38: The Abominable Snowmen

Before Watching

This one has a special place in my heart, and it’s all because of the Target novelisation. Terrance Dicks’ “Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen” was the first novelisation based on a Troughton story to be published back in about 1975, and that’s exactly when I read it. Now, you have to remember that I was in the primary school at the time, so not necessarily the most demanding or discerning of readers. Nonetheless, the story struck an instant chord with me, and it’s one that I’ve often wished would be found. I can remember the story in the novelisation very clearly, not least because I found out last year that the book was available for the kindle for a couple of quid, and so I downloaded it more quickly than you can say Padmasambhava.

As for the TV story, well, again, I do have some previous with this story. Many years ago, and we must be talking about the early 1990s here, UK Gold had a Doctor Who weekend, one of the delights on offer being that they were showing episode 2, the only existing episode of “The Abominable Snowmen”. I vaguely remember being slightly disappointed, although not why I felt so.

One more word before we start then. A quick google brings me the joyous piece of information that Henry Lincoln, co-writer of this story, is indeed the same Henry Lincoln who went on to make a decent packet of money with that piece of glorious hokum, “The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail”.

After Watching

Oh, isn’t it nice sometimes when something you enjoyed so much as a kid isn’t revealed to your adult self to be a piece of rubbish. Or put it another way, I thoroughly enjoyed that. I loved the start of the story, where it was obvious that the Doctor had been having adventures which we knew nothing about. When he realizes he has landed near the Detsen monastery in the Himalayas he remembers he has been there before, during a time of strife and troubles, when he took their holy ghanta – a sort of decorated bell – into safe keeping. So his motivation for leaving the TARDIS to visit the monastery is clear, he is fulfilling his promise to return the ghanta. That isn’t the most complicated plot device, but it does, in a very understated way, underline what must be a great source of sadness for the Doctor. Even when he does land in a familiar place, all the people he knew there are likely to be long dead, or not even born yet. Also it underlines how Padmasambhava’s life has been extended by the Great Intelligence, since he was there the last time the Doctor visited, a couple of hundred years earlier.

This story illustrates what Doctor Who – indeed the best family dramas – can do. It is perfectly possible to take the story and enjoy it as just an adventure story, which it is, but there is some more to it than that. If you take Padmasambhava, here we have what was obviously once a good man, who has been taken over by the Great Intelligence, and had his life prolonged several times beyond its natural span. All what is left of his own will wants to do is to accomplish the nefarious purposes of the great Intelligence, so that it will leave him and he can die. Now, this never occurred to me when I read the book, but the Doctor, although he gives conflicting reports of his own age, may well be centuries older than Padmasambhava.

I don’t find the Yeti scary. That’s not surprising. I don’t find the Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warrirors, Sontarans scary now, although they have each sacred the bejesus out of my in their time when I was a lot younger. I find it really hard to decide whether the Yeti would have scared me that much when I was younger. I suppose that when you cover anything, however big, in that kind of fake fur you are always inviting comparison to a giant teddy bear. Or the honey monster. Or some of the larger muppets. They’re probably much scarier in close up, where you can see what appear to be nasty looking claws. I really like the idea of the control spheres, though. It just adds another layer of sophistication to the threat that the monsters pose, that when you think they’re harmless because they have been deactivated, all it takes is for one of those wee silver balls to roll its way into the chest cavity and whoops apocalypse.

Well, let’s get down to brass tacks. The plot. The TARDIS lands close to the Detsen monastery in Tibet. The Doctor has been here before, and recognizes the chance to return the Holy Ghanta he agreed to look after for them. When they reach the monastery they don’t get anything like the warm welcome they expected. The monastery is having a bit of a problem with them pesky yetis, and the situation isn’t helped by the presence of Professor Travers, a British yeti hunter, played by Victoria’s (Deborah Watling’s) real life dad.

It transpires that the aged master monk, Padmasambhava, who was there when the Doctor previously visited the monastery a couple of centuries earlier, was whizzing along the astral plane one day, minding his own business, when he was met and taken over by the Great Intelligence. Over many years, working under the Great Intelligence’s influence, Padmasambhava has stealthily built the yeti robots, that will carry out what needs to be done to enable the Great Intelligence to take on corporeal form, and then consume the whole world nyaaahh haa haaaahhhhh! After much toing and froing and all kinds of how d’you doings the Doctor helps the monks stand firm against the yeti when they attack the monastery, and together they defeat Padmasambhava, and along with him, the Great Intelligence.

It’s maybe not a great work of science fiction, but there’s the rub. This is an adventure story, and as such it gives director and cast an ample amount to work with to create a very exciting and enjoyable Doctor Who story, all the more praiseworthy considering that this is a 6 part story. I found the whole thing very atmospheric. This is a little surprising since, my overwhelming image of the Himalayas is huge jagged peaks, and snow. Lots of snow. In this story there is not so much as one flake in sight . . . and nobody mentions it! What a stroke of genius! You can’t help noticing the lack of snow at first, especially, I found, in episode 2, which is the one episode currently in the archives, but after a while, because all of the characters seem to think that this is perfectly normal, and because nobody else mentions it, then you really just come to accept it, even though the Himalayas never really stop looking like rolling welsh hillsides – which is exactly what they are, I think.

The cast give it their all though, without necessarily going over the top. I didn’t realise that Wolfe Morris, who played Padmasambhava was the brother of Aubrey Morris. Even if you don’t know the name, you’ll know the face, as Aubrey Morris is an English character actor who has been in tons of stuff over the years. I remember him particularly as the captain of the Golgafrinchan space Ark in the tv version of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy”. That was Aubrey, though, and this is Wolfe. He’s quite different physically from what I expected – some wizened, drained little husk of a man – being a little on the large side – but he makes up for it with the way that he uses his voice. The Padmasambhava voice that he uses most of the time is calm, soothing, almost mellifluous. However the voice he produces for the Great Intelligence is almost the complete opposite – in many ways the pure evocation of motiveless evil. Quite a tour de force when you consider that these voices are being produced by the same person, often within the same sentence.

Thematically, well it’s not the most complex story, and for me basically boils down to the main theme, that of men of peace – Buddhists – being confronted with the need to take action, and stand up and defend against violence, using whatever force they can bring to bear. As much as “The Daleks” is about the Thals shedding their pacifism to take control over their own destinies, so it is here, with the monks in the place of the Thals. As I mentioned earlier, though, the figure of Padmasambhava adds another thematic level to the story.

Sometimes with a partially missing story, you get the idea that it wouldn’t necessarily be enhanced all that much if the episodes were found. I honestly don’t think that this is the case with “The Abominable Snowmen”. This is a story that I thoroughly enjoyed.

What Have We Learned?

The Himalayas can be a snow free zone.

The Great Intelligence is neither great, nor particularly intelligent.

37: Tomb Of the Cybermen

Before Watching

Well, for once, this isn’t actually a before watching at all. I’d better explain that. Before this experiment started, last summer in fact, I found out that the Watch digital channel was showing old episodes of classic Who, and, joy of joys, one Saturday they were screening the Tomb of the Cybermen in its entirety. I set the Tivo box to record it, and a couple of days later, when the family were all off doing whatever it was they were doing, I watched it all.

