that the two stories worked together more closely than any two others since The Space Museum/ The Chase. We’ll see about that. A shout out for Bernard Horsfall as well, who plays one of the Thals – always brings a little bit of class to any role he plays does our Bernard.

After Watching

Right then. If you have watched every Dalek story so far, as I have, and then you watch the first episode of “Planet of the Daleks”, then maybe you’ll be struck by just how much of this seems familiar. It’s almost a case of being ‘Now That’s What I Call Daleks” – even though one of the Daleks themselves don’t appear until right at the end of this first episode, and it’s disabled when it does. Look at what we have – a jungle planet (The Daleks’ Master Plan) - Thals (the Daleks)- killer plants (Mission to the Unknown) – the crew, who are about to die, saved by medicine/treatment provided by the locals (The Daleks) – invisible aliens (The Daleks’ Master Plan). Despite all of these familiar Dalek trappings, we are actually in an original story – either the Doctor, or the Time Lords with whom he communicated at the end of “Frontier in Space” has steered the increasingly reliable TARDIS to Spiridon, the planet where the Daleks are massing their army for the attack on Earth. So at least the first episode sets out what’s going to happen very clearly. The Doctor must first of all recover, persuade the Thals into an alliance, find out what the Daleks are actually up to, and put a spanner in the works for them.

I had to laugh at the first cliffhanger. The Doctor and the Thals discover a round dent in the ground. There is obviously an invisible thing there. The Thals produce a couple of spray paint cans. “What’s that?” asks the Doctor. Oh, for God’s sake, Doc, it’s a flippin’ spray can! -is not what the Thals reply, sadly, - and they begin to spray the creature which – shock horror – turns out to be a Dalek! This might be a shock to the Doctor, although considering the last episode it shouldn’t – but why it would come as a shock to viewers, when the story is called “Planet of the Daleks” is something more of a mystery.

Speaking of Thals a moment before, there’s an interesting juxtaposition between two of the actors who play them. Both recur in several Doctor Who roles. On the one hand we have Bernard Horsfall – and on the other we have Prentis Hancock. Now, my admiration for Bernard Horsfall as a guest star is a matter of record in earlier volumes, so I won’t go on too much about that. However, if I single him out, I probably should probably single out Prentis Hancock as well. He made his first appearance in the show in “Spearhead from Space” where he didn’t stand out one way or another. However as Vaber the Thal in this he’s been giving a typical Prentis Hancock performance – extremely intense, and that’s for every single line that he’s given, right up to the point where you want to just give him a slap and tell him to stop overacting and calm down. I watched “Planet of Evil” a few weeks ago on The Horror Channel, and he was a main character in that, playing it exactly the same way. We’ll look at that one in more detail when we get to season 13. As I recall he did the same as Paul Morrow in “Space 1999” although it’s such a long time ago that I watched this my memory may well be at fault here.

You know, a funny thing happened as I watched this story. With each successive episode I found my cynicism subsiding, and a growing willingness to say, yes, maybe this is rubbish, but it’s good rubbish. I’m guessing that this is partly due to nostalgia. Thus, since I clearly remember being thrilled as a kid when the Doctor and the Thals – who now included a woman, Rebec, from another crashed Thal ship – rising to safety using a polythene chute as a parachute cum hot air balloon in a dalek air vent, I took a guilty pleasure in watching it again now. By the end of episode 4 I realized that I was actually enjoying it quite a bit more than I had enjoyed “Frontier in Space”, and frankly I wasn’t expecting that.

It took a while, but eventually that old Dalek favourite, deadly plague/bacteria designed to kill a huge section of the native population (Dalek Invasion of Earth) eventually raised its head. Which actually made me start to wonder what the invisibility thing was all about, apart from the fact that Terry Nation did like his invisible monsters. After all, they’re on Spiridon because it’s a convenient place to build a giant fridge to chill your Dalek army until you’re ready to invade the next planet. So the invisibility thing really is a red herring, although it does provide a scene whereby the ‘good’ Spiridonian who saved Jo’s life earlier releases the deadly bacteria in a sealed room, so that if the two Daleks inside the room open the doors, then the whole Dalek city will be contaminated. After being shot, he turns visible, and we see that his head looks just a tiny bit reminiscent of a Cardassian (that’s one from Deep Space Nine, and not the awful Kim and her tribe).

