Season 11

Mighty 200/DWM 2014 poll

The Time Warrior -  47/54

Planet of the Spiders – 89/81

Death to the Daleks – 128/148

Invasion of the Dinosaurs – 131/137

The Monster of Peladon – 179/216

My Rating

The Time Warrior

Death to the Daleks

Planet of the Spiders

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

The Monster of Peladon

It has to be said that Season 11 does not have the best loved stories of the Pertwee in it, and it does beg the question whether Jon Pertwee stayed a season too long. That’s not being horrible. I loved Tom Baker’s 4^th Doctor, but even I’d find it difficult to argue that Tom maybe stayed on too long in the role. After all, you can argue that Season 7 was all about the Doctor coming to terms with his new self, and with his exile. Season 8 was all about the Doctor defending the Earth from the Master. Season 9 was about him trying to end his exile, and Season 10 was about him ending his exile, learning how to travel freely again, and beginning to bid a long goodbye to UNIT. What was season 11 all about? Essentially it was about much the same as Season 10, and the problem was that it didn’t do Season 10 as well as Season 10 had already done it. We’ll talk more about the implications of all this in the next section, looking back on the Pertwee era as a whole.

None of this means to say that there was nothing particularly of value about Season 11. For one thing we had Sarah Jane Smith. Liz Sladen was consistently excellent, and this was only her first season too. “The Time Warrior” also introduced us to the Sontarans in what is pretty widely viewed as the best story of the season. My boy Holmes again. ‘The Monster of Peladon’ as well as giving us the last Ice Warriors story also gave us the first alien planet visit sequel story – not totally successfully in my view, but at least it tried.

You can argue that at least two of the stories in season 11 were let down by special effects. Spiders are frightening to many people, but fake spiders which don’t hardly move aren’t. If your story is called Planet of the Spiders, then you’re setting yourself up for a fall if your spiders are nothing to write home about. It’s even worse if you’re offering the promise of real spectacle, like “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” and then you fail to deliver.

The end of the War Games showed us that season 7, and every following season to come was going to have to be different from what went before in the Hartnell and Troughton eras. What we didn’t know was that the show was never going to be the same again after season 11. Well, almost. There was just the one story still to come, the first of season 12. 

74: Planet of the Spiders

Before Watching

Now, by rights this story should be fondly remembered by me, shouldn’t it? I’ve since pretty much overcome my phobia, but at the time this was first shown I was a confirmed arachnophobe. I mean, I wouldn’t say that I’m ever likely to willingly keep one as a pet, but I have held a tarantula since without screaming, and so as long as spiders leave me alone, I’m quite happy to leave them alone as well. This story, then should have scared me, and yet my memory is not of having been scared, but mainly of having been bored.

Since watching it as a kid I do remember reading an old DWM  interview with Barry Letts, many years ago, where he explained that he although the story is credited solely to Robert Sloman, he himself had a lot of input, and the story, such as it is, represents a Buddhist allegory. Now, ok, I don’t actually mind the story having deeper levels to it – as long as they don’t render the superficial levels more boring or less understandable.

Having said that, I liked “The Daemons” and loved “The Green Death” and so Robert Sloman is worth taking seriously, and so I will do my level best to give it a fair hearing.

After Watching

I can’t say that I enjoyed this one as much as the previous three Sloman-Letts season enders, but I have at least revised the opinion I had going into watching it, which was based on my childhood opinion that it was, and I quote , ‘a load of old crap’.

I don’t have a problem with Doctor Who, or any other TV series, drawing on religious traditions, teachings or sources, nor do I have a problem with a religious allegory being presented as an adventure story per se. My only concern is whether it is interesting and/or entertaining, and whether it hangs together and makes sense. So let’s look at the basic premise. Mike Yates was allowed to do the honourable thing and resign quietly at the end of “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”. Actually, you can’t help thinking that maybe the Brig was hoping that he’d have the decency to take himself round the back and shoot himself, since the very least that Yates was guilty off was treason – which was still a capital offence in the 70s, I think – and probably we could add attempted murder to the charge sheet too. Frankly it beggars the mind that he was allowed to drive off in his sports car scot free.

Still, at least this meant that he could be at a loose end, and the kind of muddled, vaguely hippyish new age thinking which meant that he’d been taken in by the whole Golden Age thing led him to join a Buddhist retreat. In this retreat a gang of five middle aged nerds who should have known better, led by Lupton played by John Dearth, are dab hands at the old Om Mane Padme Hum chant, and they establish contact with a civilisation of giant psychic spiders – don’t laugh, oh, alright then, laugh – on the planet Metebelis Three. That ought to ring a bell. In the previous Sloman-Letts story, the wonderful “The Green Death”, the Doctor annoyed Jo by insisting on going off there before heading off for Wales, and she left him to go on her own. The Doctor found Metebelis Three to be a really hostile jungle planet – so much so that you might even have expected the Daleks to appear for their third story in a row – they love a good jungle planet do the Daleks – so he grabbed himself a big blue crystal and buggered off. This crystal was his wedding present to Jo and Cliff. Now, the spiders have established contact because they want the crystal for their own nefarious purposes.

By way of coincidence, Jo has sent the crystal back to the Doctor. She and Cliff are up the Amazon looking for a super mushroom, and the crystal is apparently spooking the natives. Rather against myself I had to admit that the first episode was actually pretty good. The first sight we get of the Doctor is when he and the Brig (in mufti) are at what appears to be a stag show. The Brigadier seems to particularly enjoy what we’ll charitably call a ‘belly’ dancer. He gets a little bit of a rough ride in this episode does the Brig. The Doctor has dragged him along to watch a stage psychic, whom he then brings back with him to UNIT HQ. The psychic, Clegg, at first pretends that he is a charlatan, but the Doctor knows that he is in fact a remarkably talented clairvoyant, which he proves by holding the Brig’s watch, and announcing that it was given to him ten year’s earlier during what appears to have been a ‘dirty weekend’ at the seaside. It’s funny because it is played to perfection by Nicholas Courtney. Why they thought even a brigadier would have been allowed to have hair that long in the army, though, I have no idea.

Poor old Clegg appears to be the first sacrificial lamb in this story. He looks into the crystal, sees the spiders and cops it. Then the episode takes a rather macabre twist. The Doctor had Clegg hooked up to a machine, and this enables him to look at what was going through his mind as he died, and this is how the Doctor first came to see the Spiders. Meanwhile, back at the retreat, the Lupton sewing circle manage to materialise a spider, which jumps on Lupton’s back and disappears, having mentally joined him. This could only happen if Lupton is complicit – the spider, then represents the unrestrained ego in the allegory, and by giving himself to this he renders himself incapable of ever achieving true enlightenment, even though it gives him the illusion of temporal power.

If episode one is an intriguing melting pot of interesting concepts, episode two, it has to be said, isn’t. Lupton finds he now has the power to materialise and dematerialise, and to shoot what look like mini lightning bolts from his fingertips. He agrees to fetch the crystal, and after taking it from UNIT HQ the rest of the episode – over half of its running time – degenerates into a chase in a succession of vehicles.