The danger with watching what you have always anticipated to be a classic, without actually having seen any of it before, is that you find all your illusions are shattered, and that actually, it maybe isn’t all that much to write home about. The thing is, though, this wasn’t a critical viewing, like the way I’ve approached all of the 30+ stories I’ve reviewed so far. This was just for pure pleasure, and while I admit that the story certainly isn’t without its flaws, I sat there with a big silly grin all over my silly old face for the whole two hours.

Still, it’s not good me pretending that this is a first time watch, or even a first time for ages watch, as is going to happen when we get to Pertwee, Baker and Davison. So if this turns out to be a more critical, in the correct sense of the word, well, I can only apologise.

After Watching

You can’t really fault the start of the first episode. The location shots, albeit taken in a quarry by the look of things, make Telos look appropriately bleak and inhospitable. In general the design work on this story, and the look of the whole thing is pretty impressive, bar for a couple of things which I shall come to in due course.

So, our heroes have landed on Telos at the same time as an Earth Archaeological expedition, searching for the Tombs of the Cybermen. The members of the expedition are worth spending a few moments discussing. The first thing I noticed, and I don’t like being critical of actors and actresses, but I have to say that in my opinion, the poor devil who plays Hopper, the American accented captain of the Earth ship, gives probably the worst acting performance I’ve yet to see in the course of writing this blog. I’m sorry, but he’s absolutely dreadful – so wooden you practically want to give him a wipeover with Mr. Sheen every time he opens his trap.

Well, Hopper isn’t the most important character by a long chalk, and so if his was the only jarring note, we could probably gloss over it. But, and I’m fully aware that I’m not the first person to make this point, we do need to look at some of the claims of racism which have been levelled at this story in the past. The man who has provided the funds for the archaeological expedition, Eric Klieg, aided and abetted by a lady called Kaftan, is the chief human villain of the piece. Klieg is a suitably foreign sounding name, especially when compared with the comfortably anglo-saxon names of most of the other expedition members. It’s difficult to tell precisely in monochrome, but he certainly appears to have a Mediterranean complexion. Kaftan is a likewise exotic name, and just in case we miss the point, it’s fairly clear that Shirley Cooklin, the actress playing her, has had what appears to be fake tan smeared all over her face. Very cheap fake tan as well, judging by the clearly visible streaks, to which my eye is irresistibly drawn every time she is shown in close up. When we looked at the last story, “”The Evil of the Daleks, one jarring note was the presence of Kemel, Maxtible’s mute Turkish servant. Kaftan too has a huge mute servant, Toberman, played by black actor Roy Stewart.

I want to defend the show, I really, really do. I want to say that look, this was the 1960s, and so you can’t blame the show for making the kind of crass, lazy stereotyping which other shows of the same time went in for. But I can’t. This isn’t a defence, not when you consider why it is that people value Doctor Who as a show so much. The whole point is that it ISN’T like other shows. I don’t think that the show is DELIBERATELY following a racist agenda either here or in “TheEvil of the Daleks”. But I’m very disappointed that nobody apparently stopped to consider just what message using Kemel and Toberman in this way did send out, intentional or not.

Wrenching myself back to the review then, Troughton’s Doctor is probably the most mischievous and quietly anarchic of all of the Doctors, apart, possibly from Sylvester McCoy’s 7^th Doctor, and here he is at his most mischievous and delightfully irresponsible. Actually, the more I watch of Patrick Troughton, the more I’m drawn to the conclusion that some of the best features of McCoy’s Doctor were those that made him like Troughton, at times. He pretty much aids and abets the party in getting into the tombs, and reanimating the Cybermen, and you suspect that this is motivated by a sense of curiosity as much as anything else. In fact, this is actually a terrific story for Patrick Troughton. He acts rings around all of the guest stars playing the human characters, which isn’t difficult considering the rich vein of cardboard that Gerry Davis has mined for their characteristation. George Pastell as Klieg and Shirley Cooklin as Kaftan, for example are very one-dimensional. It’s a bit of a shame that they are so clearly going to be the human villains of the piece that you know it within a minute or two of each one opening their mouths. Going back to Patrick Troughton, he gets a very touching scene with Victoria. It’s a plus point for the story that it acknowledges that Victoria had to join the crew after her father died saving the Doctor in the end of the previous story, The Evil of the Daleks. This was actually the end of the previous season, and so it would be very easy to decide that there’s no need to make any reference to the circumstances under which she joined the crew now. I think it’s a strength of the show that this story does, and it adds just a little more light and shade. As did Hartnell before him, Troughton excels at these little moments of tenderness and pathos, discussing, as he does, the fact that he too has family who now ‘sleep in his memory’ most of the time. Poetry, that. Actually this is a good story for Deborah Watling’s Victoria too. In her scenes with Kaftan she gets to show that she’s made of stern enough stuff to be worth her place on the crew.

As I have already said, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this. But. . . if I engage my critical faculties there are a few observations I can make. Firstly, barring the uneven level of performances of some of the guest stars, it’s pretty tense, exciting and enjoyable right up to the point when the Cybermen reanimate and break out of their tombs. This doesn’t look bad now, but in the mid 60s it must have seemed state of the art. However, once the Cybermen come out of their tombs, well, for me this is where the story runs out of steam somewhat. There’s the usual faffing about, threatening to convert the humans into Cybermen but not getting on with it and doing so which we’ve come to expect in previous Cybermen stories – although to be fair at one point they do give Toberman a rather effective pair of cyber arms. At one point they even go back into their tombs – which does rather beg the question why they bothered getting out of them in the first place.

One difference between this and its two cyberman predecessors is that this is the first time we see a human traitor trying to form an alliance with the Cybermen. We’ve had this happen with the Daleks before – and believe me it will happen again, and again . . . – but not the Cybermen. Klieg and Kaftan belong to the Brotherhood of Logicians, who have reached the far from logical conclusion that the emotionless Cybermen will be so grateful for their release that they will form an alliance with them.

Another development from the previous two Cybermen stories is that for the first time we get to meet the Cyber Controller. We know that this is the Controller, partly because he tells us so, and partly because he looks so different from the others. He doesn’t have the usual piano accordion on his chest, and he has a large painted dome on top of his head in which you can see his brain. Now, a slight digression here. The Cyber Controller in this, and Colin Baker’s “Attack of the Cybermen” was played by an actor called Michael Kilgarriff. Michael Kilgarriff also played the robot in Tom Baker’s first story “Robot”. Michael Kilgarriff was a sometime client of the company that my Mum worked for in South Ealing in the mid-late 80s. She said that he was a very large man, and she found him very, and I quote, ‘actorly’, and rather gruff and brusque. One day, after much urging from my younger brother, she explained to him that we were massive fans of Doctor Who, and would it be possible for him to autograph something for my brother? (I may be wrong, but I think this might have been his copy of the David Banks Cyberman book) A complete change came over the man immediately – he was all smiles, and absolutely delighted to provide the autograph. So obviously a man who had some affection for his time on the show, and delighted to be approached about it.

