It must have been about 1972 or 1973 that there was a
BBC Special Effects Exhibition at the Science Museum in London, which featured
an excellent display of costumes and props from Doctor Who. Now, we didn’t have
a lot of money as a family (cue violins in background) and never went away on
holiday, but what my Mum did try to do to make up for it was to provide us with
as many interesting days out as she could, Growing up in the West London
suburbs there was usually something interesting waiting at the end of a tube
journey, and this wonderful exhibition was one of them.
I mean it was actually really great. I can remember
going into a room which had a full sized TARDIS console, and Tardis panels on
the walls. That was amazing. There were Daleks, an Invasion Cyberman costume,
and some of the best costumes from recent years. Now, you have to remember that
the early 70s right through to about Terror of the Zygons was a golden age of
alien design for Doctor Who, unsurpassed until the 2005 revival in my opinion.
There was an Ogron, a Sea Devil, and a Draconian, and I fancy that “Frontier In
Space” may even have been the story broadcasting at the time we went to the
exhibition. So you can imagine they made quite an impression on me, and are
still one of my favourite Doctor Aliens after all these years.
Off the point a little, if we fast forward to 1982, nine
years later, my brother and I decided it was high time that we paid a visit to
the Doctor Who Exhibition on the Golden Mile in Blackpool. The 18 year old me
frankly couldn’t quite match the sense of wonder the 8 and a half year old me
had felt at the earlier exhibition. Well, we’d had a very long train journey
which was made none the better by the price I had to pay for a slice of British
Rail coffee. In fact the one lasting memory I have of the Exhibition is of
looking at the Omega Mark II costume, to be seen in the next season’s opener
“The Arc of Infinity” and asking what the hell they thought they were doing if
they were bringing Omega back. When I actually got to see “Arc of Infinity”
some 5 months later, I realised just how right I was to be sceptical, but we’ll
come to that story in due course. Meanwhile, “Frontier in Space”. This was
another of those stories whose titles were changed by Target for the
novelisation, and so if you’re looking for this one you need to look for
“Doctor Who and The Space War”. Malcolm Hulke, as he usually did, novelised his
own scripts. He usually made a good job of it too, and this one was no different
as I recall, however there was one particular passage which always made my
brother and I chuckle. At one point Jo has been captured by the Ogrons, and her
captor obviously has designs upon her, and brings her food, while uttering
these sweet nothings, “Eat good, get big, become Ogron wife.” Ah, sweet. I
can’t wait to find out if that line ever was said on screen.
After Watching
Well, we had to wait until episode 6, but then the
answer to the great question was found. The Ogron who brings Jo her food when
she’s in captivity on the Ogron home planet does not say “Eat good, get big,
become Ogron wife” – so that’s purely an invention for the Target novelisation.
How, then, do we arrive at a fair assessment of
“Frontier in Space”? In some ways it’s the archetypal space opera from the
Pertwee years, and yet in other ways it is very much a one of a kind. It’s the
last Master story for one thing. It was shortly after this was filmed that
Roger Delgado was tragically killed in a car accident, and so the mooted last
confrontation story between the Doctor and the Master never actually came to
pass.
The plot is rather thin, but not difficult to follow.
The TARDIS materialises upon an Earth cargo spaceship. There is a strange
noise, and the ship is attacked. The crew, and Jo, believe that it is
Draconians who attack the ship. The Doctor, though, with his resistance to the
sound, can see that it is in fact Ogrons who do so. The Draconians control a
rival space empire to that of Earth. The two empires have been at war in the
past, but there exists an uneasy peace between them at this moment in time.
Now, if you’re thinking that this sounds rather like the situation between the
Federation and the Klingon Empire in the original series of Star Trek, then
you’re not the only person to think so. We’ll look at similarities between the
Klingons and the Draconians a little later.
Someone or something is using the Ogrons to try to
foment war between the two empires. Now, we’ve seen the Ogrons before in “Day
of the Daleks”, and so we know that they’re too dumb to come up with this kind
of plan for themselves. The natural assumption is that it’s the Daleks who are
behind this plan, and so when they do get round to turning up, at the dog end
of episode 6, it really doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Now, my memory may
well be at fault here, but I’m sure that the BBC had already showed them
turning up in a trailer before episode 6 was even broadcast as well, so again,
it wasn’t exactly a shock to see them.
Not that it’s the Daleks who are actually carrying out
the plan to manipulate the two empires to war. This is the doing of the Master,
who doesn’t actually turn up until episode three. Once the Master does appear
we do get into a swings and roundabouts situation. Yes, Roger Delgado is as
watchable and as enjoyable as ever. The problem is that once the Master
arrives, the action becomes as predictable as ever. Prior to his arrival,
there’s a lot of toing and froing between the Earth president, who is being
urged towards war by her meathead advisor General Williams, and the Draconian
embassy. The Doctor is passed around from pillar to post with nobody believing
him, until the Earth president tires of him and sends him off to life
imprisonment on the penal colony on the moon.
So, the Master poses as the leader of an Earth Colony.
He has manipulated Earth records to show the Doctor and Jo as master criminals
on his planet, and has the president agree to them being handed over into his
custody. They are space jacked by the Draconians, and in an audience with the
Emperor, the Doctor reveals that he was made an honorary Draconian nobleman 500
years ago for services rendered. A party of Ogrons rescues the Master, but
crucially leaves one of their number behind, which finally convinces the
Draconians of what is happening. The Doctor and the crown prince take the Ogron
to convince the Earth President, but the Master attacks, and when they repel
him, he has taken the Ogron and Jo back to the Ogron home planet. The Draconian
prince wins the meathead Williams over to his side, and they mount a covert
mission to said Ogron home planet. The Master reveals that the Daleks are
behind his plan. The Doctor frees himself, Jo, Williams and the Draconian, and
sends them back to their respective empires to muster forces to resist the
Daleks. He is grazed by a shot from the Master’s gun, and after returning to
the TARDIS, which the Master had brought to the Ogron planet, sends a
telepathic message to the Time Lords, and collapses. Phew.
