66: Carnival of Monsters

Before Watching

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

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

After Watching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What have we learned?

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

65: The Three Doctors

Before Watching

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

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

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

The Claws of Axos

The Mutants

The Three Doctors

The Sontaran Experiment

The Hand of Fear

The Invisible Enemy

Underworld

The Armageddon Factor

-          while Bob Baker scripted

The Nightmare of Eden on his own.

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

After Watching

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

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

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

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

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

The Script

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

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

Performances

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

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

The Design

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

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

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

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

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

What Have We Learned?

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

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

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

Season 9

After Season 8 it would have been easy to do another season of all, or mostly Doctor v. Master stories, and the team resisted the temptation to go down this route. Likewise, it would have been easy to go down the route of having no Doctor v. Master stories, and the team resisted the temptation to go down this route. In fact, what we got was actually what I felt to be the most diverse and varied season since Troughton’s last. We had a story which not only reintroduced the Daleks, but also explored the whole question of how time travel from the future can actually change the past, which in turn changes the future – a complex and intelligent storyline. We got a proper story set in an alien civilisation of the sort we really haven’t seen since “The Krotons”, a story which saw the return of the Ice Warriors, and had the confidence to recast them as good guys. There was an Earth bound story which, for once did not use UNIT, but did retell “The Silurians” from season 7. We had a worthy but dull Colonial story in a similar milieu to “Colony in Space”, and we had “The Time Monster”, which pretty much defies rational description.

One pleasing development in the season has been the Doctor’s developing relationship with Jo. He’s still a bit of a pig towards her at times in the season, but by “The Time Monster” there’s something a little bit special developing there. It will all end in tears this time next season, we know, but then that’s fine as well, and all part of the process.

Let’s have a look about how they fared in the fans’ ratings, and then in mine: -

Mighty 200/DWM 2014 poll

The Sea Devils  50/60

Day of the Daleks 71/65

The Curse of Peladon 82/93

The Mutants 182/ 213

The Time Monster  187/222

My rating

The Time Monster

The Sea Devils

Day of the Daleks

The Curse of Peladon

The Mutants

Well, look, my list is of course a personal choice, and if you’ve given “The Time Monster” a fair crack of the whip and it’s not for you, then I can understand that and it’s fine. I really, really enjoyed it, and I don’t feel the need to lie about it – and if you ask me which story I enjoyed most from season 9 then it wins hands down, even if I can’t explain why in words which would convince anyone else.

What I can’t really understand about the poll ratings is how anyone else could seriously claim to have enjoyed “Galaxy Four” and “The Celestial Toymaker” more than “the Time Monster”, yet both of them are higher in both polls. Unless they haven’t actually seen any of the stories involved, which is a distinct possibility.

Well, there we are. Take your seats please for the Tenth Anniversary season. The Doctor’s exile will be ending (officially) any minute now. 

64: The Time Monster

Before Watching

Some stories seem to stay below the radar for me, and this is definitely one of them. As is my wont at the moment in such cases, I shall do the one minute brainstorm, and write down all I can think of to do with the story. Here we go – The Master – Atlantis – Giant white birdman – Doctor lost in the void and brought back inexplicably by the TARDIS. Not a lot, is it? This is partly because it wasn’t released as a Target novelization until 1985, by which time I was in the middle of studying for a degree in English Literature from the University of London, and Terrance Dicks was sadly not on the syllabus. On paper it’s not without interest – this is the last Earthbound story for the Doctor. The next season opens with “The Three Doctors” which brings the exile to an end. Ooops. Spoilers. This is also the penultimate story for Roger Delgado. Yes, he’s there in “Frontier in Space”, but I don’t so much rate it as a Master story. Mind you, it’s not totally a Dalek story either. We’ll come to that after.

After Watching

Something has just occurred to me. This story was written by Robert Sloman (and Barry Letts although he wasn’t credited), and it’s the last story of season 9. Their story “The Daemons” was the last story of season 8. Their “The Green Death” will be the last story of season 10, and “Planet of the Spiders will end season 11, being the last ever Pertwee story. That rather smacks of the Producer being a little bit, shall we say, naughty there, keeping his own stories back to finish the season each time. It would be even more naughty if they were turkeys. Well, “The Daemons” at least wasn’t. How about “The Time Monster”?