Helicopter Watch

OK, it isn’t really a helicopter, but at the start of the chase, after Lupton steals the Whomobile the Doctor leaps off the side of Bessie, and jumps into an autogyro to follow Lupton.

So, we have a chase which involves the Whomobile, Bessie, a hovercraft and a powerboat. The Whomobile deserves honourable mention since when Lupton abandons it, the Doctor jumps in and shows Sarah and us that it can also fly (it couldn’t really, but that’s CSO for you). Incidentally once again the Pertwee Era jumps at the chance to extract humour from a brainless yokel when the Doctor’s hovercraft runs over a trampy character who has just layed down for a nap. I’ve seen various explanations for why the padding started so early in this story, but the one that rings the most true to me is that Jon Pertwee just loved driving fast things, and so this episode was something of a farewell present for him. I kind of feel that we, the audience have the gratuitousness of this chase rubbed in our face when it turns out that just as the Doctor finally catches up with Lupton’s speedboat, Lupton has dematerialised anyway, all the way back to the retreat. Which he could have done presumably from UNIT HQ, thus making the chase totally unnecessary.

So, back at the retreat Lupton hides the crystal, and then he’s off to Metebelis Three, unwittingly bringing Sarah Jane there as well, whither the Doctor follows in the TARDIS. Here’s where more of the story’s big ideas start to come into play. There are two distinct societies, the dominant society of the psychic eight-legs (they have a real thing against the word ‘spiders’ apparently) and the subservient two-legs society, who provide services, and from time to time make a tasty snack for the spiders. Allegorical? Maybe – it could be that if you allow yourself to be ruled by your unrestrained ego, then you will eventually be eaten by it. Hey, that works for me. The big idea here is that both eight legs and two legs arrived on Metebelis Three many centuries after the Doctor left it, when a spaceship crashed after it came out of ‘time jump’. The humans lived on the plain, while the ickle spiders from the ship scuttled away to the caves which were home to the blue crystals, which had the property of both magnifying their minds and their mental abilities – and also somewhat mysteriously allowing them to grow to giant size. Oh, and megalomania. It’s pretty clear that all of the spiders are pretty big on megalomania. All of them long to replace the Queen, who herself longs to replace the Great One, the mega spider who lives alone in the blue caves.

The Doctor foments a revolt among the two legs after discovering a type of stone that shields you against the effects of the spiders’ lightning bolts if you wear one tied to your forehead. While we’re talking about this section of the story let’s also note that Arak, one of the more rebellious of the two legs is played by a pre-New Avengers Gareth Hunt. This allows me to tell you my favourite Gareth Hunt-Dr. Who tenuous connection. When Denys Fisher started producing a range of Doctor Who action figures (translation – dolls) in 1977 during the 4^th Doctor & Leela era, something went wrong with the head they had come up with for the 4^th Doctor Doll, and so, with time at a premium, they used the mould for the Gareth Hunt(Mike Gambit) head from the range of New Avengers figures. Now, when you look at photos of the figure, to be fair it doesn’t look desperately unlike Tom Baker. But it does look more like Gareth Hunt.

Back to the review. The Doctor takes an excursion up to the blue caves, and meets the Great One, and we are treated to the rare sight of the third Doctor absolutely bricking it. He has to, because it’s all part of the allegory. Meanwhile Sarah, for the right reasons has done the wrong thing, allowing the Queen spider to jump on her back when it promises to free the humans, and help her defeat the Great One and destroy the power of the crystal. Which in allegorical terms displays the way that even the virtuous and those who seek out truth and enlightenment can be seduced by the promises of the unrestrained ego if they listen to its promises. Sarah materialises herself and the Doctor back at the retreat. Meanwhile Yates, who has become a bit of a spare part in what started as his own story, suggests to the other 4 male menopausal nerds that they can get Lupton back by forming the chanting circle again. He just wants Sarah Jane back. This has the effect of allowing 4 spiders to come across, and jump on the backs of the nerds, after they attack Yates, and Cho Je, one of the two Tibetan monks who run the centre.

The Doctor and Sarah arrive back, and they go to see the abbot. In the interim, Tommy, the handyman who has learning difficulties has had his mind cleared by the crystal which he found, and become something approaching a genius. He has taken the crystal to the main monk, who goes by the name of K’Anpo Rimpoche. When the Doctor and Sarah come to see K’Anpo, we learn that this is actually another Time Lord, and is none other than the wise old hermit mentor of the Doctor’s whom he talked about in “The Time Monster”.

Time for the allegory to kick in again. The Doctor realises that, although he didn’t see it that way at the time, he ‘stole’ the crystal from Metebelis Three. It belongs in the blue caves. Likewise, it was in the same blue caves that the Great One used her powers to make him experience his greatest fear. He also knows that the unique environment of the blue caves will, if he stays there long enough, destroy the cells of his body. Therefore K’Anpo spells it out to him that the only way he can bring the situation to a successful conclusion is by returning the blue crystal to the cave from which he took it. In terms of the allegory, this tells us that Enlightenment can only be reached through admitting what one has done wrong, making every effort to put these things to rights, and to atone for them, by facing one’s greatest fears, and finally, by a willingness to embrace the destruction of the ego. All of this the Doctor undergoes in giving the blue crystal to the Great One. The Great One, the ultimate expression of unrestrained ego, uses the crystal to complete a crystal lattice she has built which will exponentially magnify her mental powers. Predictably enough this blows her mind, then blows up the mountain above the cave as well.

Following this, it takes three weeks for the Doctor to return to UNIT HQ – which he tellingly calls ‘home’ and at this point he can only regenerate, since the third Doctor has done all that he can possibly do within this life to gain enlightenment, and now is the time for him to move on to his next life in his eternal quest for spiritual perfection.

I think. You see, I’m not a Buddhist, and I don’t really know that much about Buddhist thought and philosophy. So I’m quite impressed that I am actually able to see this spiritual level of meaning within the show. It really helps too, because if you don’t see this allegorical level, then otherwise ‘Planet of the Spiders’ is just a rather below par Pertwee story, with an overlong chase scene, and poorly realised and unscary spider models, rendered slightly more interesting by the presence of a new Time Lord, and by a regeneration scene.

I know which view of it I prefer.

What Have We Learned?

You don’t necessarily need to have a TARDIS to get away from Gallifrey

73: The Monster of Peladon

Before Watching

If I had been a wee bit older when this one was shown I might have been tempted to ask – does the world really need another Peladon story? To which the answer would probably have been – no, it doesn’t, since it never got another one after this.

Now, actually, the basic premise of the Doctor returning to the scene of a previous adventure is pretty fresh and novel, and it’s remarkable to think that it hasn’t really happened before. Well, alright, the TARDIS did return to the Ark at the end of its 600 year voyage, but then that was all part of the same story. Alright, so the Doctor has been to the Detsen Monastery before “The Abominable Snowmen” but that’s a plot point, and not a televised adventure so it doesn’t count. The Doctor’s returns to Gallifrey I suppose will count when he gets round to them.

