67: Frontier In Space

Before Watching

It must have been about 1972 or 1973 that there was a BBC Special Effects Exhibition at the Science Museum in London, which featured an excellent display of costumes and props from Doctor Who. Now, we didn’t have a lot of money as a family (cue violins in background) and never went away on holiday, but what my Mum did try to do to make up for it was to provide us with as many interesting days out as she could, Growing up in the West London suburbs there was usually something interesting waiting at the end of a tube journey, and this wonderful exhibition was one of them.

I mean it was actually really great. I can remember going into a room which had a full sized TARDIS console, and Tardis panels on the walls. That was amazing. There were Daleks, an Invasion Cyberman costume, and some of the best costumes from recent years. Now, you have to remember that the early 70s right through to about Terror of the Zygons was a golden age of alien design for Doctor Who, unsurpassed until the 2005 revival in my opinion. There was an Ogron, a Sea Devil, and a Draconian, and I fancy that “Frontier In Space” may even have been the story broadcasting at the time we went to the exhibition. So you can imagine they made quite an impression on me, and are still one of my favourite Doctor Aliens after all these years.

Off the point a little, if we fast forward to 1982, nine years later, my brother and I decided it was high time that we paid a visit to the Doctor Who Exhibition on the Golden Mile in Blackpool. The 18 year old me frankly couldn’t quite match the sense of wonder the 8 and a half year old me had felt at the earlier exhibition. Well, we’d had a very long train journey which was made none the better by the price I had to pay for a slice of British Rail coffee. In fact the one lasting memory I have of the Exhibition is of looking at the Omega Mark II costume, to be seen in the next season’s opener “The Arc of Infinity” and asking what the hell they thought they were doing if they were bringing Omega back. When I actually got to see “Arc of Infinity” some 5 months later, I realised just how right I was to be sceptical, but we’ll come to that story in due course. Meanwhile, “Frontier in Space”. This was another of those stories whose titles were changed by Target for the novelisation, and so if you’re looking for this one you need to look for “Doctor Who and The Space War”. Malcolm Hulke, as he usually did, novelised his own scripts. He usually made a good job of it too, and this one was no different as I recall, however there was one particular passage which always made my brother and I chuckle. At one point Jo has been captured by the Ogrons, and her captor obviously has designs upon her, and brings her food, while uttering these sweet nothings, “Eat good, get big, become Ogron wife.” Ah, sweet. I can’t wait to find out if that line ever was said on screen.

After Watching

Well, we had to wait until episode 6, but then the answer to the great question was found. The Ogron who brings Jo her food when she’s in captivity on the Ogron home planet does not say “Eat good, get big, become Ogron wife” – so that’s purely an invention for the Target novelisation.

How, then, do we arrive at a fair assessment of “Frontier in Space”? In some ways it’s the archetypal space opera from the Pertwee years, and yet in other ways it is very much a one of a kind. It’s the last Master story for one thing. It was shortly after this was filmed that Roger Delgado was tragically killed in a car accident, and so the mooted last confrontation story between the Doctor and the Master never actually came to pass.

The plot is rather thin, but not difficult to follow. The TARDIS materialises upon an Earth cargo spaceship. There is a strange noise, and the ship is attacked. The crew, and Jo, believe that it is Draconians who attack the ship. The Doctor, though, with his resistance to the sound, can see that it is in fact Ogrons who do so. The Draconians control a rival space empire to that of Earth. The two empires have been at war in the past, but there exists an uneasy peace between them at this moment in time. Now, if you’re thinking that this sounds rather like the situation between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the original series of Star Trek, then you’re not the only person to think so. We’ll look at similarities between the Klingons and the Draconians a little later.

Someone or something is using the Ogrons to try to foment war between the two empires. Now, we’ve seen the Ogrons before in “Day of the Daleks”, and so we know that they’re too dumb to come up with this kind of plan for themselves. The natural assumption is that it’s the Daleks who are behind this plan, and so when they do get round to turning up, at the dog end of episode 6, it really doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Now, my memory may well be at fault here, but I’m sure that the BBC had already showed them turning up in a trailer before episode 6 was even broadcast as well, so again, it wasn’t exactly a shock to see them.

Not that it’s the Daleks who are actually carrying out the plan to manipulate the two empires to war. This is the doing of the Master, who doesn’t actually turn up until episode three. Once the Master does appear we do get into a swings and roundabouts situation. Yes, Roger Delgado is as watchable and as enjoyable as ever. The problem is that once the Master arrives, the action becomes as predictable as ever. Prior to his arrival, there’s a lot of toing and froing between the Earth president, who is being urged towards war by her meathead advisor General Williams, and the Draconian embassy. The Doctor is passed around from pillar to post with nobody believing him, until the Earth president tires of him and sends him off to life imprisonment on the penal colony on the moon.