I’m going to come straight out and say it now. This story was mad, at times almost laughable, at times made little or no sense . . . and I loved every minute of it. Even if I’m not entirely sure why.

Let’s try to explain the plot of this one. The Master has decided that his latest scheme for universal domination is to gain control of the greatest of all the Chronovores, Kronos. Chronovores are creatures who live outside of Time, devouring it when they please, and giving it out when they please, beings of immense, in fact unimaginable power. Exactly where this fits in with the Time Lords, and the Guardians and all that stuff is never explored, which is probably just as well, since the Guardians won’t be dreamed up until Graham Williams takes over in a few years’ time.

In order to entrap Kronos, the Master has invented a machine called (don’t Laugh) TOMTIT – Transmission Of Matter Through Interstitial Time. The basis of this machine is a crystal which used to be part of a much larger crystal in the ancient civilisation of Atlantis. The Master uses the crystal and the machine to bring him Krasis the Atlantean High Priest of Kronos, who has a medallion which Kronos seems scared of. The Master learn, though, that he needs the full crystal, which he can only obtain from Atlantis itself.

While all this is going on The Doctor and UNIT have been doing their level best to thwart his plans. And so while he is preparing to leave for Atlantis in his TARDIS, the Master subjects the Unit forces to attack from, in kronological order, a knight in armour, a platoon of Roundhead infantry, and a WWII V1 ‘doodlebug’ flying bomb. The Doctor, in a rather good sequence, lands the TARDIS within the Master’s, and creates a standoff which is only resolved when the Doctor emerges from his TARDIS, the Master sics Kronos on him, and he is cast into the Time Vortex. Good job that the TARDIS has a ‘rescue the Doctor from the Time Vortex’ button built into the new console.

Both TARDISes land in Atlantis. The Master fails to convince 500 year old King Dalios that he is an emissary of the Gods, but indulges in a spot of hand holding with the Queen, which convinces her to stage a palace coup. When he attempts to use Kronos to kill the Doctor and Jo, Kronos goes on a destructive spree, enabling the two time Lords and to flee in their respective TARDISes, with the Master still having the crystal, and Jo into the bargain. The Doctor threatens to put the TARDIS into time ram, destroying them both, but can’t quite bring himself to do it, so it is Jo who slams the Master’s TARDIS into top gear, and smashed them both out of the space/time continuum. This has the action of freeing Kronos, who, as a reward will allow the Doctor and Jo to return home in the TARDIS. Despite her wish to keep the Master in eternal torment, the Doctor successfully pleads for his freedom in order to take him back to face Earth justice. Of course, he escapes. That’s pretty much it.

Phew. Now, agreed, that is one busy script. But there are some pretty clever things about it. For one thing, this obeys Robert Holmes’ edict about the structure of a successful 6 parter, namely that it should really be a 4 part story followed by a linked two part story. Which is exactly what this is. There’s the 4 part story about the Master capturing and using Kronos on contemporary Earth, and then the 2 part story about him trying to obtain and use the full crystal in Atlantis. 4 part then 2 part – it’s the classic way of making a 6 parter that doesn’t drag too much.

I know that I big up Roger Delgado in every story in which the Master has appeared . . . so don’t expect me to make any exception now. The man was just pure class, and I find myself getting sad as I write this to think that there’s only one more story in which he appeared to watch now, and he is only one in a number of features of that particular story. This one really is The Master’s Master Plan. He’s just brilliant – barking mad, of course – but brilliant, silkily menacing, and still charming, even when telling Jo that he is casting the TARDIS – and her – adrift into the void. While we’re talking about the regulars as well, this is a great Jo Grant story, possibly her best so far. The scene in episode 6 where she pushes the Master’s TARDIS into time ram is probably her finest hour – in this story it is Jo who saves the Universe, not the Doctor. I’ll talk more about the Doctor’s developing relationship with Jo in the round up of season 9 which follows this review, but let’s just say that there’s a real bond between these two characters, real tenderness, especially evident in the delightful scene where the Doctor talks about telling the old hermit who lived on the hill all his troubles when he was a little boy. It takes real confidence in yourself as a writer, and your cast of actors to throw in changes of mood in the way this story does, and I think it’s one of the things that lifted it above so much of what I’ve already seen during the Pertwee era.