So, it isn’t the greatest Doctor Who story, and it certainly doesn’t do to analyse it too much. The story really doesn’t go very far, and the effect of Toberman throwing the cyber controller – who by this time has been replaced by a dummy in a suit – really isn’t good. But let your inner child out for a couple of hours, while you’re watching it, and like me, you’ll probably have a big silly grin all over your own face too.

What Have We Learned?

Let sleeping Cybermen lie

The Brotherhood of Logicians are a bit dull

Season 4

Without doubt the most momentous season since the first. If nothing else, the Doctor’s regeneration at the end of “The Tenth Planet” guaranteed that this season would remain one of the most important in the whole run of classic Who. Put simply, if Patrick Troughton hadn’t pulled off the Doctor in such spectacular fashion, then it could have meant the end of the show. It wasn’t just the Doctor who regenerated and changed, though. The fourth series saw an end to the Historicals – and let’s not forget that my own top rated Hartnell serials were Historicals. It saw the first two Dalek stories to be scripted by anyone other than Terry Nation – and as a result these two are actually the highest rated of all the incomplete stories.Season 4 saw the introduction of, and refinement of the Cybermen, who would feature in a further three Troughton stories, and become the series’ second most enduring monsters after the Daleks.

What I’ve personally seen in this series is the start of the show becoming something I recognize as Doctor Who from my childhood. If we take “The Faceless Ones” for instance there’s a lot that I recognize in this show. Although it is just glimpses at the moment. In this season there is no consistent style which has yet emerged, giving it an almost schizophrenic quality. Both Daleks stories were highlights, and extremely enjoyable. I also enjoyed The Faceless Ones very much, the Moonbase and The Macra Terror, even though the last two of those are flawed pieces of work in some ways.

As I said, though, it’s Patrick Troughton who has pulled the season through. The development his Doctor goes through during the season is every bit as deep rooted as the development of Hartnell’s Doctor between An Unearthly Child and The Dalek Invasion of Earth.  Jamie’s relationship with the Doctor, especially from The Faceless Ones onwards, has become every bit as interesting and as crucial to the workings of the show as Hartnell’s with Ian and especially Barbara. Let’s have a look at the ratings : -

Season 4

Mighty 200 ratings/ 2014 DWM Poll ratings

The Evil of the Daleks – 18/34

Power of the Daleks – 21/19

The Tenth Planet – 55/85

The Moonbase – 112/113

The Faceless Ones – 122/142

The Macra Terror – 137/150

The Highlanders – 145/166

The Smugglers – 159/194

The Underwater Menace – 194/224

My Ratings

Evil of the Daleks

Power of the Daleks

The Faceless Ones

The Moonbase

The Tenth Planet

The Macra Terror

The Smugglers

The Underwater Menace

The Highlanders

So no arguments from me about the quality of both Dalek stories, and there is literally nothing to choose between them. I really liked “The Faceless Ones”, hence its high rating. Personally I would rather watch “The Moonbase”, with two animated episodes, than “The Tenth Planet” with one animated episode. “The Macra Terror” had to come next because it was a really interesting idea – not perfectly realized, but nonetheless one which kept me interested. “The Smugglers” came next for me, a rip roaring, unashamedly boy’s own adventure type story with just enough humour to keep me interested. As regards the last two, well, “The Highlanders” was a better story in pretty much every way – yet if I was forced to choose between them which one I’d rather watch again, it would be “The Underwater Menace” every time. 

36: The Evil of the Daleks

Before Watching

This is one of the most celebrated of all the lost Troughton stories, one of the reasons being that it was the story which saw the final end of the Daleks – well, for five years anyway. What do I expect? Well, part of the trouble is I do remember the synopsis of this one quite well. It dovetails nicely with the Faceless Ones, since the TARDIS was stolen at the end of the last episode. I can remember that it was stolen by a guy who invented a time machine – no honestly – back in Victorian times, and is in league with the Daleks since his daughter, Victoria, has been taken as a hostage to ensure his cooperation. The Doctor ends up going to Skaro, injecting, or infecting Daleks with the Human Factor, and thus starting a civil war, in which the Dalek city, and the Emperor Dalek are destroyed. Obviously made an impression on me when I first read the synopsis. So the real interest for me is in how well it’s done. David Whitaker set a hell of a high standard for a Dalek story with The Power of the Daleks, and so he has a lot to live up to.

After Watching

There’s a remarkable lack of preamble at the start of this story which is really all to the good. We get a very brief recap reminding us that the TARDIS has been stolen from Gatwick, and then our heroes, the dream team of Troughton and Hines are off on its trail.

The plot, even when you boil it down to essentials is rather complex. The Doctor and Jamie trace the TARDIS to one Edward Waterfield, a dealer in Victoriana. The stock in his store seems remarkably new. When Jamie suggests that maybe he has just popped back in time to pick up his stock, he is poo poohed by the Doctor, and yet it turns out to be the correct explanation.

Waterfield, who has been bankrolled by eccentric, and extravagantly bearded industrialist Theodore Maxtible, has invented a method of time travel using static electricity. I didn’t really understand the explanation, but it’s all done with mirrors apparently. The first time that they wired it up and fired it up, flash, bang wallop, and an army of Daleks came out of it. The Daleks immediately took Waterfield’s daughter, Victoria, hostage, as you do, and insisted that Waterfield use his machine to bring them the TARDIS and the Doctor.

Waterfield arranges a meeting with the Doctor and Jamie in 1966, then gases them, and transports them back in time to Maxtible’s mansion. The Daleks then explain that they are sick and tired of losing to the humans on penalties after extra time, and so they want the Doctor to isolate what they call ‘the human factor’ , and inject it into Daleks to give them whatever it is that makes human beings able to defeat them. The Doctor uses Jamie to do this, and creates some very childlike Daleks who become his friends, and learn to question orders.

At this point the Daleks, along with the carpet chewing Maxtible, Victoria, the Turkish Servant Kemel, Waterfield and Jamie all are transported to Skaro, where the Doctor gets to meet the Emperor Dalek. The Doctor informs the Emperor that he has created Daleks who question orders, who will teach other Daleks to question orders, and this way he will eventually be overthrown, to which the Emperor gleefully replies that the real purpose of the experiment was to isolate the Dalek factor, and spread this to humans. It is tested on Maxtible who does indeed become a human Dalek – and the Doctor, who, not being human, doesn’t. He replaces the Dalek factor with his own phials of the human factor and begins converting Daleks. A civil war soon ensues in which Skaro, the Emperor and Maxtible are all seemingly destroyed – although it is hinted at that one Dalek may have survived. Edward Waterfield redeems himself by saving the Doctor’s life at the expense of his own, and thus the Doctor takes Victoria on board the TARDIS as his newest companion.

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Human factor – Dalek factor – Krypton Factor – X – Factor - Max Factor - it all sounds like complete hokum and it is. Yet this story is such an embarrassment of riches that you never stop to think that. It’s one of the great tragedies of the wipings that only one episode of this story actually exists. Episode 2 is not even the best episode of the story, and yet it looks cracking. I could weep when I think that episodes 6 and 7 could have survived instead of some of those that actually made it.