After Watching

Last time out was Malcolm Hulke’s last contribution to the TV series, and this time we saw Brian Hayles’. Brian Hayles has, it’s probably fair to say, a mixed track record. His first script for Doctor Who was “The Celestial Toymaker” although it’s only fair to say that what was seen on screen was Gerry Davis’ rewrite of Donald Tosh’s rewrite of Brian Hayles original script. The Donald Tosh rewrite was so extensive that it was agreed that he would receive the screen credit, while Brian Hayles would be credited as having supplied the original idea. He then went on to write “The Smugglers”, the story which recast the Historical genre in the mould of historical adventure linked to a time period, rather than Historical genre linked to a specific event. Finally, in Season 5, the Monster Season, he hit paydirt with the Ice Warriors. They debuted in the story which bore their name. In season 6 they returned in his story “The Seeds of Death”, and then in season 9 in “The Curse of Peladon”, where the great surprise of the story was that they had actually renounced their old warrior ways, and were now acting as galactic peacemakers if anything. So we end with this story, a return to Peladon, and the last story featuring the Ice Warriors actually to be produced during the classic series.

With the exception of Earth it’s difficult to think of hardly any planets which the Doctor has already visited more than once. He visited Skaro in both “The Daleks” and “Evil of the Daleks”, but the Skaro of the latter is from a much later time period than the Skaro of the former, and there’s very little that the two have in common. “The Monster of Peladon” on the other hand takes place a mere fifty years after the events of the earlier story. There’s even one carry-over character, Alpha Centauri. In functional terms it is a useful plot device having Alpha Centauri return, since it saves a great amount of tedious toing and froing in the early episode with the Doctor having to prove that he is who he says that he is. In a way, Alpha Centauri is this story’s psychic paper.

There’s one big plus to doing a sequel story like this, and one big minus. I’ll start with the plus. If you use virtually the same setting for a story as one from a couple of seasons earlier, than you can reuse a lot of sets  and costumes. (Presumably you still have them in storage. If you don’t, then it’s a complete waste of time. ) Theoretically this should make it a cheaper show to produce, and save you money which you can put into the budget of the other shows in the production block. On the other hand it does put you under constraints. It requires a very careful eye to be kept on continuity, because if anything is said or done that contradicts the earlier story, people are definitely going to notice, and they’re going to get upset about it. So how well does “Monster” do as a follow on to “Curse”?

It’s often said that “Curse” was inspired by the UK’s impending entry to the EEC. By the same token “Monster” seems inspired by the Government’s industrial relations problems with the Miners which led to the 3 day week. (Me? Miners’ side of course, brother.) So on Peladon it is 50 years after the end of “Curse” and thus 50 years into Peladon’s membership of the Federation. The Federation is mired in a long standing war with Galaxy Five. (They would have picked on Galaxy Four, but the Drahvins and Rills would have bored them into submission). Peladon is rich in the mineral trisilicate which is essential to keeping a modern fleet of star cruisers going, or whatever the Federation called their space warships. The miners on Peladon are getting bolshie though, and surprisingly it’s nothing to do with the two tone afros which seem to be part of essential Peladon miner uniform. No, their beef is that for 50 years the Peladonian nobility have been enjoying the benefits of Federation membership, and getting fatter and richer on the profits than they were already, while the poor old miners are having to work harder than before for no commensurate rise in their standard of living. That’s not just my opinion, the Doctor actually says this when he’s giving the Queen a few home truths. I’ll come to her shortly. Now, what makes it even worse for the miners is that an apparition of their god beast Aggedor has started appearing in the mines, and when it does, a miner usually gets vaporised in a heat ray.

So essentially what we have is a simple little political parable, isn’t it?  Wrong. Or rather, there is a political parable there, but it’s not so neat and simple as it sounds, since there’s quite an ambiguous attitude towards the miners in the story. For one thing they are shown as not exactly cowardly, but they are very quick to swear to fight to the death, and then run a mile at the first hint of trouble soon after. Not only that, but they are shown as rather sheep like, and I’m not just referring to those hairdos either. They have a leader, Gebek, who is the voice of reason, talks sense, is calm and brave under fire, and is dedicated to his fellow miners. Then they also have a meathead called Ettis, who has a loud voice and a small brain. Ettis has ‘I’ll get you all slaughtered’ written all over his face, and yet the miners are at times just as ready to listen to Ettis and follow him as they are with Gebek. So the message is a rather patronising one of – these miner chappies, salt of the earth and all that, and yes of course, something should be done for them, but for Heaven’s sake don’t let them think for themselves since they’re not all that bright.- Not that the nobility, represented in the person of Chancellor Ortron come off a great deal better. He is an obstinate patrician, conditioned with the idea that those who are not of the nobility are inherently inferior to those who are, yet this position is intellectually undermined by the fact that he tries to manipulate Queen Thalira, who , as royalty, he should view as being that much better than he is, unless he is a hypocrite, which he is.

Speaking of Queen Thalira, she is the daughter of King Peladon from ‘Curse’, whom she says died when she was very young. Apparently there can only be a ruling queen when there is no male heir of the royal line. Queen Thalira is played by Nina Thomas, who is rather decorative, but starts so insipidly that it’s difficult to take her seriously when she later begins to develop a backbone. I’m not really sure how to view this. The Doctor’s suggestion that she takes a few lessons from Sarah Jane, and Sarah Jane’s little speech about Women’s Lib seems dreadfully forced and to be honest somewhat patronising when I watch it in 2015. But maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe this was actually quite progressive in 1974. A part of me says that while it is frankly rather cringe making to watch now (although I still think that ‘there’s nothing only about being a girl’ is a pretty good line) at least the story is maybe acknowledging that it has been guilty of some rather rampant chauvinism in the past. I honestly don’t know.

There is a story here too, mind you, and it isn’t just a random collection of characters making some rather heavy handed, quite paternalistic political points. The story, as such, is complicated by the presence of an Earthling mining engineer called Eckersley, played by Donald Gee, who was last seen in “The Space Pirates”, and Alpha Centauri, who is now the ambassador to Peladon. It is the original Egghead here who contacts the Federation and asks them to send in some ‘peace keeping’ forces. The Ice Warriors, led by one Azaxyr, turn up almost immediately. The thing is, they were already there on Peladon, hiding out in the trisilicate refinery, and they are not Federation Forces at all. In fact they are not even official Ice Warrior troops. We eventually learn that they are a breakaway Ice Warrior faction who long to return to the old ways of slaughter, conquest and bloodshed. The corrupt Earth mining engineer Eckersley has hatched a plot with them for them to declare Martial Law on Peladon, bully the miners back to work, then sell the trisilicate to the Galaxy Five forces, thus making Eckersley the richest and most powerful man in the Galaxy. If he had a waxed moustache he’d have been twirling it when he announced this. It is Eckersley who created the Aggedor projector/heat ray machine.