Where’s the swings there’s also roundabouts. Or to put it another way, while the story had me on its side by about halfway through episode 4, it lost me again pretty soon afterwards. Bernard rounds upon Rebec for coming on this ‘suicide’ mission. Why? Because he loves her. Ah, bless. Then we have the night on Spiridon, which certainly seems to last a good 12 hours to me. It’s obvious padding, I’m afraid, and generally episode 5 drags its heels towards its weary conclusion. Old Prentis throws a major wobbly when Taron/Bernard says he has to wait until later to play with his explosives, and so on and so forth. At last, the Dalek Supreme having arrived, they get to attack the city, with the obligatory splitting up of the Doctor and the companion. The Doctor goes off with the Thals, while Jo goes off with a member of the New Seekers.

I should say something about the Dalek Supreme here. My immediate thought when I saw it was that this was very like one of the film Daleks, what with its rather wide bumper, and much bigger headlights, and a check in The Television Companion reveals that it was actually adapted from a film Dalek that Terry Nation had in his possession. There you go. The Dalek Supreme looks quite impressive in his black and gold livery, although in one scene his dome wobbles up and down as he’s talking which is somewhat less impressive. Generally the Dalek Supreme is an interesting addition to the Dalek mythos. We only really started to get an explicit idea of the Dalek chain of command in The Evil of the Daleks, where we met the impressive, though impotent, Dalek Emperor. Now he was clearly different from the other Daleks. In this story, though, the Dalek Supreme, when killing a Dalek who was responsible for not capturing the Doctor and Thals, states that the Supreme Council will not tolerate failure. All of which opens up some interesting questions, namely, what are the Daleks doing having Supreme Councils? Who are on the Council? How did they get there? Who voted them in? It just doesn’t quite sit right with our concept of the Daleks as basically a Fascist dictatorship.

Well, anyway, there we are. The Doctor and his Thal friends manage to set off an ice volcano which buries the Dalek Army, and will take several centuries to melt through. Handy that. The New Seeker, who turns out to be a Thal called Latex, or something like that, clearly has the hots for Jo (ah – back to “The Daleks”) and proposes to her, but she refuses, saying that she wants to go home. In case we missed the point, when the Doctor is basically offering her the choice of all the planets in the universe, she brings up an image of Earth on the scanner, and tells him she wants to go home. A subtle way, I would say, of preparing us for her farewell in the very next story.

What Have We Learned?

Daleks shut down a) when they are in extreme cold – and b) when they’re invisible. 

67: Frontier In Space

Before Watching

It must have been about 1972 or 1973 that there was a BBC Special Effects Exhibition at the Science Museum in London, which featured an excellent display of costumes and props from Doctor Who. Now, we didn’t have a lot of money as a family (cue violins in background) and never went away on holiday, but what my Mum did try to do to make up for it was to provide us with as many interesting days out as she could, Growing up in the West London suburbs there was usually something interesting waiting at the end of a tube journey, and this wonderful exhibition was one of them.

I mean it was actually really great. I can remember going into a room which had a full sized TARDIS console, and Tardis panels on the walls. That was amazing. There were Daleks, an Invasion Cyberman costume, and some of the best costumes from recent years. Now, you have to remember that the early 70s right through to about Terror of the Zygons was a golden age of alien design for Doctor Who, unsurpassed until the 2005 revival in my opinion. There was an Ogron, a Sea Devil, and a Draconian, and I fancy that “Frontier In Space” may even have been the story broadcasting at the time we went to the exhibition. So you can imagine they made quite an impression on me, and are still one of my favourite Doctor Aliens after all these years.

Off the point a little, if we fast forward to 1982, nine years later, my brother and I decided it was high time that we paid a visit to the Doctor Who Exhibition on the Golden Mile in Blackpool. The 18 year old me frankly couldn’t quite match the sense of wonder the 8 and a half year old me had felt at the earlier exhibition. Well, we’d had a very long train journey which was made none the better by the price I had to pay for a slice of British Rail coffee. In fact the one lasting memory I have of the Exhibition is of looking at the Omega Mark II costume, to be seen in the next season’s opener “The Arc of Infinity” and asking what the hell they thought they were doing if they were bringing Omega back. When I actually got to see “Arc of Infinity” some 5 months later, I realised just how right I was to be sceptical, but we’ll come to that story in due course. Meanwhile, “Frontier in Space”. This was another of those stories whose titles were changed by Target for the novelisation, and so if you’re looking for this one you need to look for “Doctor Who and The Space War”. Malcolm Hulke, as he usually did, novelised his own scripts. He usually made a good job of it too, and this one was no different as I recall, however there was one particular passage which always made my brother and I chuckle. At one point Jo has been captured by the Ogrons, and her captor obviously has designs upon her, and brings her food, while uttering these sweet nothings, “Eat good, get big, become Ogron wife.” Ah, sweet. I can’t wait to find out if that line ever was said on screen.