What’s so great about “The Evil of the Daleks”, then?

The use of three settings/time periods. The story starts in the present day (20^th July, 1966 to be precise.)Now, unlike The War Machines, TEOTD isn’t trying to be especially trendy and ‘swinging’ and as a result the scenes with Jamie and the Doctor holding a council of war in a coffee bar look totally authentic, as does Waterfield’s antique shop. We know that Waterfield isn’t what he seems right from the start because he has some rather impressive Victorian sideburns – almost into mutton chop whisker territory.

Then the action switches to Maxtible’s mansion, which is highly impressive with all of its acres of wood paneling, its heavy carpets and high neo-gothic time cabinet. The state of the art Victorian laboratory with all the beautifully shaped test tubes and equipment that Maxtible shows to the Doctor is a joy too.

Finally we get to make our first return trip to Skaro since The Daleks. The Dalek city is different here, or rather, it looks more developed. There’s still the corridors and assymetrical doors, but now long pathways, and the Emperor’s room is very arresting.

The Performances: Marius Goring, as Theodore Maxtible wasn’t the first big name to appear in Doctor Who, but he was certainly a real triumph for the casting director. For one thing he so looks the part. There’s a famous photo of Isambard Kingdom of Brunel, with a cigar in his mouth and a top hat on his head, standing by the chains of the great eastern, and I’m sure that Maxtible has the exact same amount of cigar sticking out of his mouth in exactly the same angle as Brunel’s in a huge number of the telesnaps. For me it’s a well-judged performance in that Maxtible doesn’t appear as mad, or callous and indifferent to the plight of fellow human beings at the start, you come to realize these things. Maxtible’s continued belief that the Daleks will show him the method to turn base metals into gold despite all the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary isn’t necessarily unbelievable either, and in fact has echoes of Mavic Chen from The Daleks’ Master Plan. I don’t know so much about the Dalekified Maxtible in the last episode though. You see, it doesn’t really matter how you try to imitate a Dalek – even if you don’t stick your arm out in front of you, you will always sound like a kid in a playground pretending to be a Dalek. So I didn’t find that to be as effective as it might have been.

John Bailey put in a lovely turn as Edward Waterfield. At first the man seems to be just a nasty, cold, two bit villain, but once he gets the Doctor back to Maxtible his human side starts to come through. It’s clever the way that, of the pair, Maxtible is revealed to be the real villain of the piece, while Waterfield, it turns out, is just a misguided scientist/inventor (one of many in classic Doctor Who) who is in an impossible situation, and just trying to do whatever he can to save his daughter. It’s a tribute to John Bailey’s acting skill that his jumping in front of a Dalek gun to save the Doctor was completely believable, and now seemed to be completely in character.

Deborah Watling, as Victoria, featured a surprisingly small amount considering that this was her debut story, so it was difficult to judge what she brought to the table. In fact, for the middle part of the story it’s Jo Rowbottom’s spirited maid, Mollie, who looks the most likely candidate in the next companion stakes.

With all of this also on offer, the fact is that this is the Doctor and Jamie’s story. The Highlander’s faith in the Doctor seems to have been totally destroyed when he overhears the Doctor conspiring with Waterfield and Maxtible to use Jamie for the tests to extract the human factor. Yet by the end , on Skaro, the Doctor asks Jamie to trust him, and he does. It’s a brief yet perfect demonstration of the unshakeable foundations of the relationship between these two characters, and a testament to the chemistry between Patrick Troughton and Fraser Hines that they manage it so economically and so seemingly effortlessly.

Is it without flaws? No, of course not, no story is. There’s Kemel, for one thing. Now, I’m not saying that Sonny Caldinez who played him did a bad job, but I just think he’s a bad character who introduced a worrying note into the story. Kemel is a Turkish Wrestler, who works as a heavy for Maxtible. After a fight with Jamie, Jamie saves his life, and he helps him from then onwards. Here we have the only black character in the story, unable to speak, and being referred to by other characters as possessing the mind of a child, clearly only valued for his physical strength. Now, you may very well say, well come on, you can’t judge something that was made in the mid 60s by the standards we have today. Maybe not, but neither should we sweep it under the carpet. Now, I have seen the whole of Tomb of the Cyberman a couple of years ago, and we have to consider the fact that there is a very similar character, called Toberman – a huge, mute, physically strong man played by a black actor. Is it racist? Yes, I’m afraid that it is, without a corresponding black actor in a far more positive role to offset it. Am I accusing the production team of deliberate racism? Not necessarily, but at the least I think you have to admit that this is lazy stereotyping, and I wish that the team had stopped to think a little about this before going this way with Kemel.

With that admittedly jarring note, then, the story isn’t perfect. But I have to say that for 60s Doctor Who, this is about as good as it gets. The return to Skaro particularly intrigued me. On his previous visit, in The Daleks, the Doctor knew nothing about them at all. Now, on his second visit, he knows more than enough. Indeed, somewhere along the line he has also learned about the Dalek Emperor, for when they meet for the first time the Doctor says that he had wondered whether they would ever meet. A word of praise for the design of the Dalek Emperor. He looks like a Dalek, but he doesn’t. He’s considerably larger than a Dalek, and on top, instead of a single dome, he has a sort of arrangement that puts me in mind of the ice cream head of Mr. Whippy. It has an eye stalk but no gun, and I would guess that it’s immobile since it is connected to external tubes, for whatever reason. I think that this is ultimately clever design work. Nothing is actually said on screen, but this presentation of the Emperor leads you to draw conclusions about the futility of power and control. The Emperor has total control over all the Daleks, and yet when one begins to question his orders, he is totally unable to defend himself, and his power turns out to be all a façade.

All in all, even being mostly recon, The Evil of the Daleks is a tour de force, and I can completely understand why it was chosen, at the end of series 5, to be the first ever Doctor Who summer repeat.

What have we learned?

If you’re thinking about using mirrors and static electricity to build your own time machine, don’t.

The Doctor has learned that the Daleks are led by an Emperor at some time prior to this adventure.

35: The Faceless Ones

Before Watching

I know a couple of things about this one which do lead me to anticipate and speculate. I know that the co-writer is Malcolm Hulke, in his first story for Doctor Who – well, his first one to get made, anyway. He went on to pen some of the more memorable stories of the Pertwee era, giving us the Silurians and Sea Devils, for instance. I’ll be interested to see whether his story sticks out from what we’ve seen in this series so far.

That;s anticipation. As for speculation, well, it’s the last story for Ben and Polly, which leads me to wonder just how Troughton’s Doctor handles companions leaving. We’ve seen a couple of fantastic scenes from Hartnell on such occasions, but somehow I can’t see this Doctor going in for that. I imagine something much more understated, more sort of ‘off you go then’. Time will tell.