As for the guest stars, there’s an actor who I recognise as playing K’Anpo Rimpoche in “Planet of the Spiders”, also by Robert Sloman, which we’ll be getting at in about 10 stories time, called George Cormack who plays King Dalios of Atlantis. He does a really splendid little turn in this, where the Master tries to hypnotise him, and he just laughs politely, and sounds amused that the master is using such a simple and old fashioned method of hypnosis. It’s just one of a couple of lovely little touches to his performance, which means that the story handles the way that everything changes in the last two episodes with ease. I didn’t realise it before checking the cast list a few minutes ago just before I started writing, but the Queen’s serving girl, Lakis, is actually played by Susan Penhaligon. She was still about 4 years away from “Bouquet of Barbed Wire” and stardom at the time. There was no mistaking the late Ingrid Pitt as Queen Galleia, though. At the time that this story was made, Ingrid Pitt was riding the height of the wave of her cult status, earned through her starring roles in such edifying fare as “The Vampire Lovers” and “Countess Dracula”. Look, it’s easy to say that her inclusion in the cast was an attempt to include a little something to keep the Dads and older brothers interested, and very difficult to argue against it given the extensive amount of airtime given to her cleavage. She’s very decorative, anyway. Rounding up the cameos, again, it was only when I looked at the cast list that I noticed that the Minotaur, guardian of the crystal, was played by none other than Dave Prowse. Dave Prowse. The man who played the body of Darth Vader. The Green Cross Code Man. Dave flippin’ Prowse!

Yes, dear friends, I enjoyed the story so much that it never occurred to me once to ask – how the hell is the Doctor’s TARDIS working again? Because it is, with pinpoint accuracy. It’s hardly ever done that before. More to the point, how the hell can the Doctor dematerialise it, when all knowledge of dematerialisation theory and the dematerialisation codes has been removed from his memory? Even in “The Curse of Peladon” in the last episode the Doctor did suggest that it was all the Time Lords’ doing. In this one, nothing. Kronos’ birdman incarnation? Not great but meh, what you gonna do on a tiny budget?  Wobbly columns in the Minotaur fight? I’ve seen worse. No, d’you want to know the only thing that really bothered me about the design? In that case, you need to come back with me to 1982. It’s a Friday morning, and I’m on the island of Ios. I discover that there’s no ferry to Crete until the Sunday – and I really want to go to Crete. So I decide to get a ferry to Thira/Santorini and take my chances of getting a boat from there. If you haven’t ever been to Santorini, and you get the chance, leap at it. I took the cable car to the town at the top of the rim of the extinct volcano (did I mention that the town is built on the rim od an extinct volcano?) and was told in the travel office that yes, there was a boat to Crete, leaving in about 20 minutes from the port on the other side of the island. After the scariest taxi ride I have ever had in my life I made it with a couple of minutes to spare. I spent a wonderful night in the doorway of the bus station in Iraklion (actually it was wonderful, but that’s another story for another day), and the next day I was on the first bus out to Knossos to see the Minoan Palace. Those couple of days have stayed as full colour memories for the whole of my life since. So, coming back to the design of the Atlantean episodes of “The Time Monster” what I found really bugged me was that they’d got so much right in the design, what with the costumes and the sets, but they’d used Greek columns rather than Minoan columns which are very distinctive and completely different from Greek ones. I’m a hopeless case.

I do like the redesigned TARDIS interior though. The painted backdrop of roundels used for one wall since the earliest days in the show have gone now, probably for good. The only difference I could notice between the Master’s TARDIS and the Doctor’s was that the Master had a shiny metal arrangement inside the central column, while the Doctors’ had an arrangement of green and pink neon tubes.