So, the Master poses as the leader of an Earth Colony. He has manipulated Earth records to show the Doctor and Jo as master criminals on his planet, and has the president agree to them being handed over into his custody. They are space jacked by the Draconians, and in an audience with the Emperor, the Doctor reveals that he was made an honorary Draconian nobleman 500 years ago for services rendered. A party of Ogrons rescues the Master, but crucially leaves one of their number behind, which finally convinces the Draconians of what is happening. The Doctor and the crown prince take the Ogron to convince the Earth President, but the Master attacks, and when they repel him, he has taken the Ogron and Jo back to the Ogron home planet. The Draconian prince wins the meathead Williams over to his side, and they mount a covert mission to said Ogron home planet. The Master reveals that the Daleks are behind his plan. The Doctor frees himself, Jo, Williams and the Draconian, and sends them back to their respective empires to muster forces to resist the Daleks. He is grazed by a shot from the Master’s gun, and after returning to the TARDIS, which the Master had brought to the Ogron planet, sends a telepathic message to the Time Lords, and collapses. Phew.

This story manages the remarkable feat of being at the same time too short for 6 episodes, and also too long for 6 episodes. There’s not really enough story in the first 5 episodes to sustain 5 episodes. On the other hand, there’s really too much in episode 6, and it means that the ending is rather unsatisfactory. Apart from anything else, there really isn’t a proper ending. We think that Williams and the Draconian crown prince will get home safely and warn Earth and Draconia about the Dalek threat. But we don’t actually know, and what’s more, we will never find out. And so although “Frontier in Space” and “Planet of the Daleks” are not the first pair of stories to dovetail together, for me they are the first pair that dovetail without the first story being properly resolved. If we take “The Space Museum” and “The Chase”, the situation on the planet of the Xerons has clearly been resolved. Partly this sense of dislocation is caused by the abrupt way that we saw the last of Roger Delgado’s Master. That’s nobody’s fault other than a cruel and untimely death on a car crash, but it is a terrible shame that there was no great and final showdown, which many people connected with the show have said was being planned. In the end of episode 6 the Master does what he has always done so far – watched his schemes begin to collapse around him, and done a runner while the going was good, although this time he took a pot shot at the Doctor as he was running, which caused the injury which is carried forward into the next story.

That’s the manic 6^th episode. In the 5 episodes prior to that it was a particularly good story if you like prison scenes. The Doctor and/or Jo were locked up in several different locations including more than one spaceship, an Earth prison cell, a penal colony on the Moon, and a cell on the Ogron planet, and that’s just the ones I can remember. Which does smack a little of a lack of imagination. For me this is what stopped “Frontier in Space” actually being the classic that I maybe thought it was when I watched it back in 1973. The concept, of an agent provocateur deliberately and covertly trying to provoke war between two great powers is an interesting one, and it means that the story is constantly watchable, but never really becomes what it could have been. For example, General Williams’ sudden conversion to the cause of peace would be a lot more believable had we but heard a little more about his past history with the Draconians, which might have made his conversion seem just a little less Damascene and a little more believable. Then there’s the Earth president. You now, I can’t really make up my mind whether Malcolm was making a stand against the prevailing tone of the Pertwee era so far, which is certainly chauvinistic, even if it isn’t misogynistic, by having a woman President. On the other hand, he might just be using this as a sign of how far in the future we are – President of the Earth? A woman? This can only be the future. The way that the President is continually browbeaten by the meathead Williams, and the fact that in one of the scenes she is lying on a couch, having a head massage from her female PA kind of makes me think it’s the latter rather than the former.

Right, let’s get back to the Draconians. I made the point earlier that it’s possible to draw comparisons between them and the Klingons from Star Trek. Of course, when you say the Klingons you need to define exactly which Klingons you’re talking about. The Klingons that appeared in the original series, that is the only Klingons we had experienced by the time that “Frontier in Space” was broadcast were essentially humanoids with funny eyebrows, played by blacked up actors. There was maybe a suggestion of something Asiatic about them, but that was about it. To a ‘man’ they were pretty aggressive meatheads obsessed with warfare. Which isn’t really like the Draconians. Now, some 6 years after “Frontier in Space” a Klingon ship appeared in the beginning of the film, and everything had changed. This wasn’t an exploration of Klingon culture by any stretch of the imagination, but now the Klingons had their strange, ridged, inhuman foreheads, and their peculiar facial hair. In “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and films such as “The Undiscovered Country” we gradually learned a lot more about Klingon culture. They lose their role as out and out villains, and instead come across as a noble race, obsessed with honour, their concept of which seems to be at least suggested by the Samurai code of Bushido. Which also sounds like the Draconians. It’s worth stressing again, though, that the Draconians came before this version of the Klingons. I think that the Draconians were an interestingly conceived alien race, and their design, and appearance was as good as it gets in classic Doctor Who, and it’s maybe a little surprising that they were never to reappear in classic Doctor Who. If I was asked I’d hazard the opinion that this comes down to two things. Firstly, that the Draconians, despite their alien appearance, are not monsters, and it’s probably easier to write stories about out and out monsters, and secondly, that it seems to me that something happened to alienate Malcolm Hulke from Doctor Who. Having co-written “The Faceless Ones” and “The War Games” for Patrick Troughton he wrote at least one story for each of the 5 seasons of Jon Pertwee. He would write “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” for season 11, Jon Pertwee’s last season, and then that would be it and he would never contribute again. A great pity.

