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.

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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. 

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. 

57: The Claws of Axos

Before Watching

You wouldn’t forget the two Axon costumes in a hurry. If I recall it correctly, the first costume, which is the appearance that the Axons take on when they first come to Earth, is of golden humanoids, which have expressionless faces and no pupils or irises in their eyes and which look like Greek statues come to life. The second , and real appearance is I’ve got stuck in my head as a creature that has 2 arms, two legs and a head of sorts, but still looks like it has been made from spaghetti and meatballs.

I must have seen at least one of these episodes round a mate’s house in colour, since I still remember the brightness of the colours, especially in Axos itself. If I seem to remember quite a few plot details despite not having watched the story in 4 decades, it must be lingering memories of the Target novelization. I’m not certain, but I think that this one may well have the Doctor and the Master working together to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow – which hardly ever actually really happened despite what people think they remember.

Anything more before we start? Well, I have a feeling that this was the first story to be scripted by the ‘Bristol Boys’ , or to give them their real names, Bob Baker and Dave Martin. They are going to be regular writers until season 19, and in this time they’re going to produce a string of stories, none of which I look back on as an absolute classic at the moment, but none of which were complete turkeys either. So that’s pretty much what I’m expecting here.

After Watching

Maybe I’m going a bit soft, but I really rather enjoyed that. It’s a four parter, and you know the temptation with the 4 parters. I know that the sensible options , to keep Dr. Who fresh for me, is to only watch two episodes in one sitting. Well, no, actually, even that’s a compromise option. Really and truly the most sensible option would be to watch one episode a week, preferably on Saturday teatime, but that just isn’t going to happen. With a 4 parter, you watch your permitted two episodes, and what happens? You’re into it, and you think, well, another one wouldn’t hurt. So then you watch it and think – well, there’s only 1 to go now, it’s silly not to finish it tonight. Before you know it you’ve watched the whole story – which is probably not the best way to watch it, and maybe means you won’t be getting the full benefit from it.

Well, for better or for worse I did watch it in full go, so I promise I will try my best to be fair about it. There were some quite clever things going on in this, the Bristol boys’ first Doctor Who story. Basically, what seems to be an alien spaceship lands on Earth. This happens at a time when a nasty little Ronnie Barker lookalike called Chinn from the Ministry of Defence is poking his nose around about UNIT, and getting himself all worked up about the fact that the Doctor isn’t British. There’s also a visit from an American agent called Bill Filer, who is there to see what’s happening with the Master, and to take him back to the USA if he can be found. Watch this space, Bill.

Back at the spaceship, a tramp rejoicing in the name of Pigbin Josh (one of the Dungeness Joshes?) is snared by the ship and killed. Bill Filer has made his way to the ship, and he too is snared on board. When he comes to he is being held by the eponymous claws of Axos, the name of the organic, living ship, and he is in bad company, since the Master is being held as well.

The plan of Axos is to spread bits of itself, which it calls Axonite, throughout the world, where it can then start feeding on the earth’s matter and energy. It dupes that fat idiot Chinn into agreeing, by showing him how Axonite can blow up a small frog to the size of a large cow, and somewhat mysteriously pronounces this as the answer to the world’s food shortages. Only in France. Sorry, that was uncalled for. I too have eaten frogs’ legs, and d’you know what? They tasted like frogs’ legs. Chinn, though, all along plans to keep Axonite for Britain, which holds up the plans of Axos, allowing the Doctor to discover the nature of Axos’ plans. Axos lets the Master go, but keeps his TARDIS as a guarantee of his good behaviour, to go and get the Doctor and the TARDIS. You see, Axos wants to be able to travel through time so that it can absorb all the energy and matter that has ever been and ever will be. Well, you’ve got to set yourself goals in life now and again, haven’t you. So basically the Doctor gets the Master to fix his TARDIS for him, and fly it into the middle of Axos. Incidentally, we get a nice shot of an unchameleoned TARDIS , since the Master’s looks like the parked TARDISes in the last episode of the War Games. The Doctor suggests he can link up the TARDIS drive with Axos to turn Axos into a time machine. Amazingly Axos falls for this old toffee, and gets itself trapped in a time loop for eternity. The Doctor escapes, although the TARDIS has been programmed by the Time Lords to yo yo back to Earth, and we’re led to believe that the Master has got away.