Well, that was “The Time Monster”. Completely bonkers, and yet thoroughly enjoyable from the first minute until the last.

What Have We Learned?

Chronovores have a strange sense of humour, and a terrible sense of décor.

63: The Mutants

Before Watching

Another Bristol Boys story, unless I’m very much mistaken. I’m tempted to write a ‘before watching’ here on the one minute principle again, but then I don’t think I can add a lot more than ‘mutating giant insects’ off the top of my head. As a mutant myself, I think that I owe them a little more thought. Oh, the mutant thing. Well, I say that I’m a mutant – it may well be that this is not technically true, in which case please don’t tell me and thus shatter my illusions. I was born with an extra rib, what’s called a cervical rib, which is like a bone spur which sticks out between your neck and your shoulder. It somehow got crushed down on top of the vein or artery, and it gave me blood clots, which meant I could have died, came very close to losing my left arm, and I had to have it surgically removed, along with the blood clots. 3 weeks in hospital thank you very much. Nevertheless, as I say, I am a mutant myself, and as such feel that I should treat this story with a little more gravity than usual. The problem is, I have little or no memory of it. I did remember reading once that someone commented that the Andrew Smith story “Full Circle” from season 18 was similar in some concepts, and that one I do remember, so it will be very interesting to see how true that actually is.

After Watching

The Bristol boys scored a qualified success with their first story “The Claws of Axos”, and so having successfully achieved the slightly easier task of writing a decent four parter, now we see their first attempt at a 6 parter, the 6 parter being the most common format for seasons 8 through 11. It’s maybe illuminating to remind ourselves of the overall verdict that we formed on the previous story. “Claws of Axos” was a story with some interesting and original ideas, which were not necessarily perfectly realised on screen, but nonetheless made an enjoyable whole, even if it wasn’t the best story of the whole season. Now, good ideas can be spread a bit further in a four parter without diluting the whole than they can in a 6 parter: in a six parter you need drama, and you need characters. They don’t necessarily have to be totally believable, but they have to be interesting, and they have to be consistent within themselves.

I don’t know if the opening scene was a conscious homage to the opening of each episode of the original TV series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but surely it must have struck someone in the production office that when the story opens with a ragged, long haired, extravagantly bearded old fellow staggering towards the camera, thousands of voices of viewers would shout in unison “IT’S !” Honestly, if you’re old enough to be familiar with the original Monty Python TV series I defy you to watch the opening scene and deny the similarity. This is just there to introduce us to the world of Solos, which is one of the two main locations of the story, the other being a space station in orbit above it, Skybase.

The Doctor receives a package from the Time Lords. He doesn’t know for whom it is intended, but it’s fairly obvious that the TARDIS will take him to the intended recipient. He warns Jo off accompanying him in a way in which he must have known would encourage her to jump in the TARDIS after him, and away they go. The package the Doctor receives is rather odd looking, a bit like a football which has had unmatched pieces of black pottery stuck all over its surface. The TARDIS materialises on board Skybase, where the Administrator, played by Geoffrey Palmer, is about to announce to a group of Solonian natives that they are about to be granted their independence from the Earth Empire. Now, what do we remember about empires? That’s right – Federations-good, Empires – Bad. The Marshal, that is the military commander, doesn’t like the idea of Independence, and arranges for one of the natives to assassinate the Administrator.

Right, here’s an odd thing. In this and the previous season, when a story is set on Earth it’s the military in the person of the Brigadier and UNIT, or Captain Hart and the Royal Navy, who are the Doctor’s natural allies, and while they may be misguided they are clearly on the side of the forces of what is right. It’s the government representatives who are either stupid, or evil, or both. In a story set in Space, it’s the military commanders, as in this story, or the quasi military such as Dent in “Colony in Space”, who are evil and/or stupid, while the government representatives, such as The Investigator in this story are seen as decent and impartial. Just an observation. The Marshal is played by Paul Whitsun-Jones, last seen as the Squire in “The Smugglers”. He is thoroughly evil, and totally consistent in his portrayal, but for my taste the Marshal is just too one dimensional to sustain a six parter. I’ll try to explain.