Let’s consider the way that the Ice Warriors come across in this, their last appearance in the classic series. In a way, Brian Hayles was always onto a loser bringing them back in this story. In “The Ice Warriors” the warriors themselves had a kind of motivation for what they did. In “The Seeds of Death” this had developed into out and out evil malevolence and desire for conquest, which was accompanied by the usual incompetence we’ve come to expect from evil malevolent aliens bent on conquest. Then in ‘Curse’ they had developed as a species, renouncing conquest, taking their place within the Federation and showing that they were clearly some way along the road to Enlightenment. There was nowhere left to go with them for Brian Hayles, short of making them bad again. OK, so we get the tacked on explanation that this is a breakaway faction, but there’s no getting away from the fact that this seems like a renunciation of the bold and effective step that he took with them in the previous story. Which is a mistake.

So, when the Ice Warriors’ brutality and their ultimate aims of domination of Peladon become clear, we see the Monarchy, the bourgeois nobility, the guards (military) and the proletariat all throwing in their lot with each other to defend the Peladonian way of life, a way of life with which a lot of them are by no means satisfied, by the way. Now, I’d be charitable and say that this is a clever comment by Brian Hayles on the way that throughout History rulers and politicians have used war and conflict to distract people’s attention from the issues at home which they are failing to deal with and thus cling on to power. But the way the Doctor comments approvingly on this development rather makes me think it isn’t meant to be viewed ironically like this. The Ice Warriors and Eckersley are defeated by a combination of the Doctor’s superhuman ability to resist Eckersley’s security systems to use the Aggedor projector and the heat ray against the Ice Warriors, and the determination of the people of Peladon to fight together and defeat the Ice Warriors. As a bonus, once the Ice Warriors are defeated Galaxy Five immediately opens negotiations for peace, since they know they can’t possibly win without the trisilicate that Eckersley was going to send them.

Let’s examine the end of the story immediately prior to the Doctor’s departure. Queen Thalira virtually begs him to stay on as her advisor and Chancellor. He refuses, saying that she doesn’t need anyone to tell her what to do now. Right, if this story was serious about making a point about feminism, or showing any feminist credentials, then it should have been Sarah to say this, and not the Doctor. Even more so, once it had been said, then that was the time to leave. However they don’t. The script compounds this by having the Doctor suggest the miner Gebek as the next Chancellor. On the surface this looks like the dawn of a new era of class equality and opportunity on Peladon. It is nothing of the sort. Queen Thalira pays a patronising tribute to Gebek’s excellent qualities , then says there has never been  a chancellor who has not been a member of the nobility before. Firstly the Doctor tells her not to worry about old fashioned thinking like that. This is the second point at which he needs to stop talking and leave immediately. But he doesn’t. He ruins the whole thing by saying ‘anyway, you can always give him some sort of title.’ It’s a throwaway line, but it illustrates so much of what is wrong about ‘The Monster’ of Peladon as a political parable. For essentially the Doctor has just given Thalira carte blanche to maintain the whole unjust system. By giving Gebek a title, she would reinforce the idea that the top jobs are only for the nobility, since she has to make Gebek one. Where this old class system survives, for example in the UK, it does so because it allows the exceptional individual to arise from among the proletariat, but absorbs them into the elite before they have a chance to effect any real change. Yes, there is no reason why a politician who has not attended Oxford or Cambridge University should not become Prime Minister. Precious few of them ever have done so, though.  Just my opinion, of course, and feel free to disagree.

If you are totally apolitical, and view this just as an adventure story about aliens fighting, some with future weapons, some with swords, then frankly it’s a bit of a tired old slog at 6 episodes long. If you try to view it as a political text it’s a lot more interesting. Albeit rather more muddled. You see, while it makes noises about political change, about giving the poor old miners a fair deal, it is actually far more conservative, in fact far more reactionary than that. It is never really a criticism of the semi feudal/semi proto-capitalist society that Peladon actually is, and in fact the only solution to the class conflict in the story that is offered is to take the one effective member of the proletariat, and graft him into the reactionary and ineffective nobility, thus making them more effective and as a result, more powerful. Interesting, and frankly, rather indefensible. Feel free to disagree.

What Have We Learned?

Get a few miners to stop striking, kill a few Ice Warriors, and you too could find yourself in the House of Lords. 

72: Death to the Daleks

Before Watching

Now, there’s a title to get your pulse racing. I’m going to have to be careful not to say too much before we get to the after watching section of this review, since I’m afraid that this is another of those shown in its entirety on the Horror Channel within the last couple of years, which I found the time to sit down and enjoy. Terry Nation, then returned to the fold as it were with season 10’s “Planet of the Daleks”. That essentially was something of a remake of his own “The Daleks” from season 1. In fact, Terry Nation did develop a reputation for rehashing his own material. There is a lovely story, possibly apocryphal, in which Terry Nation is having a meeting with the Producer and Script Writer du jour, discussing a script, and he is supposed to have asked whether they liked it. The producer then replied, “We love your script, Terry, just as we loved it every time you sold it to us in the past.”

So, bearing in mind I only last watched it about a year ago, can I reasonably expect to derive anything new from this story? Well, yes, maybe I can. For when I watched it last week I had not seen every Dalek story before Death to the Daleks. Now I have, and so you never know, this in itself may mean that I come to view it in a different light. Let’s see, shall we?

After Watching

Unless I’m imagining it there’s quite a famous publicity shot from the 4^th Doctor’s time which shows Sarah, clad in beach wear, emerging from the TARDIS with the Doctor, expecting to be in some exotic location, but finding that snow is falling all around her. She should have known better by then, since in the start of this story he has clearly promised to show her a good time in some exotic location, as she starts off dressed in blue beachwear this time. The Doctor is always doing this in the classic series, taking his companions off for a promised holiday in a beauty spot which never materializes, should you pardon the pun. Only a couple of stories ago he kept trying to drag poor old Jo off to Metebelis 3 – no wonder she went off with the Welshman.

We know pretty much what we’re going to get with a Jon Pertwee story now. It’s never going to blow your mind, with the sheer brilliance of a “Mind Robber” or “Deadly Assassin”, but it’s never going to plum the depths of “The Twin Dilemma” either. Seriously, write down a list of the worst Jon Pertwee stories, and then see how many of them would be in your bottom 10. Not many, I’ll be bound. So then, since it’s Jon, the Doctor is going to be dashing around, being heroic, throwing out expositions, barking at idiots, and saving the day – because that’s what the Third Doctor does, without fail. There’s plenty of that in this story.

The TARDIS lands off course, on the planet of the Exxilons. Something is draining power out of the TARDIS. The Doctor meets a group of people from Earth, who are trying to get a supply of Parrinium, (and when you pronounce this on the telly it sounds uncomfortably like perineum) which is essential to fight a terrible space plague. Their ship has been drained of power. So has a ship belonging to the Daleks, who have come for the same reason. Even their guns fail. This is an interesting idea – after all, a Dalek is almost defined by its gun. So what does one do when the gun doesn’t work? Simple – make an alliance with the humans – who can be as evil as Daleks when they want to be – and make sure that you bump them off as soon as you get the opportunity. Fix a different kind of gun to your redundant gun, and hey presto, you’re hot to trot.