After Watching

Well, we had to wait until episode 6, but then the answer to the great question was found. The Ogron who brings Jo her food when she’s in captivity on the Ogron home planet does not say “Eat good, get big, become Ogron wife” – so that’s purely an invention for the Target novelisation.

How, then, do we arrive at a fair assessment of “Frontier in Space”? In some ways it’s the archetypal space opera from the Pertwee years, and yet in other ways it is very much a one of a kind. It’s the last Master story for one thing. It was shortly after this was filmed that Roger Delgado was tragically killed in a car accident, and so the mooted last confrontation story between the Doctor and the Master never actually came to pass.

The plot is rather thin, but not difficult to follow. The TARDIS materialises upon an Earth cargo spaceship. There is a strange noise, and the ship is attacked. The crew, and Jo, believe that it is Draconians who attack the ship. The Doctor, though, with his resistance to the sound, can see that it is in fact Ogrons who do so. The Draconians control a rival space empire to that of Earth. The two empires have been at war in the past, but there exists an uneasy peace between them at this moment in time. Now, if you’re thinking that this sounds rather like the situation between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the original series of Star Trek, then you’re not the only person to think so. We’ll look at similarities between the Klingons and the Draconians a little later.

Someone or something is using the Ogrons to try to foment war between the two empires. Now, we’ve seen the Ogrons before in “Day of the Daleks”, and so we know that they’re too dumb to come up with this kind of plan for themselves. The natural assumption is that it’s the Daleks who are behind this plan, and so when they do get round to turning up, at the dog end of episode 6, it really doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Now, my memory may well be at fault here, but I’m sure that the BBC had already showed them turning up in a trailer before episode 6 was even broadcast as well, so again, it wasn’t exactly a shock to see them.

Not that it’s the Daleks who are actually carrying out the plan to manipulate the two empires to war. This is the doing of the Master, who doesn’t actually turn up until episode three. Once the Master does appear we do get into a swings and roundabouts situation. Yes, Roger Delgado is as watchable and as enjoyable as ever. The problem is that once the Master arrives, the action becomes as predictable as ever. Prior to his arrival, there’s a lot of toing and froing between the Earth president, who is being urged towards war by her meathead advisor General Williams, and the Draconian embassy. The Doctor is passed around from pillar to post with nobody believing him, until the Earth president tires of him and sends him off to life imprisonment on the penal colony on the moon.

So, the Master poses as the leader of an Earth Colony. He has manipulated Earth records to show the Doctor and Jo as master criminals on his planet, and has the president agree to them being handed over into his custody. They are space jacked by the Draconians, and in an audience with the Emperor, the Doctor reveals that he was made an honorary Draconian nobleman 500 years ago for services rendered. A party of Ogrons rescues the Master, but crucially leaves one of their number behind, which finally convinces the Draconians of what is happening. The Doctor and the crown prince take the Ogron to convince the Earth President, but the Master attacks, and when they repel him, he has taken the Ogron and Jo back to the Ogron home planet. The Draconian prince wins the meathead Williams over to his side, and they mount a covert mission to said Ogron home planet. The Master reveals that the Daleks are behind his plan. The Doctor frees himself, Jo, Williams and the Draconian, and sends them back to their respective empires to muster forces to resist the Daleks. He is grazed by a shot from the Master’s gun, and after returning to the TARDIS, which the Master had brought to the Ogron planet, sends a telepathic message to the Time Lords, and collapses. Phew.

This story manages the remarkable feat of being at the same time too short for 6 episodes, and also too long for 6 episodes. There’s not really enough story in the first 5 episodes to sustain 5 episodes. On the other hand, there’s really too much in episode 6, and it means that the ending is rather unsatisfactory. Apart from anything else, there really isn’t a proper ending. We think that Williams and the Draconian crown prince will get home safely and warn Earth and Draconia about the Dalek threat. But we don’t actually know, and what’s more, we will never find out. And so although “Frontier in Space” and “Planet of the Daleks” are not the first pair of stories to dovetail together, for me they are the first pair that dovetail without the first story being properly resolved. If we take “The Space Museum” and “The Chase”, the situation on the planet of the Xerons has clearly been resolved. Partly this sense of dislocation is caused by the abrupt way that we saw the last of Roger Delgado’s Master. That’s nobody’s fault other than a cruel and untimely death on a car crash, but it is a terrible shame that there was no great and final showdown, which many people connected with the show have said was being planned. In the end of episode 6 the Master does what he has always done so far – watched his schemes begin to collapse around him, and done a runner while the going was good, although this time he took a pot shot at the Doctor as he was running, which caused the injury which is carried forward into the next story.