Written down like that it looks like there’s a lot of story to this story, and there is, but not oppressively so. If we take “Terror of the Autons” as a prototype season 8 story, then this one fits the template a hell of a lot better than it would have fit in season 7. If you read my views on the Hartnell era stories, then you might remember that the mingers v. pretty people score stood at 1 all after “The Daleks” and “Galaxy Four” This story manages the achievement of making the baddies into both pretty people AND mingers!

The story then has a lot going on in it, but for all that it’s a relatively simplistic one. There’s a certain very basic set of assumptions here. Axos has come to Earth. Its purpose is an evil one – to absorb all the matter and energy on the planet. Why is it so evil? Because it is an alien monster and alien monster are evil. That’s what they are and what they do. Trust me, it’s perfectly logical when you’re 8 years old. The Earth has already been invaded so many times  in the show since season 5 (I’m thinking Ice Warriors, Web of Fear, Fury from the Deep, The Invasion, Seeds of Death, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons) you just kind of start from a basic assumption that this is what an alien is going to try to do. You know that however benign the alien is on the surface, it is sooner or later going to be trying to take over the world, and you know that the Doctor is going to foil its plans. You just don’t know how it is going to try to take over the world, and you don’t know how the Doctor is going to foil its plans.

So this month’s alien then is Axos. I say alien, singular, advisedly, since although Axos manifests itself as a number of beings, it is in fact one entity. Neat trick if you can do it. In order to lull those stupid Earthlings into a false sense of security, Axos manifests itself as humanoid beings with golden skin and hair, and overly large strange featureless eyes, the effect of which is to give them something of the appearance of classical greek statues. It was only when the credits came up that I saw the leader of the Axons (alright, they are all one being, but let’s try to simplify it a little shall we) is played by Bernard Holley. Bernard Holley is another of those actors whose name might not mean anything to you, but whose face you’d surely recognize – well, you would if he wasn’t wearing those strange eyes and that dodgy syrup, anyway. ( For those of us who don’t speak 1980s Mockney – syrup is short for syrup of figs, and syrup of figs rhymes with hairpiece). The other manifestation of the Axos – the afore mentioned spaghetti and meatballs monster isn’t to my mind quite so effective. The worst shot of all is when poor Wisher, sacrificial scientist number 1, becomes one. Or rather, he doesn’t. What he becomes is A Man In A Large Brown Bag. I have to say that it’s probably one of the least impressive shots of the season so far, alongside the CSO kitchen in Terror of the Autons.

I said that I enjoyed this story, yet reading back what I’ve written so far I haven’t really said a great deal about why I liked it. So let’s try to be positive. I do wonder whether the outline at least of this story as written before the decision was made to have the master appear in every story (so far) of season 8. Why I say so is that you’d only need to make minimal changes to the plot to take the Master out of it entirely. Which would be a huge mistake. No wonder Roger Delgado was as hugely popular as he became. Here we get to see another facet of the Master’s character, since this is a Master in desperate straits. The criticism has been made that the Master can’t be all that smart since every alien ally he makes seems to dupe him and ditch him in the end. The interesting development in this story is that the Master has already been suckered in by Axos before the story even starts. Blow me if I wasn’t even a little bit sympathetic towards the Master, and never more so than when the Doctor seemingly makes an alliance with him to escape from Earth. That was a great little scene, and it said a lot about the Master and the Doctor’s relative strengths and weaknesses. The Master, it turns out, is the engineer. The Doctor freely acknowledges that only the Master could get his TARDIS working. And, bless him, the Master SO wants the Doctor as a mate, whatever he says.

What Have We Learned?

Beware of Greek statues bearing gifts