So the Earthlings and Daleks strike up a fragile alliance, and put the indigenous Exxilons to work, getting the parrinium for them. See how I told you that humans could act just as evilly as Daleks. This is a point that we are obviously meant to make for ourselves, and the Doctor’s opposition to what is happening really does him some credit.

Meanwhile Sarah has in her own inimitable fashion stumbled up to the great city of the ancient Exxilons. Now, at this stage we get some serious echoes of “Colony in Space”. In both stories an ancient civilization has decayed, and the native in habitants, have descended to ‘primitivism’ over many generations. They have left behind their great city generations ago, but worship it. To enter is forbidden, and just as Jo did in “Colony in Space”, so does Sarah in this story and when the Exxilons find Sarah there they duly take her away for sacrifice.

The resolution to the plot involves the Doctor discovering that it is the city draining power from the TARDIS and the ships. With the help of Bellal, a ‘good’ Exxilon, he enters the city, beating booby traps and facing challenges, with the Daleks hot on his heels.  Now, cards on the table, I like the trope of finding your way into an ancient city, facing challenges and overcoming them to reach the treasure that lies within. It was used to great effect in 3 of the Indiana Jones movies, and is far older than Doctor Who – going back to Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines” and arguably back as far as the mythological story of Jason and the Argonauts. Classic Doctor Who used a slight variation on this theme in “Pyramids of Mars” and again in “The Five Doctors”, but this was the first.

I don’t know whether this had anything to do with it, but this story would have been in the planning stage right about, or just after the time of the great Tutankhamen exhibition in the British Museum in 1972. Now, my parents didn’t actually take me to see the exhibition, which was a shame. I can’t complain too much because they did take me to see the BBC Special Effects exhibition in the Science Museum. I did get to see the 2007 Tutankhamen Exhibition at the O2 Arena, which had more exhibits than the 1972 exhibition, but sadly not the gold death mask. However, I digress. At the time of the 1972 exhibition there were a lot of books and a lot of TV shows about Tutankhamen and the discovery of his tomb. Now, I can’t say for certain that this was the catalyst for my love of this particular archaeologically based adventure genre, but then I wouldn’t say that it wasn’t either. Who knows, it may even have been the inspiration for this aspect of the story. Admittedly this only uses some of the trappings of the genre. There’s no great prize, no enlightenment awaiting the Doctor at the heart of the ‘tomb’, only the opportunity to hopefully destroy the city.

The City itself, even more than the Daleks, is the great enemy in this story, and it’s an interesting idea, one that takes this story some way beyond “Colony in Space”. In short, the Exxilons built the city to be capable of repairing and maintaining itself. Hence we have the huge and tentacular roots that attack the Doctor when they believe him to be a threat to the city. The ancient Exxilons fitted the city with a gigantic supercomputer for a brain, and the city instantly realized that it could function much better on its own, and cleared itself of its infestation of Exxilons. The only remaining descendants are the ‘primitive’ Exxilons on the surface, and the small band living under the city, like Bellal. The idea is a different slant on the dangers of technology. The City’s purpose was originally to provide a home to living organisms. When  it becomes seemingly sentient it destroys the organisms it was built to serve, thus losing its’ purpose at the same time. The City’s purpose then becomes its’ own continued existence and nothing more,  which essentially is a warning to us all , since its’ existence is at best, sterile, and at worst, malign. The message would seem to be then, that to simply be is not a good enough purpose for existence. Self-perpetuation is a means, but it should never be an end in itself.

The City and its’ history give us a clue to another source or influence upon the story. When he is shown some of the markings which are on the City wall by Bellal, the Doctor realizes that he has seen the same markings on a temple wall in Peru. Really? When? It wasn’t during the Aztecs, since anyone knows that they lived in Mexico. Leaving that to one side, this looks again like another nod to human development being guided and aided by aliens, as we saw in “The Daemons”, which ties in with “Chariots of the Gods” and by Erich Von Daniken, and its many sequels and imitators. Not for the last time in Doctor Who, either. This ‘Shaggy God story’ was first published in 1968, and its’ enjoyably crackpot theories became hugely popular in the early 1970s, partly due to a 1970 documentary, and a number of TV shows. Without wanting to spend too much time paraphrasing the text of the book, Von Daniken and his imitators and successors claim that they believe that human civilization developed through the intercession of technologically advanced alien beings, who were worshipped as Gods, and that there is ample proof available if you know what you are looking for.

This is the third of four Dalek stories which have appeared once a season since season 9. Yes, I know that they appear in the end of Frontier in Space – but that acts more of a lead in to this story, not unlike the Daleks’ appearance in “The Space Museum” paving the way for “The Chase”).You’ve got the intelligent story which reintroduces the Daleks (Day of the Daleks), then the Daleks’ Greatest Hits story (Planet of the Daleks), and after this the epic story which introduces the origins of the Daleks – and so I always think that this is the ugly duckling of the four. Which is a shame considering that it’s certainly more original than the preceding Dalek story.  An enemy (in this case the City) more powerful than the Daleks are is an interesting departure.

The Daleks have had another makeover for this show. The Daleks in “Planet of the Daleks” were dark, matt coloured daleks, which gave them a more military,’ this means business’ feel. The Daleks in this story are certainly brighter than we’ve ever seen them before. Their bodies are painted silver, and a bright silver at that, while all of their lumps and bumps are black. This does make them stand out far more against the dull, sandy and grey background of the quarry which stood in for the planet Exxilon (which was presumably unavailable due to prior commitments). It does also make the scene where the Dalek bursts into flames after an attack by the Exxilons more vivid as well.

In fact, destruction is something of a keynote in this story, certainly in the last episode. There’s the destruction of the city itself. The city hasn’t been a bad model up to this point. There is a tendency to only go a couple of ways when you’re designing an alien city of the future. Domes, spires and aerial walkways is one – like the city of the Mechanoids in “The Chase”, and the other is mega-ziggurat. This city is the latter. All in all its’ destruction scene is a little bit of a letdown. Presumably it was made from a block of something like polystyrene, and acetone or something similar was poured over it. So the city just sort of subsides, liquefies and congeals, and the overall effect is not the most effective.  Likewise, the classic TV series, as opposed to the film, has always had a bit of a problem with Dalek ships. We recall the flying saucer in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and the ‘Dardis’ in “The Chase”.  In the climax of this story, after the Doctor has given the City’s brain insoluble problems to deal with to give it the equivalent of a stroke, the Daleks, in time honoured fashion, decide to do a runner with the loot.  All of which allows grizzled Scottish space marine, Dan Galloway, to smuggle himself and a bomb aboard the Dalek saucer – result? – Mit der bang, mit der boom, mit der bing bang, bing bang boom. A little simplistic, but then this is the Pertwee era, and if the denouement doesn’t actually involve reversing any polarity, then that’s sophistication enough.