That’s the manic 6^th episode. In the 5 episodes prior to that it was a particularly good story if you like prison scenes. The Doctor and/or Jo were locked up in several different locations including more than one spaceship, an Earth prison cell, a penal colony on the Moon, and a cell on the Ogron planet, and that’s just the ones I can remember. Which does smack a little of a lack of imagination. For me this is what stopped “Frontier in Space” actually being the classic that I maybe thought it was when I watched it back in 1973. The concept, of an agent provocateur deliberately and covertly trying to provoke war between two great powers is an interesting one, and it means that the story is constantly watchable, but never really becomes what it could have been. For example, General Williams’ sudden conversion to the cause of peace would be a lot more believable had we but heard a little more about his past history with the Draconians, which might have made his conversion seem just a little less Damascene and a little more believable. Then there’s the Earth president. You now, I can’t really make up my mind whether Malcolm was making a stand against the prevailing tone of the Pertwee era so far, which is certainly chauvinistic, even if it isn’t misogynistic, by having a woman President. On the other hand, he might just be using this as a sign of how far in the future we are – President of the Earth? A woman? This can only be the future. The way that the President is continually browbeaten by the meathead Williams, and the fact that in one of the scenes she is lying on a couch, having a head massage from her female PA kind of makes me think it’s the latter rather than the former.

Right, let’s get back to the Draconians. I made the point earlier that it’s possible to draw comparisons between them and the Klingons from Star Trek. Of course, when you say the Klingons you need to define exactly which Klingons you’re talking about. The Klingons that appeared in the original series, that is the only Klingons we had experienced by the time that “Frontier in Space” was broadcast were essentially humanoids with funny eyebrows, played by blacked up actors. There was maybe a suggestion of something Asiatic about them, but that was about it. To a ‘man’ they were pretty aggressive meatheads obsessed with warfare. Which isn’t really like the Draconians. Now, some 6 years after “Frontier in Space” a Klingon ship appeared in the beginning of the film, and everything had changed. This wasn’t an exploration of Klingon culture by any stretch of the imagination, but now the Klingons had their strange, ridged, inhuman foreheads, and their peculiar facial hair. In “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and films such as “The Undiscovered Country” we gradually learned a lot more about Klingon culture. They lose their role as out and out villains, and instead come across as a noble race, obsessed with honour, their concept of which seems to be at least suggested by the Samurai code of Bushido. Which also sounds like the Draconians. It’s worth stressing again, though, that the Draconians came before this version of the Klingons. I think that the Draconians were an interestingly conceived alien race, and their design, and appearance was as good as it gets in classic Doctor Who, and it’s maybe a little surprising that they were never to reappear in classic Doctor Who. If I was asked I’d hazard the opinion that this comes down to two things. Firstly, that the Draconians, despite their alien appearance, are not monsters, and it’s probably easier to write stories about out and out monsters, and secondly, that it seems to me that something happened to alienate Malcolm Hulke from Doctor Who. Having co-written “The Faceless Ones” and “The War Games” for Patrick Troughton he wrote at least one story for each of the 5 seasons of Jon Pertwee. He would write “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” for season 11, Jon Pertwee’s last season, and then that would be it and he would never contribute again. A great pity.

All in all, then, it’s a curious piece of work is “Frontier in Space”. It strives for something of the epic style and sweep of “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, with the Master in the Mavic Chen position, and the Daleks pushed almost totally into the background. At times it almost makes it as well – it’s certainly a more convincing ‘space opera’ than we’ve seen for a long time in the show. As a stand-alone story, though, it falls some way short of the gold standard for me. Which is a shame, because I loved it when I first saw it.

What have we learned?

The Doctor is an honorary noble of Draconia – and The Master isn’t. 

66: Carnival of Monsters

Before Watching

So, the Doctor is free! He can now go where and when he pleases, not having to go as the Time Lord’s favourite errand boy, and not having to look over his shoulder in case they catch him. So surely the first story we’re going to get now is going to be a huge, wide ranging space epic? Well, as it happens that is on the way, but not yet.