After Watching

There was much to enjoy about this particular story. You have to remember that I was at an impressionable age during Jon Pertwee’s tenure, so I’m very used to stories set on contemporary Earth, yet it strikes me that we’re 35 stories into the series now, and this is only the second, following g the trail blazed by The war Machines. While we’re making a comparison, in the War Machines the Doctor was able to effortlessly walk into the middle of the action, and be accepted seemingly by everyone in authority. This is a huge contrast to the first couple of episodes of The Faceless Ones, where absolutely nobody in authority seems prepared to listen to the Doctor at all, which is frankly far more believable.

The TARDIS materializes on the runway of Gatwick airport, giving Jamie the chance to ask about ‘yon flying beastie’. What they find out eventually is that based in a hangar, and calling themselves Chameleon Tours, a race of aliens – the Chameleons – are using the tour company as a front to carry out their dastardly purposes. They use what appears to be a Vickers VC10 airliner – incidentally one of the most beautiful airliners Britain even built. Young people are given the opportunity of taking incredibly cheap flights. During the flight, they are all miniaturized. The wings of the VC10 retract, and it becomes a spaceship, presumably a rocket. It docks with the mother ship, where the miniaturized humans are stored, ready to be transported to the Chameleons’ home planet. It transpires that the Chameleons are victims of nuclear war. As a result they need to use human beings. When processed properly, a black armband connected to both human and chameleon enables the chameleon to assume the human’s identity. The key plot point which enables the Doctor to triumph is that once the armband is removed from the human original, the Chameleon suffers what might be termed a spontaneous existence failure. The Doctor’s companions du jour – more about that later – find the originals hidden in cars in the airport car park, and use these to convince the Chameleons to leave the Earth and its humans alone. He also promises to give their scientists a few ideas about other ways to solve their problems.

Alright, written on the page in a few lines like that it doesn’t look like much. But there’s far more to making a good story than just having a good plot idea or two, although that obviously always helps. 6 parts means padding, but it also means you can afford a more leisurely storytelling approach, and sometimes this can build real mystery and suspense in the way that it does during the first couple of episodes of The Faceless Ones.

Then you’ve got performances from the guest stars. Donald Pickering is suitably chilling as the leader of the Chameleons’ Earth task force, Captain Blade. He was last seen in the trial sequences of “The Keys of Marinus”, but he’s here for the long haul in this story. Then, just as action seems to be flagging a little as the Doctor is just going round and round in circles with the Commandant in the airport, who should arrive but Bernard Kay, playing Inspector Crossland of Scotland Yard, investigating the disappearances of young people who have flown with Chameleon Tours. He’s a Doctor Who stalwart is Bernard Kay, having added quality to both The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Crusade already. Crossland finds his way onto a Chameleon Tours flight, and is actually used as the original for the leader of the Chameleons. Good choice. The list of memorable guest stars goes on. Wanda Ventham (does she ever get sick of having people begin their description of her career with the phrase ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s Mum’?) plays a terrific cameo as Jean, the Commandant’s assistant, who doesn’t have much to do, but does it extremely well. Then there’s Pauline Collins.

Right, this gets a little complicated. Ben escapes from the bureaucracy in the airport, and sneaks off to investigate Chameleon Tours’ hanger. He gets caught, and frozen, and apart from a few minutes at the end of the story, that’s Michael Craze’s time on the show either. Polly also gets caught by the Chameleons, and she is copied. This gives you the great scene where the Polly copy, asked to verify the Doctor and Jamie’s story, denies that she has ever met them. At first this looks like yet another case of a companion being brainwashed, until it becomes clearer that it’s far more sinister than that. Like Michael Craze, that’s it for Anneke Wills until the end of the story. This sidelining of Ben and Polly leaves a vacuum, into which steps Pauline Collins, playing Samantha Briggs. She does it bloomin’ well too. Sam Briggs has come to Gatwick to investigate the disappearance of her brother, who was last heard from taking a Chameleon Tours flight to Rome. Sam is sparky, feisty, bright, brave and decent – in other words perfect companion material. She also seems to have a bit of a thing for Jamie. She announces she has bought a Chameleon Tours ticket, and won’t let Jamie taker her place, despite the danger. So Jamie engages her in a bout of tonsil tennis, neatly stealing her ticket at the same time. In the end, she even forgives Jamie, and gives him another snog before they part. I can’t help thinking that maybe she was being lined up to join the crew, but for whatever reason it was decided not to go ahead with it. If Pauline Collins really was offered the chance to come on board as an assistant and turned it down, then you can’t really say that she made the wrong decision, looking at her career since, compared with many of the other companions. It’s a shame, though. She was one of the huge plus points of this story.

I already know that Jamie and the Doctor would pick up Victoria in the next story ‘Evil of the Daleks’, and when she left she would be replaced by Wendy Padbury’s Zoe Heriot, but I can’t help wondering if they ever considered having at least a few stories with just the Doctor and Jamie. The chemistry between Troughton and Hines is so obvious in this story that it would probably have worked pretty well.

Right, the leaving scene. This was, as I suspected it would be, a little low key. Not as emotional as Susan’s, not as reluctant as Ian and Barbara’s, not as congratulatory as Steven’s, and thankfully nowhere near as perfunctory as Dodo’s – well, she never had one. It’s a little low key, although it was nice to see Ben offer to stay if the Doctor needed them – he was a sailor and knew all about duty, that man.

What Have We Learned?

Jamie is a bit of a ladies’ man, and not above using his manly wiles to get what he wants.

The Doctor is always more happy to negotiate than annihilate.

34: The Macra Terror

Before Watching

2007 was a great year for Doctor Who. David Tennant had in the previous season made his debut as the Doctor, and very quickly earned a reputation as the best Doctor since Tom Baker, and many would say, the best Doctor bar none. In this, his second season, he would continue to go from strength to strength. The third episode was called “Gridlock”, and if you’re a fan of the revived series you may well remember it. Now, one of the most interesting things for me was that when the evil aliens at the bottom of the motorway are revealed, they turn out to be Macra. I have never watched “The Macra Terror” and never read the novelization, but nonetheless I knew that this was the return of an old monster. Yes, the very first series saw the returns of the Autons and Nestene, and the Daleks, and the second series saw the return of the Cybermen. With respect, these are all more recent Doctor Who monsters, better known Doctor Who monsters, and more popular Doctor Who monsters than the Macra. So why exactly Russell T. Davies decided to exhume them for this story I don’t know, but maybe he had been a fan of “The Macra Terror” in the past? It suggests that there may be something to this story, anyway, something about it really worth watching, and so, even though all 4 episodes are missing and we are back in the land of telesnaps, we’ll give it a fair hearing. . . er . . . viewing.

After Watching

In some ways this was a very familiar story, even though I’ve never seen it before.

It’s set in a holiday camp/resort  I was immediately put in mind of the Sylvester McCoy story “Delta and the Bannermen”. It strikes me that a holiday camp is a really good setting for a Doctor Who story. It isn’t always easy to take something which should, by rights, be associated with fun and enjoyment, and give it a sinister twist, but when it’s done well you can end up with something memorably chilling. Personally, I’ve always thought of holiday camps as something slightly unpleasant and unwholesome anyway. That very British idea of organized and regimented fun has always struck me as rather oppressive and brought out my rebellious streak.