Compare this story with next season’s “Genesis of the Daleks” and you can learn a lot about the differences between the Pertwee era and the series with Tom Baker. Which we will do. What we mustn’t do though, is forget that this is maybe not the greatest of all Dalek stories – there’s no maybe, it isn’t – but it rattles along well enough, and that’ll do for me.

What Have We Learned?

When Apple finally get around to inventing the iCity we should probably give it a miss. 

71: The Invasion of the Dinosaurs

Before Watching

Some stories have one or two poor special effects in them, which you can easily gloss over, and which do nothing to spoil your enjoyment of them. Then there are others where, for some strange reason, it is only that poor shot that you ridiculed at the time which stubbornly refuses to remove itself from the dump bin of memory, and dominates your recollections of the whole story. Another example would be the Action Man Scorpion tank used in “Robot” next season, and Dobbin the Myrkka in “Warriors of the Deep” in season 21. We’ll get to them in due course.

So, look, we already know that the Dinosaurs in this show aren’t at all good. That probably upset me more than it should when I first watched it, since there were a number of things I was really into during the Jon Pertwee era of the show. Manned spaceflight was one of them, and so were dinosaurs, and so that’s maybe an explanation of why I can’t hear the words “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” without the phrase – bad dinosaurs, bad dinosaurs- playing on a loop through my head for a while. So what I’m hoping for from this particular viewing, is a chance to assess this story for the story, rather than the effects. At the moment I have it filed in my memory in the cabinet marked ‘crap Doctor Who stories’ and I would hate for it to have to remain there a moment longer than is necessary, not least because this is Malcolm Hulke’s last story.

After Watching

Was it hubris which made the Barry Letts production team go ahead with this story? I’ll explain why I ask. For pretty much the whole of the Pertwee era, when the special effects have been bad, they have got away with them, simply because they’ve never tried telling you they’re any good. There’s this tacit understanding along the lines of – look, we’re going to do the best we can to show you the things we need to show you for the story. Some of it, frankly, isn’t going to be brilliant, but it’s the best we can do, and you’ll forgive us for it. – Now, if you call a story “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” it’s not simply a case of  - oh and by the way there’s a dinosaur in it – as was the case with season 7’s “The Silurians”. No, you highlight the dinosaurs in the title, and you’re basically saying – Hey – look, we’ve got some dinosaurs. . . and they’re good enough that we want to shout about it!-  And the problem is, they’re not.

So how bad are the dinosaurs in this? Well, being fair there’s only two really bad ones. Unfortunately these are the first we see, the pterodactyl, and the most foregrounded dinosaur the T-Rex. Well, that’s what they call it, although frankly it really didn’t look like any reconstruction of a T Rex that I’ve ever seen. Let’s start with the pterodactyl. I’m afraid that time has certainly withered this one, and custom staled. It doesn’t matter how skilfully you film it, but a rubber pterodactyl dangling on a wire will always look like a rubber pterodactyl dangling on a wire. Now, none of the land bound dinosaurs moves particularly well, but at least the sauropod, stegosaurus and triceratops look halfway decent. The sauropod is actually called a brontosaurus by the Doctor – he should have known that not long after the story was filmed pretty much everyone would stop calling this species by that technically inaccurate name, and switch to Apatosaurus. Not that this would be a problem for me if that was the only complaint about the dinosaurs. But as I say, the incidental dinosaurs don’t move at all well, but the models really aren’t bad. But the would-be T-Rex, well, I’m sorry but it’s god-awful, and it keeps popping up all over the story, virtually immobile apart from its pathetic twitching arms.

Now, this is going to sound contrary, but in a way I think the dinosaur deficiencies would matter less if they were more important to the story. That’s not a typing error.  When you boil it down, the dinosaurs are in the story for one reason really, and that is to provide spectacle. When they fail to do this because of the shortcomings of the models used, and their animation, then their inclusion is worse than pointless, it is a definite failure. We don’t need dinosaurs in order for the plot to work. The villains bring dinosaurs into the present day for two reasons – to test their equipment presumably, and to scare the authorities into evacuating London. Well, they could do the same thing just s easily by, for the sake of argument, bringing some plague rats from the 1665 plague. Yes, they would kill a lot of people, but hey, they were going to die, or should I say, to never have existed in the first place, so who loses? As a rule, more often than not the show is very aware of what it can and can’t do, but in terms of effects this is a prime example of the show overreaching itself. In practice the dinosaurs it could produce did not provide the spectacle the title promised.

The sad thing is that all of this is a distraction from what is actually important about this story – the ideas behind the script, the script itself, and the way that the cast deliver the script. Let’s start with the ideas behind the script. The Doctor and Sarah return from their medieval avdventure with Linx the Sontaran to find modern day London deserted. This is nicely done, and evokes fond memories of both “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and “The Web of Fear”. The deserted city is a Science Fiction trope I’ve always enjoyed. Their first inkling that someone is maybe monkeying around with Time is the encounter with the pterodactyl. The dinosaurs appear, seemingly out of nowhere. They have in fact been gathered by a piece of equipment, a machine invented by a Professor Whitaker played by the excellent Peter Miles. He was Dr. Lawrence in Malcolm Hulke’s earlier “The Silurians”, and next season will play Nyder, Davros naziest henchman in “Genesis of the Daleks”. Would the name Whitaker be a sly reference to David Whitaker, I wonder? Whitaker and his associate Butler, played by Martin Jarvis in suitably oleaginous and nefarious form, under the aegis of Sir Charles Grover MP and General Finch, are putting into practice a scheme. This firstly involves the evacuation of London, and the removal of the Government to Harrogate – which is achieved through the dinosaur apparitions. Secondly, they will use the machine to make the Earth regress in time millions of years. He has several hundred people, many of whom are stored in suspended animation, who believe that they are on a spaceship heading to a planet they have dubbed ‘New Earth’ to start a new civilization since what’s on the old one is going so rapidly down the toilet. When they have regressed the Earth, then these people will be told they have landed, and will start to build a society which will avoid the mistakes of the past.

Ok – well, it doesn’t do too much to over analyse sci fi ideas behind and adventure story, but it seemed to me when I watched it that this scheme would be a classic example of the grandfather paradox. If that doesn’t ring a bell, a simple way of explaining it would be this. One day you invent a time machine. You go back in time and materialise on top of your own grandfather, crushing him to death before he ever met your grandmother. This means that your father was never born, which in turns means that you were never born. This means that you never invented a time machine, so you didn’t go back in time, so your grandfather did survive, so your father was born, so you were born, so you went back in time and accidentally killed your grandfather etc. etc. So if Grover’s lot went back in time, this would condemn pretty much the whole population of the earth never to have been born – and, although I didn’t hear anybody mention it on the show, which is a bit strange considering that as flaws in plans go it’s a bit of a biggie – condemning Grover and Butler and Whitaker’s own ancestors never to have been born – with predictable consequences.