When you threaten someone with death , or death to their loved ones, and they still double cross you, it should be ample evidence that they can never be trusted by you, and if you are that sort of person who needs to make that kind of threat, then you should kill them now. The Marshal never gets to this point, and the story could be 8, 10, or heaven help us 12 parts, and he still never would. Which means he is basically unbelievable, and the story suffers as a result. Enjoy his villainy in the first two or three episodes by all means, but I can almost guarantee you’ll be sick of it before episode 6.

The Earth’s Empire is collapsing, and Earth is withdrawing from its outlying provinces in the way that Rome withdrew from Britannia in the early 5^th century. As it is, Solos has an atmosphere which is poisonous to human beings, albeit only in the daytime. Don’t ask. The native inhabitants of Solos look humanoid, at least they start off looking humanoid, although lately they have developed a rather disconcerting habit of mutating into giant insects. Maybe Gregor Samsa was a Solonian! (Not wishing to  insult anyone’s intelligence, but in case you haven’t read it, Gregor Samsa was the first person protagonist of Franz Kafka’s story “Metamorphosis” in which he woke one morning from troubled dreams to discover that he had become a giant insect. Read it. You won’t regret it.) The Marshal’s plan is to have Jaeger, his pet scientist, find a way to convert the Solonian atmosphere to make it breathable to humans, at the same time as doing it in a way which annihilates the mutants, enabling him to take it over as his own private fiefdom.

While we’re talking about this, Jaeger is played by George Pravda. You may recall him in a more sympathetic role in “The Enemy of the World”. As I said in the previous volume, on Patrick Troughtons’ stories, I shall always think of him as the Castellan in my favourite story “The Deadly Assassin”. Again, as does Paul Whitsun-Jones, George Pravda plays what he is given very well and with utter conviction – I wouldn’t expect anything different, but I would have liked again just a little more depth in the conception of the character. Does he just once or twice feel a twinge about what he is doing? I don’t know – and I should know. He should be feeling this, because he’s not barking mad enough not to.

So into this melting pot come the Doctor and Jo. As he so often does, the Doctor poses as an official from Earth, much to everyone’s suspicion. After the assassination the Marshal declares martial law, and all hell breaks loose. As he’s running away and trying to escape, Ky, leader of the outcast people going through the mutations, touches the Doctor’s package (ooh, Matron) as he’s running past, and it begins to open. “Jo!” bellows the Doctor, “follow that hippy!”, or words to that effect, and Jo, being Jo, obliges implicitly, and the two of them escape to the surface via transporter booth. The Doctor meanwhile sticks around long enough to convince two guards, Stubbs and Cotton, that the Marshal is not to be trusted. Right, a word about these two. It’s nice to see that at least two of the quasi military types on offer here are human beings rather than unthinking meatheads. It’s even nicer to see that one of them, Cotton, is black, and he’s not subordinate to Stubbs. Alright, it’s not a command position, but nonetheless it is a positive role for a black actor for a change, the first since good old Rudolph Walker’s cameo in “The War Games”. Which makes it all the more galling when I have to say that Rick James, who plays Cotton, er. . . well, he just isn’t very good. I’m really sorry if anyone thinks that this is a racist comment – believe me it’s not meant to be. I try to be fair to everyone, but there have been times in the first two volumes when I’ve had to criticise what I think are not very good acting performances, and I’m sorry to say it, but I think that this is one of them. He’s trying, but that’s the point. You notice he’s trying. You notice that he’s acting, and the moment you actually notice that someone is ‘acting’ then they’re not acting very well. Sorry Rick.