It’s another chance for the Doctor to take on Totalitarianism  Again, I was reminded of another Sylvester McCoy story, “The Happiness Patrol”, which also portrays a Society in which expressing unhappiness can bring severe penalties. In “The Macra Terror” the travelers have landed on a future Earth colony, where the whole colony is an organized holiday camp. On arrival they are welcomed by The Controller, whose photograph appears on a giant screen, while his booming voice exhorts his fellow colonists to greater efforts in their work. If that puts you in mind of Big Brother from George Orwell’s “1984”, well, it did me too. A little later on, after the travelers have started to ask awkward questions about the colony, efforts are made to reprogram and indoctrinate them during their sleep – again, no doubt inspired by “1984”, and room 101 in particular.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise when you find echoes of Nazism, Fascism and Totalitarianism in some of the societies and civilizations that the Doctor encounters. Most of the writers in the first decade of the show had lived through World War II, and were well aware of the atrocities committed by the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and his contemporaries. Ian Stuart Black, whose last Doctor Who story this was, had served in the war himself, and he wasn’t the only Doctor Who writer to have done so. Totalitarianism was, and still is, an easily recognizable evil.

The interesting aspect of Totalitarianism that “The Macra Terror” sets out to exploit is the way that whole populations can be manipulated, and what can happen to the individual who sees through the exploitation, and tries to alert his fellow citizens. What gives this story slightly more depth is that you come to realise that the humans seemingly oppressing their fellow humans are themselves not evil, but being manipulated by the Macra, which wouldn’t come across without some very good performances from such fine actors as Peter Jeffrey, who plays the Pilot, pretty much the Controller’s deputy on the ground, if you like.

A companion gets brainwashed, but in the end overcomes the conditioning, and saves the day. In this case, it’s Ben, who succumbs to the nighttime conditioning, and turns in his friends as subversives. The last time we saw this happen was in “The War Machines” where both Dodo and Polly were brainwashed by VOTAN, sorry, WOTAN. Now, I thought that this was well done in the story. In the third Doctor’s era, as we shall see in the fullness of time, all it would take would be for someone to give the Doctor just a hint of a glassy stare and he’d be reaching for a shiny pendant and dehypnotising them. All Troughton’s Doctor does is to keep gently reminding Ben that he’s letting down his friends, and he isn’t acting like he normally does, and eventually it works, and Ben breaks his conditioning. Now, that’s the Doctor.

Giant monsters based on Earth creatures.  Okay, not insects this time, and it’s interesting to speculate why exactly the team who made this one settled on crab monsters. I suppose it’s not unreasonable to suggest that they can look threatening, and they’re not insects, which had already been done.  This is the basic idea. The Macra are in charge of the colony, and have been for a long time. The voice of the Controller is actually the voice of the Macra. The holiday camp fun and games are there to distract the humans from the fact that they are being manipulated. The Macra need the humans to mine gas, which is poisonous to the humans, but essential to the Macra themselves. Which was something different, since I did wonder whether we were going to find out that the Macra were actually farming the humans to eat them eventually. Nope, and that was something.

The basic problem with the Macra, for me, is that we see so little of them. We see quite a bit of individual claws, but very little of the full Macra prop, and when we do get to see it, it seems very poorly lit and difficult to make out any details. One thing I can say though – it’s certainly very big. Maybe that was the problem. However, when you’re selling the show on the fact that these creatures are meant to be terrifying, hence the title of the story, then you probably have to do more than show us the odd giant claw now and again, impressive those these are at stages.

Male companions being forced to dance. This has actually happened before, rather than foreshadowing something which will happen again in the show’s future. I think particularly of Peter Purves in The Celestial Toymaker. That doesn’t exist because the episode is lost, and neither does Jamie’s Highland Fling. Shame.

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

Ok, as I said, then, this reminds me of quite a few other Doctor Who stories, but let’s deal with it on its own terms, now. It’s only a 4 parter, which is probably right, in fact, I can’t help thinking it might have been even better as a three parter. There’s quite a lot of Jamie making his way down tunnels, meeting Macra, struggling against Macra, escaping from Macra – you get the gist of it, I’m sure. Also the cliffhanger at the end of episode 2 is the controller appearing live on screen, and being attacked by a giant claw – proof enough of the Macra’s existence, I would have thought. But even this doesn’t break the conditioning, so episode three we go back to still arguing about whether they exist or not, despite the fact that everyone has seen one now. I don’t really get that.

Nevertheless, this is an Ian Stuart Black story – his last for Doctor Who, as it happens, and you often get something interesting in his stories which you haven’t had before in Doctor Who. I think it’s fair to say that none of them came across as complete successes, but all of them have something of interest going on them which means they stay in the memory far longer than the average Doctor Who story of the same era.

What Have We Learned?

As I always suspected, Holiday Camps are sinister places

The Doctor doesn't have to use de-hypnotising techniques to dehypnotise people

33:The Moonbase

Before Watching

I invite you to come back to with me to a few days after Christmas 1975. My younger brother has received money, and spent some of it on buying the Target Books novel “Doctor Who and the Cybermen” by Gerry Davis. This is the novelization of “The Moonbase”. He has read it, and now it’s my turn. I thoroughly enjoy it, and it goes right up there with “Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen” as my favourite Doctor Who novels.  OK – 3 – 2- 1 – you’re back in the room. Even though this was 40 years ago, I can still remember the basic plot of the novelisation pretty well. In some ways, it’s a virtual reworking of “The Tenth Planet”, although I recall that I didn’t enjoy that novel anything like as much as this one.

Well, you’ll maybe recall that I did enjoy watching “The Tenth Planet”, so my hopes for “The Moonbase” couldn’t be a great deal higher than they already are. Two episodes exist, but for the other two the BBC, as they did with the last episode of “The Tenth Planet”, commissioned a team of animators to reproduce them using the original soundtracks. The animation for the last of “The Tenth Planet”, well, we’re not exactly talking Disney Pixar standards here, but it looked good, and although the animation itself was limited, it did the job far better than any recon I’ve yet watched. In fact, I’m having to do the mental equivalent of pouring a bucket of water over myself – it’s not fair to raise my own expectations so high that the story couldn’t possibly be expected to live up to them.

After Watching

Okay, now that I’ve watched it, the question I’m sure that you’re dying to know the answer to is, did “The Moonbase” live up to my expectations?

Yes, it did.

I enjoyed the novelization more than I enjoyed the novelization of “The Tenth Planet”, and I enjoyed the story itself more than I enjoyed “The Tenth Planet”. It does make such a difference when there are official animations of the missing episodes to watch. I draw the comparison to “The Tenth Planet” deliberately, for the similarities between the two stories are fairly clear. Both are set in an inaccessible base – on the moon in this one. Both of them are staffed by an international crew. Both bases are attacked by a party of Cybermen, who initially managed to take over the base, before being repulsed when the humans discover one of their weaknesses. Of course, there are differences. In “The Moonbase” the base exists to house the Gravitron, a gravity device that has the power to control Earth’s weather. The Cybermen intend to seize said Gravitron, and use it to devastate the Earth by manipulating said weather. When asked if they are doing it for revenge they strenuously deny it, being emotionless as we know that they are. Alright, so they’re just gits, then.