This story manages the remarkable feat of being at the
same time too short for 6 episodes, and also too long for 6 episodes. There’s
not really enough story in the first 5 episodes to sustain 5 episodes. On the
other hand, there’s really too much in episode 6, and it means that the ending
is rather unsatisfactory. Apart from anything else, there really isn’t a proper
ending. We think that Williams and the Draconian crown prince will get home
safely and warn Earth and Draconia about the Dalek threat. But we don’t
actually know, and what’s more, we will never find out. And so although
“Frontier in Space” and “Planet of the Daleks” are not the first pair of
stories to dovetail together, for me they are the first pair that dovetail
without the first story being properly resolved. If we take “The Space Museum”
and “The Chase”, the situation on the planet of the Xerons has clearly been
resolved. Partly this sense of dislocation is caused by the abrupt way that we
saw the last of Roger Delgado’s Master. That’s nobody’s fault other than a
cruel and untimely death on a car crash, but it is a terrible shame that there
was no great and final showdown, which many people connected with the show have
said was being planned. In the end of episode 6 the Master does what he has
always done so far – watched his schemes begin to collapse around him, and done
a runner while the going was good, although this time he took a pot shot at the
Doctor as he was running, which caused the injury which is carried forward into
the next story.
That’s the manic 6th episode. In the 5
episodes prior to that it was a particularly good story if you like prison
scenes. The Doctor and/or Jo were locked up in several different locations
including more than one spaceship, an Earth prison cell, a penal colony on the
Moon, and a cell on the Ogron planet, and that’s just the ones I can remember.
Which does smack a little of a lack of imagination. For me this is what stopped
“Frontier in Space” actually being the classic that I maybe thought it was when
I watched it back in 1973. The concept, of an agent provocateur deliberately
and covertly trying to provoke war between two great powers is an interesting
one, and it means that the story is constantly watchable, but never really
becomes what it could have been. For example, General Williams’ sudden
conversion to the cause of peace would be a lot more believable had we but
heard a little more about his past history with the Draconians, which might
have made his conversion seem just a little less Damascene and a little more
believable. Then there’s the Earth president. You now, I can’t really make up
my mind whether Malcolm was making a stand against the prevailing tone of the
Pertwee era so far, which is certainly chauvinistic, even if it isn’t
misogynistic, by having a woman President. On the other hand, he might just be
using this as a sign of how far in the future we are – President of the Earth?
A woman? This can only be the future. The way that the President is continually
browbeaten by the meathead Williams, and the fact that in one of the scenes she
is lying on a couch, having a head massage from her female PA kind of makes me
think it’s the latter rather than the former.
Right, let’s get back to the Draconians. I made the
point earlier that it’s possible to draw comparisons between them and the
Klingons from Star Trek. Of course, when you say the Klingons you need to
define exactly which Klingons you’re talking about. The Klingons that appeared
in the original series, that is the only Klingons we had experienced by the
time that “Frontier in Space” was broadcast were essentially humanoids with
funny eyebrows, played by blacked up actors. There was maybe a suggestion of
something Asiatic about them, but that was about it. To a ‘man’ they were
pretty aggressive meatheads obsessed with warfare. Which isn’t really like the
Draconians. Now, some 6 years after “Frontier in Space” a Klingon ship appeared
in the beginning of the film, and everything had changed. This wasn’t an
exploration of Klingon culture by any stretch of the imagination, but now the
Klingons had their strange, ridged, inhuman foreheads, and their peculiar
facial hair. In “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and films such as “The
Undiscovered Country” we gradually learned a lot more about Klingon culture. They
lose their role as out and out villains, and instead come across as a noble
race, obsessed with honour, their concept of which seems to be at least
suggested by the Samurai code of Bushido. Which also sounds like the
Draconians. It’s worth stressing again, though, that the Draconians came before
this version of the Klingons. I think that the Draconians were an interestingly
conceived alien race, and their design, and appearance was as good as it gets
in classic Doctor Who, and it’s maybe a little surprising that they were never
to reappear in classic Doctor Who. If I was asked I’d hazard the opinion that
this comes down to two things. Firstly, that the Draconians, despite their
alien appearance, are not monsters, and it’s probably easier to write stories about
out and out monsters, and secondly, that it seems to me that something happened
to alienate Malcolm Hulke from Doctor Who. Having co-written “The Faceless
Ones” and “The War Games” for Patrick Troughton he wrote at least one story for
each of the 5 seasons of Jon Pertwee. He would write “Invasion of the
Dinosaurs” for season 11, Jon Pertwee’s last season, and then that would be it
and he would never contribute again. A great pity.
All in all, then, it’s a curious piece of work is
“Frontier in Space”. It strives for something of the epic style and sweep of
“The Daleks’ Master Plan”, with the Master in the Mavic Chen position, and the
Daleks pushed almost totally into the background. At times it almost makes it
as well – it’s certainly a more convincing ‘space opera’ than we’ve seen for a
long time in the show. As a stand-alone story, though, it falls some way short
of the gold standard for me. Which is a shame, because I loved it when I first
saw it.
What have we
learned?
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