Eventually The Doctor, Cotton and Stubbs make it down into the caverns on Solos, where Jo and Ky are also hiding. The Marshal, who has overheard Stubbs and Cotton talking with the Doctor, uses poisoned gas to try to kill them and the mutants, and plastic explosive to blow up the entrance. Our heroes are saved by a mysterious figure in a silver radiation suit. This it turns out is Professor Sondergaard. We know this because the Doctor greets him with “Professor Sondergaard I presume.” Huh? Why does he presume that? Was there some info dump, some bit of exposition which mentioned him before that I missed? Actually there might well have been. The dialogue in this story isn’t what you’d ever call sparkling, and I did find myself tuning out more than once. Here’s an interesting thing too. The professor, who’s obviously a goody and an ally for the Doctor, has a German accent. On British TV for much of the 20^th century, a German accent was shorthand for ‘evil megalomaniac’. Much like a British accent in a 1990s Hollywood blockbuster. Ky has opened his package, and found some old tablets containing a message in old Solonian symbols nobody can understand. The Doctor and Sondergaard work out that they are actually explaining that the climate of Solos has 4 seasons, each of which lasts 2000 years. The mutations happening to the Solonians are part of a natural process. They leave for Skybase, but on the way the Doctor goes into a cavern of radiation and retrieves a magic stone which he will later realise will help him to help Ky complete the radiation cycle. Yes, there is a sort of scientific explanation given, but when you boil it right down, this is a magic stone without which our heroes cannot complete their quest.

There is a problem now. This is only episode 4. By rights the whole thing could be wrapped up very quickly now, and certainly shouldn’t take more than one more episode, tops. But there’s still two to go. Hence the introduction of the Investigator from Earth (his guards are in white so you know that they are all decent chaps) who finds for, then against, then for, then against the Marshal. There’s more than one imprisonment and escape, and one of these is a frankly ridiculous escape from a radiation chamber by Jo, Ky and Cotton. Typically for this story, they get imprisoned in this chamber a second time. Yes, it was the Marshal who came up with the idea of imprisoning them in the same place they’d already escaped from once before. At last, at last Ky gets to complete his mutation. Remember how I called him a hippy earlier? Well, I wasn’t actually joking much, because now that’s what he becomes, a floating superbeing, dressed in robes of fluctuating psychedelic colours, who frees Jo, Cotton and Sondergaards, then flies off and disintegrates the Marshal, before going off to Solos to help his people mutate into super hippies as well. Bless.

I haven’t in all honesty thought that too many of the stories since the start of season 7 have suffered drastically from being 6 or even 7 parters, but this one really was two parts too far. Had it been one of the ones chosen for a summer omnibus repeat, and edited down to 90 minutes, I think it would have worked a hell of a lot better. As it is, though, this shows that as writers of 6 parters, the Bristol Boys were pretty decent 4 parter writers.

What Have We Learned?

Somebody really needs to introduce the Time Lords to the concept of stamps and postcodes. 

62: The Sea Devils

Before Watching

Remember what I said before “The Daemons” about some stories managing to live in the memory far longer than some others? Well, “The Sea Devils” is another example of this. I’m not entirely sure why this might be, but I’ll have a stab at it. The Sea Devils themselves are very memorable. Their heads are modelled on turtles, and the masks were created by monster maker extraordinaire John Friedlander. He cleverly designed the masks to be worn like hats, with the elongated necks covering the actors’ faces. These gave the Sea Devils less of the man in a suit appearance than other contemporary monsters. They wore these very simple questions made from nylon netting. I’m not sure in which documentary I saw them talking about this, but the costume designer was suddenly told out of the blue that they were not going to be allowed ‘naked’ Sea Devils, and so they needed costumes of some sort. With no money left to spend, she had some nylon netting around, and so used it – and the effect was remarkably striking. I love their disc shaped weapons as well.

It’s not necessarily just the visual impression though. Now, I haven’t researched this, but I have distinct memories of repeats of Doctor Who during the 70s, in which the chosen stories were abridged and edited down to a lean and mean 90 minutes. I’m pretty sure that “The Green Death” and “Genesis of the Daleks” also received this treatment. So I saw this story more than once back in the day.