All in all, then, it’s a curious piece of work is “Frontier in Space”. It strives for something of the epic style and sweep of “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, with the Master in the Mavic Chen position, and the Daleks pushed almost totally into the background. At times it almost makes it as well – it’s certainly a more convincing ‘space opera’ than we’ve seen for a long time in the show. As a stand-alone story, though, it falls some way short of the gold standard for me. Which is a shame, because I loved it when I first saw it.

What have we learned?

The Doctor is an honorary noble of Draconia – and The Master isn’t. 

Season 9

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

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

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

Mighty 200/DWM 2014 poll

The Sea Devils  50/60

Day of the Daleks 71/65

The Curse of Peladon 82/93

The Mutants 182/ 213

The Time Monster  187/222

My rating

The Time Monster

The Sea Devils

Day of the Daleks

The Curse of Peladon

The Mutants

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

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

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

64: The Time Monster

Before Watching

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

After Watching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Have We Learned?

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

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

Season 8

The elements of what we think of as the Pertwee Era all seemed to fall into place during season 8. We’ll talk about that shortly. First, though, let’s have a look at the fan ratings: -

DWM Mighty 200 poll/ 2014 DWM poll

The Daemons – 34/38

Terror of the Autons – 51/59

The Mind of Evil – 92/76

The Claws of Axos – 129/139

Colony in Space – 171/199

My Ratings

The Daemons

Terror of the Autons

The Mind of Evil

The Claws of Axos

Colony in Space

It’s unanimous, then. The mighty 200, the 2014 poll, and my own personal ranking have each of the stories in season 8 in exactly the same order. “The Daemons” isn’t my favourite story of the Third Doctor, but it’s a good one, and if it’s a case of more style over substance, well fine, because I like its style. “Terror of the Autons” creeped me out when I was 7, but it has its flaws which can’t be completely glossed over when you’re 50. Even “Colony in Space” isn’t dreadful, despite some of the comments I made about the uneasy marriage of two separate and distinct stories in the script, being worthy but a bit dull.

Looking back on the season as a whole, it’s not that difficult to note a change in direction of the show. I hesitate to use the phrase ‘dumbing down’, which I’ve heard other people use about this era of the show. Season 8 is no more short of ideas than season 7 was. But there’s been a clear change of emphasis. Ideas are there, but they’re there to give opportunities for action. If the story is moving too slowly, then it’s the exposition that goes out of the window. If the ending isn’t working, just speed it up, cut down on the explanation, and give it some welly. Don’t knock it – when it worked, it worked spectacularly.

Season 8 was, of course, dominated by the arrival of the Master. Yes, you could maybe say that the Master is overexposed by appearing in every story of the season, but then when you saw what he could bring to the show, you’d have included him in every story yourself if you’d been the producer too. The team cut back on his appearances in the next season, and in fact he only has three stories left, “The Sea Devils”, “The Time Monster” and “Frontier in Space”

Jo Grant, on the other hand is in every story for the next two seasons, to add to the 5 in Season 8. Yes, she maybe conforms to the stereotype screamer, and yes, she can be really annoying with the way that she keeps blundering into traps, but in her own way she is as valid a character as Liz Shaw was, and perfectly played by Katy Manning. Jo’s relationship with the Doctor will be the backbone of the show right up until the end of “The Green Death”.

59: The Daemons

Before Watching

Right, this bit will eventually make sense. I was researching my family history about ten years ago, and I found out that one of my great, great, great grandfathers was born in Aldbourne, Wiltshire. Now, something in my memory said that this village name rang a bell, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. Now, it is still rare to find any English Parish registers which have been transcribed and put online, and was even rarer ten years ago. Yet Aldbourne was, and I found out that my 3x great grandfather was an illegitimate child baptised in St. Michael’s, Aldbourne in 1820. He went on to become a blacksmith, and I’ll be honest, I think that every family should have an illegitimate blacksmith in their family tree somewhere. Coming back to the point, though, again, St. Michael’s, Aldbourne rang a bell. I googled it, and it transpired that this is none other than the church at the centre of “The Daemons”!