Well, leaving that to one side, when the crazed Whitaker does activate the machine, everyone seems to be caught, frozen in time, except the Doctor. Being a Time Lord it seems that he has the ability to move outside of time, albeit very slowly. Jon Pertwee mimes moving in slow motion to turn the switch off. This section reminded me a little of the pretty much contemporary Six Million Dollar Man TV series, when Lee Majors would mime moving in slow motion to show off how strong he was. Look, I was only ten years old at the time and it made sense to me. This isn’t inconsistent with everything that has gone before – we know that the Doctor can exist within the Time Vortex for example, from “The Time Monster”.

So the ideas beind the story are pretty much hokum. The idea of the deluded elite within the ‘spaceship’ reminded me a little bit of the people kept in the bunker by Salamander in “The Enemy of the World”. There’s a level of predictability about it as well. I couldn’t remember that much about the story, but as soon as we met Sir Charles Grover, even though the Doctor seemed quite taken with him, being that kind of establishment figure who either muck everything up for everyone, or are downright villains in this era of the show, I knew he was the chief black hat. At least, well, at least it wasn’t overtly through megalomania, which is a welcome departure from a lot of what we’ve seen, but through a misguided, in fact downright twisted messiah complex.

So, we have a story which relies on the showcase effects to provide spectacle, which they singularly fail to do. We have a storyline with a couple of gaping plot holes. Yet for all that “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” is not a grade A oven ready turkey – and it’s turned out that even the least good Pertwee stories never tend to be that. What stops it from becoming that particular avian, then? Well, the regulars have some pretty good back up in the guest cast. I’ve already mentioned Peter Miles and Martin Jarvis . Completing the baddies there’s a fine performance from Noel Johnson as Grover, while John Bennett’s Finch was an interesting sort of Anti-Brigadier. Even amongst the cameo parts we had Carmen Silvera, last seen, I think, giving her all on the sinking ship the RMS Celestial Toymaker, who played Ruth, one of the leaders of the elite aboard the ‘spaceship’.  As for the regulars, I felt his was the story where Sarah Jane really started to become the Sarah Jane we all ( well I do) know and love. She’s treated like a spare part for the first three episodes, but once she leaves the Doctor and goes off to investigate by herself she’s just as brave, feisty and gutsy as Jo Grant ever was – and – sorry Jo, quite a bit smarter too.

I suppose we should end with a comment on the betrayal by Richard Franklin’s Mike Yates. Yates never really worked for me in UNIT. He was neither one thing nor the other, and I have to say that Richard Franklin never seemed to have the greatest range either. On a good day he could run the full gamut of emotions from A to B. I’m afraid that when asked to play out of his range in this story, that is, to show the treacherous Yates’ crisis of conscience when Butler or Finch asks him to sabotage the Doctor’s equipment, he frankly looks rather constipated.

So farewell, then , Malcolm Hulke. If you look at all the stories he wrote or co-wrote –

The Faceless Ones

The War Games

The Silurians

The Ambassadors of Death (credited to David Whitaker)

Colony in Space

The Sea Devils

Frontier in Space

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

- it’s quite a body of work, all of it thoughtful, some of it very good, and all of it a cut above the average. Thanks Malcolm.  

Helicopter Watch

At one point the Doctor is giving the slip to General Finch’s men, and is tracked by a small, fast army helicopter

What Have We Learned?

The Time Lords only care when other Time Lords use a Time Scoop. When humans use the equivalent, they couldn’t give a stuff. 

70: The Time Warrior

Before Watching

Since Dennis Spooner’s “The Time Meddler” we’ve had precious few pseudo-historicals like this, that is stories set in the Earth’s past, yet with a definite science fiction element other than the Doctor and companions arriving via time machine. In fact, the only one that comes to mind is “The Evil of the Daleks” and that didn’t do a great deal with Victorian Britain, which was after all only one of the locations of the story.

I’m not entirely sure why. After all, one of the essential problems with the pukka Historicals was that either they became pure adventure stories where the past is merely used as a kind of wallpaper, like the late Historicals, “The Smugglers” and “The Highlanders”, or you had the Doctor and companions being essentially bystanders and observers, the audience to History, but not participants within it. In a pseudo Historical you avoid this problem, since it’s pretty clear that the Doctor must act in order to prevent the course of History being diverted. Classic Who, though, continued to steer clear of this kind of story for a long time after “The Time Meddler”. In that story you may recall the Meddling Monk’s plan was to use 20^th century weapons technology to defeat Harald Hardrada before the battle of Stamford Bridge, sparing Harold Godwinsson the effort, and ensuring him victory at Hastings. Well, Hastings was a real, pivotal, Historical event. The next time that the Doctor would actually be trying to prevent a real Historical event from being wiped out of History wouldn’t be until season 20’s final story, “The King’s Demons” where the Master plans to prevent the signing of Magna Carta.

Look, I can’t lie to you. I watched this one again last year on the Horror Channel. I’m sorry, but I can’t be expected to sit there idly twiddling my thumbs while they’re showing a classic, Robert Holmes – Jon Pertwee story. I know what happens, I know what it’s like – I know the goodies that are within – the debut of both the Sontarans and my favourite classic companion, Sarah Jane Smith. Actually, I’ll be interested to see over the next couple of series whether Sarah Jane manages to stay in that enviable position  - Jacqueline Hill’s Barbara is a serious contender for the crown too.

After Watching

The first thing that struck me about the new title sequence was how unhappy and old Jon Pertwee appears on it, compared with the smiley, short haired Pertwee whose ginning phizzog has welcomed us to every episode previously. Maybe it’s a good job that this is a Robert Holmes story, and a four parter to boot, to get him back into the swing of things.

The story opens in the late12th/ early 13th century. The earliest action is centred on the castle of Irongron. Irongron is a bandit, who is a bit like Robin Hood, in as much as he robs the rich, although he hasn’t got around to giving it to the poor yet. Irongron is played by David Daker, a very well known face on TV in the 70s and 80s. He was the baddy in Richard O’Sullivan’s rather lacklustre “Dick Turpin”, and is possibly best remembered as Harry Crawford in “Boon”. With his lived in face David Daker was never going to be cast as shrinking violetty, sensitive types, and I doubt that his Hamlet would ever have been much to write home about. Cast him as a thug like Irongron, though, and he’d always do a throroughly good job for you. And in this Robert Holmes script he has quite a bit of good stuff to work with.

Supplies are running low, when Irongron and his wingman Bloodaxe see what looks like a shooting star. They ride out to where it came to Earth, and find a small space capsule which contains a warrior in a metal helmet. The Time Warrior, after claiming Earth for the Sontaran empire, enlists Irongron’s help, promising to give him new fangled weapons which will help him overcome any of his enemies. And all this in the first 6 minutes or so.