Actually these Cybermen are great. They look good today – how good they would have looked in the mid 60s I can only imagine. The cloth heads have been replaced by shiny metal helmets, and the overhead headlamp has been made smaller and incorporated into the helmet itself. Their hands are now no longer human, and not only part of the costume, they had become a sort of three pincer arrangement. These have the added bonus of allowing the Cybermen to shoot electricity out of them and zap anyone who gets close range. Having said that though, this only tends to happen in the first two episodes. For some reason they start using guns after that. Not really sure why. Finally the chest unit is a lot less bulky than the original, and in fact is the classic chest unit that would remain part of the cyberman costume until the complete redesign for Earthshock in the Davison era.

The cyber voices have changed as well. Instead of trying to make them sound inhuman through varying the rhythms of normal speech, they have a flatter, yet at the same time more conventional delivery, with a more heavy electronic treatment. It works very well, because it does sound like the artificial voicebox which can be used by people who have had theirs removed.

I can only judge by the animation I saw, but the first episode really looked rather good to me. Alright, the spacesuits are very unconvincing, even for the 60s, but they didn’t spend very long in those, thankfully. Jamie takes a giant leap for Mankind and knocks himself out at the foot of the base, necessitating the visitors seeking medical help. Once the travelers get into the base, the tension starts to ramp up. The scientists on the base are being decimated by an unknown virus. This is a nice touch, not giving away immediately that this is the work of the Cybermen. If I remember correctly they reused this tactic in Tom Baker’s Revenge of the Cybermen. The first hint we get that the Cybermen were involved is a shadow, then we see one skulking around near the sickbay. It must have been even more effective when first viewed, since the title wouldn’t have told the viewers that the Cybermen were involved, as tended to happen with Dalek stories. At the risk of being accused of hyperbole, there’s parts of this first episode which remind me a little of Ridley Scott’s first “Alien” film, where the remaining crew members know that the alien is on  the ship hunting them, and they are searching along cramped metal corridors for it.

The moonbase set itself, and the model work for the exteriors are pretty impressive work for the time that they were made. I use the work of Gerry Anderson as a comparison. Now, I freely admit that what was being produced by Gerry Anderson in the early and mid 60s was very clearly aimed at the kids, as compared with Doctor Who, which always was a show for the family, and this is an important distinction to make. Even a mediocre Doctor Who script is considerably more complex and interesting than, let’s say, a Fireball XL5 or Stingray script, which is not a criticism since that’s the way it was meant to be. However, where they are worthy of comparison is in their use of models. You can argue that in the mid 60s, when Anderson was making Thunderbirds, the models his productions were using were pretty much state of the art, and as good as it got – certainly on television anyway. This shouldn’t come as a great surprise. His philosophy was to treat every episode as if it was a blockbuster movie – from “Stingray” in 1964 onwards all of his shows were shot in colour, even though it would be 3 years before the first colour television programmes were shown in the UK. From Thunderbirds in the mid 60s onwards, a man called Derek Meddings was Visual Effects Supervisor, and it’s worth noting that he went on to work on many Hollywood blockbusters of the 1970s, and his work was more than once nominated for an Oscar. So it’s not a bad idea to compare model work in Doctor Who to What Anderson were producing at the same time. And in terms of “The Moonbase”, the model of the base itself certainly holds its own. Yes, it’s maybe not quite up to Moonbase Alpha from Anderson’s Space 1999, but that was quite a few years in the future. Much less impressive is the Cybermen’s spaceship which lands on the moon. It’s a rather unimpressive flying saucer shape, and the effect is of a similar quality to the spaceship shots in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. The sets inside the base, though, are rather good, especially the main control room, with the dome looking out onto the surface of the moon.

I rather enjoyed the performances of the actors playing the humans. It was nice to see Andre Maranne popping up as Benoit, the very French member of the crew of the base. He was an actor who got a lot of work in British films and TV shows of the 70s playing French men. He’s probably best remembered for being Andre the restaurateur in the Fawlty Towers episode “Gourmet Night”.

As regards the relationships between the travelers, well, for the first time there was a little bit of macho posturing between Ben and Jamie once the latter started to recover from his illness. Allowing for the fact that this was family viewing, and so there are only ever going to be hints about the travellers’ feelings for each other, in this story it’s clear just for that moment or two that Ben thinks of Polly as his territory. I can’t quite make up my mind either how well Polly is served by this story. I mean, on the one hand it is Polly who comes up with both the idea of attacking the Cybermen’s chest units, and using acetone to do it. On the other hand, she does more screaming than usual, and the Doctor is very dismissive towards her when she asks what she can do to help, and he tells her to make coffee for everyone.

Whatever you do, it’s probably not a good idea to analyse the science in this story very much. For example, unless I’m much mistaken, Polly and Ben put the plastic dissolving Polly cocktail into plastic plant sprayers. Which don’t dissolve, although the Cybermen’s chest units do. Then the gravitron sends the Cybermen and the Cybership off into space, and everyone hopes that this will be the last that we see of the Cybermen. Why can’t the ship wait until the gravitron is switched off and then zoom around and pick up the Cybermen drifting around? Oh, and the Cybermen use a laser to cut a hole in the dome of the base, which is plugged with a plastic drinks tray. Don’t try this one at home, kids.

Nevertheless, overall, I think the part of me that will always be 10 years old, that I mentioned in the last review, was always going to love this serial. And it’s fair to say that suspending your disbelief, and watching this one as you would have watched it as a kid is by far that best way of enjoying it. Watch it to enjoy the Cybermen tramping across the moon towards the base, kicking moondust as they go. Enjoy them rising like butterflies on their Kirby wires as they drift off into space.

What have we learned?

If you don’t like the British weather, then all you have to do is to invent the gravitron and sort it out.

The Cybermen’s chest units are made from the same sort of plastic that Easter eggs are held in their boxes by. 

32: The Underwater Menace

Before Watching

Not before time I’m at last going to get to actually see Troughton in action since the middle two episodes exist. Yippee. Putting this into perspective, we were able to watch no fewer than 13 Hartnell episodes before Part 1 of Marco Polo, the first of the still missing episodes. We’ve already watched 10 Troughton recons, and have another to go before our first full live episode. It’s really difficult to judge his portrayal solely on his voice, and on still pictures.

Well, the Underwater Menace, then. This one, I believe, is something to do with Atlantis, the first journey along what will become quite well trodden ground for the show. It’s going to be interesting to see how the relationships within the TARDIS develop during this story as well. After all, for the first time we have two young male companions to one young female companion. Are we going to see Ben and Jamie trying to score points off each other and prove themselves to be the alpha male of the herd? Ben and Polly are from the same time, and including “The War Machines” they have come through 5 adventures together, so you’d expect them to be tighter with each other. In fact, they know each other better than they know the current Doctor, which means that I can actually see the possibility of two camps forming in the TARDIS – Ben and Polly in one, and the Doctor and Jamie in the other. Of course, that’s depending on whether this was something Gerry Davis and Innes Lloyd wanted to explore or not.