“Carnival of Monsters” is a quirky, at times almost whimsical Robert Holmes piece, and the thing about quirky, at times almost whimsical stories is when they work, they can be extremely memorable and enjoyable. This was the story chosen to represent the Jon Pertwee era in the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” series of repeats in late 1981/early 1982. On the surface it’s a rather odd choice, since there are far more representative stories from either the pre Three Doctors , UNIT –era, or from the post Three Doctors era. Yet it’s an inspired choice really, and one which maybe shows the influence that fandom had over the Producer of the series at this time, John Nathan-Turner.

After Watching

You know, sometimes you can forget just how good Doctor Who can be, and just how good an individual story this one is. I’m pretty sure that I really do have nothing new to say about “Carnival of Monsters”, but what the hell, let’s go for it any way.

There’s many clever things about this story. The only expectation you have at the start is that the Doctor won’t be on contemporary Earth, and that much is fulfilled right from the start. We quickly learn that the TARDIS has materialised on board HMS Berenice, a cargo ship which is also carrying passengers to India, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The passengers and crew are notably suspicious of them. Oh and there’s a sea monster menacing the ship, which appears to be a plesiosaur. Now, so far we seem to be in recognisable Doctor Who territory. So things need to start getting very strange indeed. And they do.

I don’t remember a Doctor Who story prior to this where there are two seemingly unconnected storylines which run parallel for so long. The action switches to the planet of Inter Minor where the humanoid showman Vorg is trying to prove to some grey skinned and white haired bureaucrats that he should be allowed in, with his assistant Shirna, and his miniscope. The miniscope, you see is the key. It is an entertainment device, in which creatures caught within its miniaturisation field are placed, together with a sample environment, and forced to act out the same actions over and over again for the benefit of the viewers. This machine had been banned by the Time Lords – it turns out that the Doctor had been instrumental in getting them banned – and the great irony is that his TARDIS has materialised inside one.

This isn’t actually the most promising of material, but it works brilliantly. Why?

It works brilliantly because Vorg isn’t evil. Vorg is a rogue, one of a type in which Robert Holmes came increasingly to specialise in, and more than that, he is a funny rogue, and a lovable rogue. He’s one of the ways in which Robert Holmes plays with our concept of what a Doctor Who story actually is, and what we expect from it. We know that a lot of the time there will be monsters. And indeed, there are monsters in this story. But they’re not the problem nor the point of the story. Yes, they provide the necessary scary bits, and the necessary danger, but this is obviously not what the Doctor is here to sort out. We also know that most of the time there will be a villain. Hence in a story like “The Mutants”, which follows a lot of the conventions of Doctor Who in the early 70s, you don’t need more than a few seconds to identify the Marshal as a villain, and you know exactly how he is going to act for the whole of the story, and be fair, he never lets you down. Say what you like about Vorg, but even though he has caused the situation that the Doctor has to deal with, he isn’t a villain. And one of the reasons why this story works so brilliantly is that it trusts its viewers a) to be able understand the difference, and b) to be able to cope with this difference from what they would have expected.

So, Vorg not being a villain means he can be developed as a comic turn, and his comic turn then provides the counterpoint to what goes on in the miniscope, which becomes increasingly serious and frightening. Which brings me to the Drashigs.

“Carnival of Monsters” works brilliantly because the Drashigs are one of the best realised pure monsters of the Pertwee era. You don’t have to be a crossword nut to work out that Robert Holmes used an anagram of the word ‘dishrag’ for this story’s stand out monsters, but there’s nothing wet or limp about these. A combination of puppetry, model work, CSO and good sound effects meant that Producer Barry Letts, wearing his director’s hat for this story, made the Drashigs one of the more convincing and frightening monsters of the whole of Pertwee’s tenure. I kind of think that the Drashigs work because they are no more than they have to be, which is ravening, unstoppable monsters. Because there is so much else going on with the script, it doesn’t need to be making points through the monsters. They are there to provide the danger, which they do perfectly.