It isn’t even necessarily this, though. The fact is that I have a distinct memory of the Master, in prison (Isle of Wight? I’m sure it’s on an island somewhere) watching an episode of The Clangers. I can only think that I must have been quite fond of the Clangers at the time. Oliver Postgate certainly had one of the finest and most distinctive voices on TV in the 70s, but I digress.

After Watching

Well, the Clangers thing happened in Episode One. It was actually just one of several nice little ‘character bits’. The Master, who has been on ice since the end of “The Daemons”, on a prison in a castle on an island just off the mainland. The Doctor and Jo pay a visit ostensibly to check that he is held securely, but also Jo discerns, the Doctor wants to check that he is being looked after as well. When he holds his hand up to Jo’s accusation the Doctor replies that they were once friends, in fact very good friend, and then makes the strange comment “You might almost say that we were at school together.” What I want to know is how you can almost be at school together with anyone? Either you were, or you weren’t. Coming back to the Clangers, the Master has won the Prison Governor, Colonel Trenchard, over to his side. Trenchard is this story’s seemingly obligatory reactionary old buffer, and it looks like the Master has played upon his misplaced ‘little Englander’ sense of patriotism, which is, one senses, of the ‘hang and flog anyone whose hair reaches down the ears’ variety. The Master, who has requested a colour TV in his cell, is watching “The Clangers”. (“The Clangers” was a charming Oliver Postgate animated series for young children, set on a different planet, where the eponymous Clangers communicate with each other by imitating penny whistles, and exist on blue string pudding and soup helpfully provided for them by a soup dragon. In some episodes they help an iron chicken, and they can go into space on a boat powered by music, the notes of which grow on trees. Utterly charming) when Trenchard enters the cell, the Master makes a wry comment about unusual extraterrestrial life forms that have been discovered, and Trenchard reacts as if he really means it, and the Master’s expression reveals just what he thinks of that. It’s a very subtle moment, but it’s clearly there, and beautifully illustrates the Master’s contempt at the stupidity of people like Trenchard, which is ironic since if Trenchard wasn’t a bear of quite so little brain it would be nowhere near as easy for the Master to control him.

Speaking of little humourous moments, this isn’t the only one. When Jo and the Doctor escape from the prison and make their way back to the Naval Base, the ravenous Jo is given a plate of cheese sandwiches. The Doctor reprimands her, snatches them off her, scoffs a couple then passes them around, handing back the plate with the words ‘I really am most terribly sorry.” Now maybe this would be funny if it wasn’t following on from a number of incidents in the last few stories when the Doctor has been a bit of a pig towards Jo, and not in a funny way either.

The way that we’re tantalised with views of the Sea Devil’s hands before we get to see him full on is reminiscent of the way that the Silurian was eventually revealed in the earlier story. The Sea Devils themselves are rather more obviously war like than their land based cousins. They have destroyed three marine craft, and this enables the Doctor to plot the epicentre of the attacks as a Martello tower, currently being used by the navy as a Sonar testing establishment. It’s here that the Doctor and Jo are first attacked by a Sea Devil, and need to be rescued. Which brings me nicely to : -

Helicopter Watch

Barry Letts had persuaded the Royal Navy that this story could be a good showcase for them, and the Navy fulfil the role that UNIT would normally have taken. When the Doctor and Jo need rescuing from the sonar testing station, Captain Hart dispatches a Navy Sea King to go and get them, which is rather impressive, but a little bit like sending a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.

The Master’s plan, then, which involves dressing up in a naval uniform and popping over to the nearby naval base to steal some electrical bits and pieces from the quartermaster’s stores to make a device which will rouse the Sea Devils in numbers, so that they will rise up and destroy Humanity as a way of taking revenge upon the Doctor, nyaa haa haa!

