74: Planet of the Spiders

Before Watching

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

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

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

After Watching

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helicopter Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know which view of it I prefer.

What Have We Learned?

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

71: The Invasion of the Dinosaurs

Before Watching

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

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

After Watching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Faceless Ones

The War Games

The Silurians

The Ambassadors of Death (credited to David Whitaker)

Colony in Space

The Sea Devils

Frontier in Space

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

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

Helicopter Watch

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

What Have We Learned?

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

69: The Green Death

Before Watching

Of “The Green Death” I remember precious little at the moment, other than giant maggots and slime. And Jo Grant leaving. I was quite upset about that at the time, not realizing that, just as Jon Pertwee would be soon replaced by an even greater Doctor, Jo Grant was to be replaced by an even greater companion. Just my opinion, of course. But I’m right.

This is one of the last UNIT stories, and one of the last Pertwee stories set entirely on Earth. Maybe this is why I can remember so little about it when compared against, let’s say the other stories of the 10^th season.

“The Green Death” was scripted by Robert Sloman, whose other contributions towards Doctor Who were writing “The Daemons” in conjunction with Barry Letts, the show’s producer, and Jon Pertwee’s last story, “Planet of the Spiders”. Now, regarding “The Daemons”, any story with Roger Delgado’s Master in it has an unfair advantage before it starts, and when I watched it recently I found it an enjoyable enough romp. For me, “Planet of the Spiders” hasn’t fared so well, although I promise to give it a fair hearing when I sit own to watch it again in a couple of weeks’ time. Really, as I’m a confirmed arachnophobe it should have given me the willies, but those spiders just weren’t convincing enough. There was too much padding, especially in the chase scene with Lupton, where Jon Pertwee was given his head and allowed to use a range of vehicles, none of which seemed all that necessary. There was yet another Time Lord we’d never heard of before, who apparently was the Doctor’s mentor, and who helped the Doctor regenerate. Sorry – this is meant to be a review of “The Green Death”. I’m just hoping – well, I’m just hoping that this is better than “Planet of the Spiders”, otherwise it could be a long 6 episodes.

After Watching

Wow. I loved this. I mean, maybe this is just me, but be fair, wasn’t that terrific? Which is a weird thing for me to say when you think that I didn’t think that much of it when it was first transmitted. But then I was 9 years old at the time, I suppose, and a lot of it must have gone over my head. All of the principals are in marvellous form here, and it kind of showed for me that when a Unit story worked it could be really good – in fact there’s probably a good argument for saying that this was the last really good Unit story.

As a story, the basic premise isn’t that promising. This is what it boils down to. A giant sentient supercomputer going by the acronym BOSS takes over the head of multinational chemical company. (actually you could say that it takes over the head of the Head of a multinational chemical company) The company pumps industrial waste into a disused section of a coal mine which kills anyone who touches it, yet also it alters the DNA of maggots, and said maggots become three foot long armour plated acid spitting super-maggots, and tunnel out of the mine after it is closed off by explosives. This is all part of the supercomputer’s plan to subjugate humanity, and impose order and regulation upon a chaotic world – you get the drift. Yet for all the seeming drawbacks of this particular scenario it is actually exceptionally watchable.

With the megalomaniac supercomputer this is crossing ground which has already been well trodden in “The war Machines”, and will be well trodden again in years to come. Yet for me, BOSS works a lot better than WOTAN ever did. For one thing, it turns out that this computer does have a personality. A rather smug, arrogant and barking mad personality, granted, but it does make for a more interesting story. It has a couple of good lines as well, telling Stevens, its human catspaw “That's how you get your kicks like the good little Nietzschean you are.” You don’t get lines like that in your average Terry Nation.

Watching it, I was surprised how really rather sickening and repulsive the green pulsating goo and the maggots still looked today. Watching the documentary in the extras with the BBC DVD, I was intrigued to see that the maggots weren’t all, as I had previously heard, made from condoms. Actually the special effects people used a variety of several different construction methods including glove puppet and mechanical puppet, depending on the kind of shot that was required. The results are effective, and considering the time that this story was made, really rather remarkably so. Less so the adult insect. It really wasn’t brilliantly realised , and the flying effects were not good. Thankfully they didn’t last that long. I had to chuckle when the creature was brought down dead, and the Doctor examined it saying “What a beautiful creature!” I do wonder how Jon Pertwee managed to keep a straight face saying that one.