“Carnival of Monsters” works brilliantly because every named character is more than just a repository for lines of the script. On the S.S. Bernice, you’ve got the kindly old buffer, Major Daly, who is played by the fine welsh actor Tenniel Evans. Worthy of note also is the late Ian Marter, who plays Lt. Andrews. It’s not a huge part, but he must have made an impression, for in just over a year’s time he would return as Season 12 companion Lt. Harry Sullivan. Shirna’s world weary cynicism makes her a perfect foil to Vorg, and she’s played by Cheryl Hall. I haven’t seen her on television for quite a while, but in the 70s and 80s she appeared in many shows, in particular the first three series of popular sitcom “Citizen Smith”, which showcased her talents as a comedienne. Then there’s the Inter Minorians. In less sure hands these three would just be boring cyphers. But Robert Holmes never wasted an opportunity to mock a bureaucrat. Kalik, Orum and Pletrac all stand out as individuals, although they are clearly of a sort, and that’s clever. Their plan to launch a coup d’etat is laughable, and that’s the point – it’s supposed to be. Oh, and Kalik is played by Davros-to-be Michael Wisher. What more could you want?

Here’s a thing worth noting. Vorg is a rogue, and he’s caused the trouble in the first place by using an illegal miniscope, and yet it’s Vorg’s actions which save the day. Once again, it’s playing with our expectations. At the risk of sounding pseudo-intellectual, there’s something quite Dickensian about salvation coming through the intervention of show people. Dickens loved the world of the theatre and the circus he even inveigled some of his literary friends into appearing in a comic melodrama “Not So Bad As We Seem” scripted by the now forgotten, yet then extremely popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In many of his novels the theatre and the circus, the world of the itinerant showman and woman represents salvation from the trials and tribulations of contemporary life that many of his heroes and heroines often find themselves having to endure.   

The last word, then, on “Carnival of Monsters”. It’s a terrifically watchable 4 parter. You can accuse seasons 8 and 9 of ‘playing it safe’  - that’s merely an opinion, and as always, feel free to disagree. You can say, well, even if that is the case, look at what they achieved. Both seasons were highly enjoyable on the whole, and when you consider that the biggest criticism you can make of stories like “Colony in Space” and “The Mutants” is that they’re a bit dull, then the show is in pretty decent fettle. But a story like “Carnival of Monsters” which plays with the conventions and discards or twists many of them, shows that the series is still capable of taking risks, and delivering something out of left field. And that’s a valuable thing indeed.

What have we learned?

Miniscopes are banned, and frankly nothing like as entertaining as a Nintendo. 

65: The Three Doctors

Before Watching

Do I need to say anything? I mean, everyone knows that this one is an all-time classic, don’t they? Or do they? I’ll tell you why I ask. I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but it’s a fact that “Doctor Who” has featured on the cover of the Radio Times more times than any other BBC TV series. I can still see in my mind’s eye the cover of the Radio Times the week that the first episode went out – the three Doctors staring moodily out, Jon Pertwee behind, his cloak spreading expansively, William Hartnell not looking well, below and to his right, and Patrick Troughton, wearing a very strange looking wig, to his left. I’d already made my mind up that it was going to be a classic, and to the 9 year old me, it certainly was. After all, the whole point of the exercise was putting together Jon Pertwee together with MY first Doctor, Patrick Troughton, and THE first Doctor, William Hartnell. If we got anything resembling a decent story into the bargain, well, that was all a bonus.

8 years later, when it formed part of the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” season I was surprised to find that it had somehow got a little worse, and rather more childish than it had been in 1973. Of course, it had always been that way, but I had changed and become just a little more discerning in the interim. Watch anything at the age of 9, and then watch it again at 17 and chances are that your opinions will have changed, even though what you are watching remains the same.

I still enjoy it every time that I watch it on cable, but I have to work hard on not letting nostalgia cloud my view of it as a Doctor Who story. So I will force myself to take the opinion that this is not a sacred cow, and try to judge it on its own merits. It’s interesting to speculate why such a prestigious assignment was given to Bob Baker and Dave Martin, nicknamed The Bristol Boys. Over the years they became stalwarts among the stable of regular and reliable Doctor Who writers, and in their time they wrote: -

The Claws of Axos

The Mutants

The Three Doctors

The Sontaran Experiment

The Hand of Fear

The Invisible Enemy

Underworld

The Armageddon Factor

-          while Bob Baker scripted

The Nightmare of Eden on his own.