In a way this show almost plays out as two three parters. Parts 1 – 3 being “Something is Sinking Our Ships”, and Parts 4-6 being “The Sea Devils Attack”. And to be honest, once it’s firmly established what is sinking the ships, and how the Master fits into the storyline, it tends to become a lot less interesting. After all, we have been here before with “The Silurians” and in many ways it was done a little bit better in that show. So there’s a very conspicuous use of hardware in the last two episodes. We’ve already mentioned the navy Sea King helicopter. In the last two episodes not only do we get a Royal Navy SRN6 Hovercraft, we also get a pair of what appear to be very early proto-jet skis, in which the Doctor and the Master stage a gratuitous and really rather unnecessary chase with each other. I’ve often seen criticisms of certain of the Pertwee stories that the show is too heavily influenced by the contemporary Bond movies. For the most part I think that this is an oversimplification of what is actually going on, but when I watch “The Sea Devils” I can kind of understand why the observation is made in the first place. And I’m afraid that it is a negative criticism. Without wanting to write an essay on the nature of Bond films, they are live action comic strips based on some characters and occasionally some ideas from the original novels by  Ian Fleming. That’s not actually a negative criticism. That is what James Bond films are meant to be, and what they are meant to do, and they do it extremely well. But it’s not what Doctor Who is, or rather, not what it should be. Doctor Who is drama, or at least, when it is at its very best, it is.

Here’s one of the differences between season 7, and the two seasons which come after. At the end of “The Silurians” the Brigadier blows up the caves containing the entrance to the Silurians’ base even though he has given his guarantee to the Doctor that he will do no such thing. It takes real confidence in your show to have one of the continuing ‘good guys’ act in such a morally ambiguous way. It’s interesting that this is avoided in “The Sea Devils”. For one thing, as previously stated, there is no UNIT in this story. Having secured the cooperation of the Royal Navy, they take UNIT’s place. And being given such liberal help on the show it is understandable that the Navy is going to be shown in the best possible light. Hence it is not the Navy’s decision to launch a nuclear attack on the base of the Sea Devils, it is the decision of Walker, the parliamentary private secretary despatched by the Ministry of Defence to take charge of the situation, and he takes the decision ignoring the advice of the Navy’s Captain Hart. However, the attack doesn’t even happen in the 3end, because the Doctor has conveniently already blown up the Sea Devils’ base. The Master, displaying the one flaw in his character, namely fatal stupidity, takes the Doctor back to the Sea Devils’ base with him to help finish constructing and installing the machine that will waken the thousands of Sea Devils in hibernation there. And he lets him get on with it by himself. The Doctor, before activating the machine, which he has rigged to blow up the base by the simple expedient of reversing the polarity of the neutron flow – and this was the only story in which this was ever said seriously, in the Five Doctors it was surely said as a tongue in cheek nod to the fans, - before he activates it he satisfies himself that there is no possibility that the Sea Devils will now negotiate. Faced with a choice, he makes the only decision he can make – killing a few thousand Sea Devils to save the millions of humans AND Sea Devils who would be killed in a war between the two species.

I can’t help thinking that in the 7^th season, an exploration of the ramifications of this decision might well have provided the ending to the story. In this case it’s just glossed over, and the Doctor never gets a chance to show any remorse for it. Instead we get a bit of a disappointing scene when the Master, having been taken off the Hovercraft seemingly at Death’s door, turns out to be a man in a bad rubber mask, while the real Master drives off in the hovercraft. Seen it before, I’m afraid.

I can definitely understand why I enjoyed this story so much when I was 8 years old. Despite its six part length it is full of action, and full of great hardware. It’s got the Master, and it’s got one of the better monsters – in my opinion the Sea Devils look better than their cousins, the Silurians, even though they are not necessarily as well conceived – only one of them ever gets to deal with the Doctor and the Master, and there is no sense of individuals with them as there is with the Silurians. Even now, at the age of 50, I can still enjoy something like this. If I start to analyse it then I can see the flaws, but the point is not to analyse it too much. With the benefit of hindsight this was the direction that the show had taken at this time, and it’s not as if it’s not watchable, because it is, and it’s not as if it wasn’t popular, because it was. And it’s not as if it wouldn’t take a different direction in the future, because it would. Not for a while yet, though.

What Have We Learned?

The Doctor and The Master were best buddies at Gallifrey Mixed Infants