While we’re raising the few negatives there are about this story, as we now know, this is where the third Doctor sows the seeds of his eventual destruction by visiting Metebelis Three after threatening to do so for ages. Now, the studio jungle scenes are as good as always, but as for the gigantic avian feet and talons that swoop on the Doctor – well, I’m sorry, but it’s a no from me, Simon. It is rare, though, for such an inconsequential moment in one serial to come back and be used in the way that it is a season later. There’s a strange and inconsistent use of CSO at one point. Most of the scenes on the hillside outside the mine were clearly shot on location. However there is one which makes such obvious use of CSO that it looks ridiculous. All I can think of is that they must have found late on that they needed to reshoot the scene, and didn’t have time and money to go back on location to do it. Oh, and while I think of it there’s the obligatory UNIT “bomb the hell out of them” scene. This scene was a good example of the principle  - if you can’t do it well, then do something different -.

Helicopter Watch

The bombing run is carried out by a tiny one man helicopter, and it’s so unimpressive it would probably have been better just to have the Brig being told over the phone that the bombing run had been completed.

I’ve lived in South Wales for the best part of three decades now, and so much of it must have rubbed off on me that I can get rather defensive about bad accents and patronizing clichés. This does all start off a little bit like it should have been titled “How Green Death Was My Valley” But I found that as the show went on this didn’t seem quite so much of a problem. Not accent wise, anyway, since there’s quite a few really genuine Welsh accents in the mix. I noticed good old Talfryn Thomas when the Doctor descended into the mine for the first time.  I remembered him from being a guest star in a few episodes of “Dad’s Army”. Now I can tell you from personal experience that his accent is the real McCoy. The exteriors looked dead right for the South Wales valleys too – probably because that’s where they were filmed.

Since we’re mentioning performances at this point, we’ll talk about the guest stars. Now there’s definite on-screen chemistry between Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan who  play Jo Grant and Professor Jones, but then that’s hardly surprising since there was off-screen chemistry between them at the time as well. I believe that they were engaged at the time, although the relationship ended. A mention for Tony Adams, making an early TV appearance here as one of Stevens’ flunkeys. He disappears about halfway through the story, because he was taken ill, but this didn’t have any hugely detrimental effect on his career. He went on to play Doctor Neville Bywaters in General Hospital, and then Adam Chance in theat perennial favourite of lovers of bad TV, Crossroads. Acting bouquets, though, go to Jerome Willis, who plays Stevens. He is a terrific villain, and to add to that, his conversion to the light at the end of the story was convincing enough to make his sacrifice at the end rather moving.

How did people view this story’s eco agenda when it was first shown? I ask the question because it just seems right on the money today. When the story was written, alternative ‘clean’ energy, edible fungus and textured vegetable protein, and the dangers of genetic modification were all on the agenda, but pretty much on the fringes of national consciousness, while it’s fair to say that they all firmly in the mainstream today. As a result you don’t have to be a genius to see that this story has a remarkable resonance when you watch it today.

We can’t ignore the fact that this is Jo Grant’s last story. It’s always been fairly clear to those of us who look for that sort of thing, that Jo has confused feelings towards the Doctor. He is obviously a father figure towards her, yet at the same time her feelings are a lot more complicated than that. So when she meets a rather hippyish, young, long haired, Nobel prize winning scientist called Professor Jones, with whom she gets off on the wrong foot at their first meeting, it’s pretty much a given that we’re going to be hearing wedding bells – well, engagement bells anyway, at the end of the story. Actually this does give us a really rather good end to the story. The Doctor slips away from the engagement party, and gives a rueful look as he drives Bessie away into the twilight. He’s going to be lonely, we know. What we don’t know at this point is that in the very next story he’ll get the pleasure of the company of wonderful Liz Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith. Ahh, the lucky swine.

What Have We Learned?

Even at this late stage the production team were capable of pulling a great UNIT story out of the bag.

Today’s Science fiction can sometimes become tomorrow’s science fact.

 

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. 

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