Using this time to set up the situation with Irongron and Linx, the Sontaran, means that when we do cut straight to UNIT we don’t need a long exposition scene telling us about disappearing scientists – we work out what is happening, and put two and two together to link it with Linx. It also gives a little more time to introduce Sarah Jane Smith. Sarah Jane, played by the late beautiful and talented Elisabeth Sladen, is a journalist, who is posing as her Aunt Lavinia, a famous scientist, to investigate exactly what is going on. When another Scientist, one Professor Rubeish, a scientist who is a prime example of the ‘dotty old fool’ variety thereof, disappears, the Doctor uses a doohickey to get a fix on where he has gone. Sarah goes rooting about in the TARDIS, just before the Doctor decides that it’s a case of tally-ho, the game’s afoot, and sets off after him. Amazingly the TARDIS makes a near perfect landing.

At the end of episode 1 Linx raises his helmet and we get our first sight of the head of a Sontaran. The Sontarans, although not always used to the best advantage, would reappear another 3 times in classic Doctor Who, in “The Sontaran Experiment”, “The Invasion of Time” and “The Two Doctors”. One interesting fact is that their appearance changed, slightly but noticeably each time they appeared – which doesn’t really matter than much apart from the fact that they are supposed to be a cloned species that are absolutely identical to each other. The Sontarans, although the last of the great recurring monsters to appear in classic Doctor Who (by which I mean the Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and Sontarans) they would actually appear in the post 2005 series before the Ice Warriors were exhumed.

The action, then, remains in the medieval milieu. Irongron wants ‘modern’ firearms so that he can attack and defeat his near neighbour Edward of Wessex. Sarah Jane, after escaping from Irongron’s clutches with the help of the Xeron leader from “The Space Museum”, Jeremy Bullock, who plays Hal the Archer. It’s quite forgiving of him since Sarah Jane distracts him when he is about to shoot Irongron, and thus ensures that he is captured and his life is in danger. Thus when they reach the castle of Edward, we find that in fact on the side of the goodies we have Lord Beardy of Weirdy, Lady Dot of Cotton and Sir Boba of Fett. June Brown is a terrific actress who has rightfully received plaudits for her long lasting role in “Eastenders”, and while Lady Eleanor isn’t the meatiest role she’ll ever have played she imbues her with a certain steeliness which mirrors Sarah’s own , for it’s Sarah who persuades Edward to stage an attack on Irongron.

Episode two sees the meeting between Linx and the Doctor which reveals his plan. His capsule has some elementary time technology, which enables him to seize scientists from the 20^th century – that-s the furthest range that the power source of his capsule will allow. The scientists are then fitted with mind control devices, and used either to carry out the necessary repairs on Linx’s capsule, or to fashion the firearms that Linx has promised Irongron. The Doctor reveals, for the first time, that he is actually from Gallifrey, prompting Linx’s famous observation that the Time Lords have great power, but lack ‘the morale to withstand a determined assault’. And from that throwaway line will come one of the less successful Tom Baker stories in the shape of “The Invasion of Time”. That’s in all of our futures for now, though. It’s been a while since we’ve come back to the issue of whether you can change history or not. The only previous time in Jon Pertwee’s tenure was in “Day of the Daleks”. The third Doctor’s reaction to Linx is completely consistent with his reaction to the Monk in “The Time Meddler” – his meddling with Earth history would be disastrous, and he will not allow it to happen.

In fact, the more I think about it the more the comparison to “The Time Meddler” seems an apt one. There’s the obvious connection with the setting – alright, there’s more than 100 years between 1066, and the dawn of the 14^th century which is when this one is set, but that’s really not a great difference in terms of the culture and society of the times, certainly not as far as Hollywood or TV drama is concerned anyway. Then rather more subtly, there’s the tone. Yes, there are some nasty things that happen in this, or that nearly happen, I should say, but overall the tone of both is of a historically based romp, with a vein of comedy and fun running through it. Not that Linx is a comic character as the Monk is. But in “The Time Warrior” the funny lines are spread out between several of the characters, thus we get Irongron’s memorable description of the Doctor as ‘a long-shanked rascal with a mighty nose’, and then when The Doctor tells professor Rubeish that he is looking for Sarah, ‘I’m looking for a girl’, Rubeish muses ‘I would have thought he was a bit old for all that.’

Now, a short digression, which will, hopefully, make sense in the fullness of time. Superman, the archetypal superhero was created in the early 30s by schoolboys Jerome Seigel and Joe Shuster, and eventually sold to DC comics where he made his first appearance in Action Comics no. 1 in 1938. When he first appeared, Superman didn’t fly, and once of the claims made about him was ‘nothing short of a bursting (artillery) shell could pierce his skin’. Soon his super leaps became flights, and the claim had been changed to ‘not even a bursting shell could pierce his skin’. Superman soon became so super that it was totally unbelievable that anyone could ever so much as inconvenience him, let alone defeat him. Which is why the writers of the time came up with the concept of kryptonite. For those unfamiliar with it, basically Superman was sent to earth from his home planet of Krypton by his parents when he was a tiny baby, because Krypton was about to explode. Kryptonite is pieces of the core of the exploded planet. At first there was just kryptonite – which came to be known as green kryptonite, a short exposure to which robbed Superman of his powers, and a long exposure to which would kill him. In time this would be joined with other colours of kryptonite which would have different effects.

Now, what this has to do with Doctor Who is that the more powerful a monster, the more there needs to be a kryptonite, a weakness which can be exploited to defeat them. With the cybermen, to pick one example, their ‘kryptonite’ has been, at different times, radiation, gravity, acetone, gold and so on. Now, in “The Time Warrior” Sontaran kryptonite comes in the form of the probic vent. Remember, the Sontarans are a genetically engineered species, and instead of the inefficient refuelling means we humans use, that is, eating and drinking, they refuel through an orifice which is called the probic vent. Now, the probic vent is really and truly the only part of a Sontaran that is vulnerable- extremely vulnerable as it happens. So, bearing in mind that they are a genetically engineered species, their designer must have been having a really bad day when he decided to put the probic vent on the back of their necks, where they can neither reach it, nor see any danger approaching it. It’s the only real criticism that I have  of the Sontarans, that their kryptonite is so obvious. Linx isn’t defeated because he is outthought, or out-technologied by the Doctor. He is defeated because Hal the Archer gets one lucky shot at the probic vent. And it’s a shame, since the Sontarans otherwise have a hell of a lot going for them. In most ways they are more interesting and far more adaptable than, by way of comparison, the Cybermen. Could you ever see a cyberman being used in the same way as the revived series has used Dan Starkey’s Strax for comic effect as a member of the Paternoster Gang? I rest my case.

All in all then, if we’re prepared to lavish praise on Robert Homes – and I am – we must also apply criticism where it is due. So this isn’t quite an all-time Holmes classic for me. But it is what it is, a very enjoyable slice of late-Pertweeana, and there’s much to enjoy here.

What have we learned?

Practically everything important we’ll need to know about the Sontarans

Sarah-Jane Smith is as gutsy and brave as Jo Grant, but more feisty too. She’s a keeper.