Now, I don’t wish to be horrible, but it may well strike you, as it has struck me, that what links pretty much all of these stories is that for the most part they are good, honest, watchable Doctor Who stories, but there aren’t any real classics there either. Their track record doesn’t really compare with their contemporary Robert Holmes, for instance. But then Holmes was writing the next story “Carnival of Monsters” anyway. Holmes reputedly liked the Bristol boys’ work, enough to entrust them with his Sontaran creations for “The Sontaran Experiment”, but that, as they say, is in the future. So, anyway, working on what we know about Baker and Martin’s work, it’s reasonable to expect that what we’ll find in “The Three Doctors”, once we strip away the razzmatazz over the alliance of Doctors from different eras, is a decent, watchable, but workmanlike and uninspired script. In the words of Harry Hill, there’s only one way to find out.

After Watching

There’s two ways of assessing “The Three Doctors”, one of which is blatantly unfair. The temptation may well be to say that despite the fact that this is a story which was popular when it was first shown, and has retained a certain amount of affection ever since, and this is solely due to the cameo appearance by William Hartnell, and the 2^nd and 3^rd Doctor tag team pairing – other than that is has very little going for it. That’s the blatantly unfair way of viewing the story. Which is not to say that it does have a huge amount going for it other than the Doctor double act – but that’s the whole point of the story anyway. Saying “The Three Doctors” is a lacklustre story apart from the fact that it has Three Doctors in it is pretty much tantamount to saying that “The Daleks” is a terrible story apart from the fact that it has the Daleks in it. It IS a terrible story apart from the fact that The Daleks are in it (just my opinion and feel free to disagree) but that’s totally irrelevant. The Daleks are the point of “The Daleks”, and the combination of Doctors IS the point of “The Three Doctors”.

Baker and Martin had several obstacles to overcome, several constraints while coming up with this story. For one thing the need to include all three Doctors must have been something of a headache. After all, they had to come up with some rationale to explain why and how the different versions of the Doctor came to inhabit the same time stream for the story. That means some serious transgression of the laws of time, which necessitated the Time Lords being involved. At the end of the story, as well, there was a requirement for the Time Lords to reward the Doctor by ending his exile, which really necessitated some real threat to them and their Society, which the Doctor has to overcome to thus earn their gratitude. After all, they gave him sod all for his good work in “The Colony in Space”, “The Curse of Peladon” and “The Mutants”, so it has to be something on a really cosmic scale. Essentially, a renegade Time Lord, then, and not the Master, since the Time Lords in “Terror of the Autons” made it clear that they considered him to be small fry with whom the Doctor was capable of dealing on his own. So really it needed a super-renegade Time Lord, in the shape of Omega. Now, having come up with the concept of our super renegade, the question has to be asked – what is he doing that necessitates breaking the laws of time to bring the three Doctors together to defeat him? Once again, the solution that Baker and Martin came up with makes sense. Surely, had the Time Lords known that Omega still existed, and was planning action against them, they would have dealt with him somehow before this point. So we have the situation whereby Omega is the great temporal engineer who created the black hole, via supernova, that provides the energy for the Time Lords. They believed that he was killed doing it, while in fact he was exiled to an anti-matter universe, kept in balance solely by the power of his own will. So when he attacks it is totally unexpected, and something they have no idea of how to counter.

Now, ok, I don’t have the scientific knowledge to be able to say whether this is all complete nonsense – I’m guessing that it probably is – but that’s neither here nor there in the context of the story. Am I willing to accept it – of course I am. I was when I was 9, when I was 17, and I still do now I’m 50.

Having thus negotiated all bar one of the plot hurdles they had to overcome, there just remained the not insignificant conundrum of how exactly the Doctors were to overcome Omega, in a world of his own creation. I may well be in a minority here, but I felt the deus ex machine of the recorder, having fallen into the TARDIS field generator and not having been converted from matter to anti matter, worked nicely in the context of the story. This relies on one of the clever bits of the story. This world where Omega rules is a creation of his will. The Doctors have the power to influence it, building a doorway through the power of their mind, but not to recreate it or reshape more than a small part of it. This they are forced to negotiate with Omega, agreeing to take his place in return for the release of Omega’s prisoners, including Jo and the Brigadier. Omega takes off his helmet, and we find that he has no body left – as much as this world is a construct of the fore of his will, his consciousness is only maintained through this world. He can never leave it, and in fact all that the Doctors can do for him is to provide him with an ending to his suffering – which he will get if he touches the recorder.

So if we think that “The Three Doctors” is a less than satisfying piece of work, and I know quite a few people who do think exactly that, it doesn’t seem to be a fault of the story or the script. In which case it is merely a case of how good the execution and realisation of the story is.