After Watching

Well, the first thing to report was that the jockeying for position between the males started early when Ben called Jamie “Me old ‘aggis” in the first couple of minutes of the first episode. A word of advice would be to avoid using that particular term of endearment in Sauchihall Street – or anywhere else in Scotland for that matter. Episodes 2 and 3 survive of this story, which means by a process of elimination that episode 1 is a recon. Even so the opening location shots looked fairly impressive. Polly said it was Cornwall, and by golly it looked like Cornwall. The Doctor somehow deduced from the rocks that we were somewhere in the Mediterranean. Oh well. After a few minutes the four of them stumble into a shelter, which turns out to be a lift, which takes them directly to the lost city of Atlantis. No, honestly, that’s how you get to Atlantis apparently, take the lift.

Ten minutes in, they all recover from their journey in the lift, where they all manage mysteriously to develop caisson disease. Caisson Disease is another name for the Bends, which is actually I thought associated with a sudden decrease in pressure, rather than an increase. A sudden decrease in pressure, caused by returning to the surface from being under the sea, causes nitrogen bubbles to form in the blood. This is why divers need to go into a decompression chamber. I didn’t think it worked the other way around. When they recover Ben tells Jamie to watch out in case he gets mistaken for a woman for wearing a kilt. Ho ho ho. Again, though, please don’t try that one in Scotland either.

So, the thrust of the story, then, is a visit to Atlantis. Atlantis is a strange place. On the one hand it’s all archaic temples and costumes and worshipping gods called Amdo, and on the other hand it’s scientists in white Nehru jackets keeping a beady eye on the nuclear reactor. Which would be all fine and dandy if it wasn’t for a mad scientist called Zaroff.

The ‘mad scientist’ has a long and honourable history in fiction, which can certainly be traced back to Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Although having said that, you can argue that the original Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was more tragic than mad, and that the madness really is more due to Colin Clive in the 1931 Universal studios film of the novel. Whatever the case, the mad scientist is a common feature of the sci fi horror genre, and one which would have been familiar to a large number of the original viewers of The Underwater Menace. The Doctor recognizes that a great scientist called Zaroff must be involved through the delicious plankton meals the Atlanteans prepare for them once they arrive. The Doctor meets Zaroff, and while all is very cordial, he soon realizes that Zaroff, who has promised the Atlanteans that he will raise Atlantis to the surface once more, actually plans to blow up the world. So the rest of the story is about the Doctor and friends trying to thwart Zaroff’s plans.

I have to talk about Joseph Furst’s portrayal of Zaroff. Now, over the top can work in the right context. I think particularly of Kevin Stoney’s Mavic Chen in “The Daleks’ Master Plan”. Stoney, though, judged his outbursts to perfection, and provided plenty of contrast, of light and shade in other scenes, thus making Chen a more convincing individual. Now, Zaroff, when confronted very early on by the Doctor about his plans, cheerfully admits that blowing up the world is exactly what he wants to do – why? – Because he is a great scientist, and what else would any great scientist want to do? When I say that this outburst is where he starts from, you’ll get the idea that the full chorus of “Cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man’s a mushroom.” is only just around the corner. Furst is so far over the top, that you almost start to think that he is deliberately sending himself, and the show, up. Joseph Furst was, by all accounts, a distinguished actor who had tons of TV appearances in the 60s and 70s, so he could have been doing just that – but somehow I doubt it. Apparently the accent he gives Zaroff is his own – and while I accept that, his voice was so distinctive it kept bugging me exactly what his intonation and the rhythms of his speech reminded me of. It was only during episode 4 that I managed to put my finger on it – his voice reminds me very much of Gru from the “Despicable Me” films. So much so that I can’t help wondering whether Steve Carel, who voiced him, is a secret classic Doctor Who fan. I think Zaroff has a couple of specific inspirations. The name, Zaroff, is just a letter removed from Dr. Zarkoff, the scientist who enlists Flash Gordon to fight against Ming the Merciless in the old film serials. His appearance, meanwhile, may well have been inspired by the popular conception of Albert Einstein – just in case we weren’t already convinced that he was a scientist. It was either that or Professor Plum from Cluedo.

I’m not sure that Joseph Furst’s ‘throw in everything including the kitchen sink’ attitude to his performance necessarily does everything that could be done with this character. He’s actually a really nasty and amoral piece of work – we see him viciously stab the priest Ramo and one point, and shoot the king, Thou. It didn’t really have the effect of making me sit up and take notice, whereas a little grey in his portrayal, as opposed to the unrelieved black we get, would have highlighted these evil actions more.

Also memorable in this story, and also not necessarily for the right reasons, were the fish people. The Atlanteans live on plankton, which doesn’t keep apparently, so it has to be harvested every day. So they have fish people, that is, people who have been surgically modified to live and work underwater, to farm plankton for them. When shown the fish people at work in the first episode, Polly enthuses about them, to which the second Scientist Damon, played by the always excellent Colin Jeavons, replies how glad he is, since the people they rescue from shipwrecks to convert to fish people normally become quite upset at the thought. Polly, horrified, learns that a) they make humans into fish people by giving them plastic gills, and b) she is next on the operating table. This gives her the opportunity to utter my favourite line of the Troughton era so far – “You’re not turning me into a fish!” Bless her, she really meant it as well.

The ending, with the city‘s lower levels flooding, reminded me of several movies, not the least of which was the James Mason version of “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. I can’t say that I was all that sorry that when it was over. There were just a couple of interesting touches in that last episode, mind you. Zaroff imprisons Ben and the Doctor behind a set of automatically activated metal bars while the water rises around them all. He later joins them to gloat, and Ben takes advantage to lock him in. He and the Doctor leave, but the Doctor insists that he just cannot leave Zaroff there to drown. Now that’s the Doctor. Of course, it’s too late, and he can’t go back, and we get to see Zaroff slip away beneath the rising waters. They didn’t in Australia mind, since this was one of the clips cut out by the censors, which is why we get to see a few seconds of moving pictures at this point.

As regards the Ben, Polly, Jamie triangle, well, to be fair there’s precious little evidence of any tension, sexual or otherwise between the three of them. I did notice, though, that on the recon, although it’s Jamie who brings Polly safely out of Atlantis, it’s Ben that she hugs. She believes in stick with what you know, obviously.

This is not a great story. If anything, it reminds me of some pretty ropey Sci Fi films I used to watch in the 70s before ‘Star Wars’ came along and changed the game – I’m thinking particularly about things like ‘At the Earth’s Core’ and the truly awful ‘Warlords of Atlantis’. But hey, I used to pay good money to go and see films like that, and so because of the part of me that will always be a ten year old boy, I’ll always be able to sit through even ropey old hokum like this, and find something to enjoy. Not a lot, mind you. But it’s the only explanation why, while I admit that this story was in pretty much every way inferior to the competent but lacklustre Historical that preceded it, I preferred this one.

What have we learned?

Atlantis Mark 1 was only a lift ride away

Fish people are very easy to manipulate

Ben must never, ever visit Scotland again