The Script

The script is a mixture of the very good, the good, the adequate, and the bad. The very good is every scene between Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee. We’ll never really know exactly what Patrick Troughton thought of his successor, and what Jon Pertwee felt of his predecessor, but Baker and Martin made the eminently sensible decision to play up tension between the two, and every scene between the two of them is absolute gold dust – in all honesty worth the price of admission by itself. Poor old William Hartnell was so ill he could hardly be used in the story at all, but even allowing for that he still gets one of the best lines in the whole script, “So you’re my replacements – a dandy and a clown!” When the third Doctor tries to explain to Jo who the second Doctor is, “ you see – I am him, and he is me” , Jo quotes from the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus”, saying – “- and we are altogether, coo coo coo choo.” Even the Brig, the strait-laced, stiff upper lip Brig, gets a couple of silly old bufferish one-liners. Arriving in Omega’s anti matter world he refuses to accept it as an alien world, maintaining “I’m pretty sure it’s Cromer.” Then also his words of praise at the end of the story, “Splendid chap – both of him”.

Not that everything in the garden’s rosy, of course. My gripe with the script isn’t just a gripe with the script, since the sequence in question isn’t very well realised either.  At one stage the Third Doctor is forced into a battle of minds and wills with Omega, which is realised through what appears to be a dream sequence in which the Doctor wrestles with what appears to be a bloke in a suit with a vaguely oriental looking mask. It’s worth comparing this with the far superior battle of wills between the Doctor and Morbius in Season 13, to which we will come in the fullness of time.

Performances

I’ve already mentioned the Pertwee Troughton double act, but it’s so good it’s well worth mentioning it again. It’s one area where the story far surpasses the enjoyable 20^th anniversary special “The Five Doctors”. In that story the only real interaction between Doctors is between Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, and Richard Hurndall’s recreation of the First Doctor. Well, we’ll get to that story all in good time.

We’ve already mentioned the Brigadier’s comic turn, which is all part of the fun, and all of the regulars do their bits as well as could be asked for. Omega is played by Stephen Thorn, whom we last saw as Azal, the Daemon in “The Daemons”. He gives a similar performance in this story, but then that’s what was required for this role. There is a subtle difference between his portrayal of Omega and Azal – this time round he makes it clear that Omega is only a wibble away from full blown cluck-cluck –gibber-gibber – my-old-man’s – a-mushroom psychopathic mania. It’s a shame for Stephen Thorn that both of this most famous roles on TV saw his features obscured by a mask. Still we did get the benefit of his sonourous voice, which in this case meant that we had a literal example of an empty vessel making the most noise. Having said all that, I’m not sure that the full extent of which Omega is essentially a Tragic character is actually realised. He is the villain of the piece – no doubt about that – but he is a character for whom it should be possible to have a significant amount of sympathy, bearing in mind the circumstances that put him here, and conspire to prevent him from leaving.

The Design

I thought that this story looked fantastic in 1973 – and I suppose that’s the problem with it. In 1973, this looked just like we expected a weird and alien place to look like. The doorways were strange shapes, and the walls were covered in bubbles in different shades of garish orange, red and brown. Watch it today, and it looks very 70s.

Doctor Who fans are a difficult lot to please. Stick a man in a suit with a mask on to represent an alien and they’ll complain that it looks like a man in a suit with a mask on. Stick a man in a costume designed specifically NOT to look like a man in a suit, and they’ll complain that it looks unrealistic. The blobby, rather amorphous ‘plasma’ creatures that Omega sends to fetch the Doctor, which attack UNIT HQ have not stood the test of time very well.

As for Omega himself, well, his appearance is dominated by the welding mask to end all welding masks. It’s rather impressive actually, and it does make the reveal, when Omega removes the mask to reveal that his body has been worn away by the something or other rays within the anti matter universe, a very good, very dramatic moment.

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

As we’ll see when we get to “The Five Doctors”, making an anniversary special where you have to include more than one Doctor, and be fair to them, where you have to make some major additions to the whole Doctor/Time Lords mythos, and where the outcome is settled before you’ve even written one word of the story isn’t easy at all. For me, the Bristol Boys pulled it off. I loved “The Three Doctors” in 1973. I still enjoyed it a lot in 2015. I’m more than happy to settle for that.

What Have We Learned?

It’s Omega that the Time Lords have to thank for all of their power and mastery of time. At least until Robert Holmes invents Rassilon

There are circumstances under which the Time Lords can circumvent the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.

When you life Time Lords out of their time stream, a significant proportion of the time they are going to get stuck in a time eddy.