Some stories stick on the memory while others don’t. This was very much the former. So much so that when I watched the film version of “Quatermass and the Pit” a few years ago it very much reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until I realised that in some ways it was reminding me of “The Daemons”.

So it’s an iconic story. And the thing about iconic stories is that sometimes they deserve their iconic status. . . and sometimes they don’t. Now, until I watch it, I can’t say which is the fairest assessment of “The Daemons”. And this is worrying me a little bit, because if it isn’t close to being as good as I remember it, I’m probably going to be unhappy and wish that I hadn’t watched it again. I’m not sure that I want some of my illusions shattered. Oh well, what must be must be. Bring it on.

After Watching

Of all the stories of the 8^th season, this, the last, is probably the ‘marmite’ story. People either love it or hate it, but one thing you can usually guarantee is that they’ll have an opinion about it. We’ll try to examine why this is the case as we go through the story.

I’ve already mentioned the village of Aldbourne, and this story makes full use of it as a location. For Aldbourne we read the fictional village of Devil’s End. It’s aptly named, since this is the first time that Doctor Who takes a shy at black magic, witchcraft and the trappings of Satanism. It won’t be the last. “Masque of Mandragora”, “The Stones of Blood” and the spin off “K9 and Company” all had aspects of the occult in them, to name but three. Yet it was “The Daemons” that came first.

I’m sure that I once read that when Katie Manning made her screen test audition for Jo Grant she had to run around a churchyard set at midnight being chased around by a gargoyle, which may well have been the ‘Bok’ costume that was actually used in the story. Barry Letts supposedly liked this scene so much that he and writer Robert Sloman worked together to produce the script for this story. It went out under the pseudonym Guy Leopold, mainly because there were fairly strict BBC rules about who could be allowed to write a script if they were working on the same series, in order to prevent script editors and producers from commissioning themselves to write stories. Robert Holmes was always needing to be given special permission to write stories when he was script editors, or to do page one rewrites of other writers’ stories – “The Ark in Space “ and “Pyramids of Mars” being two particularly special results of his efforts. Robert Sloman’s three later stories –series 9’s “The Time Monster”, series 10’s “The Green Death” and series 11’s “Planet of the Spiders” both went out solely under his name, leading to speculation whether Barry Letts had any script input or not. We’ll discuss this again in more detail when we get to “Planet of the Spiders”.

Coming back to “The Daemons” the story concerns what happens when BBC3 (the 1971 concept of the future BBC3 seems rather similar to the 2015 contemporary BBC4) are transmitting a live archaeological dig of the Devil’s Hump, a barrow just outside the village. This happens at the same time as the new vicar, one Mr. Magister, takes up his post. Now, if you know Latin, then you don’t need to actually watch the story to work out who this is, Magister being Latin for Master. The Master it turns out is conducting quasi Satanist rituals in the crypt of the church to summon up an entity he calls Azal.

Concurrent with all this, and as a result, a heat shield encircles the village.

Helicopter Watch

The story goes that the team bought a few seconds of film from a James Bond film of a helicopter being blown up, and used it as a helicopter trying to pass the heat shield.

Stuck inside the village, the Doctor and Jo find a tiny, shrunken yet incredibly dense spaceship inside the dig. This is the first clue that Azal is not, as expected, the Devil or a small d demon, but an alien from an incredibly powerful race, called the Daemons. The Master succeeds in calling Azal up, and we learn more. Azal is actually the last of the Daemons. It transpires that they have been using the Earth, and Humanity as an experiment. They have been hothousing and guiding human development, destroying civilisations, like Atlantis, which proved to be blind alleys. This Atlantis thing is a little bit of a continuity headache due to “The Underwater Menace”, and I’m pretty sure that next season’s “The Time Monster” is only going to muddy the waters further.  Coming back to “The Daemons”, when Azal appears for the penultimate time, he says that the experiment is now at an end, and he must make decisions. He has to decide whether Humanity has passed, or whether to destroy them. He must also decide whether anyone is worthy to receive his knowledge and his powers, as his own time is up. Unsurprisingly, the Master puts himself forward as a candidate. Azal, though, decides that the Doctor fits the bill. The Doctor, again unsurprisingly, refuses. Azal decides that this is reason enough to destroy him. At this point Jo Grant, dolled up as the sacrificial victim as she is, throws herself in front of the Doctor and demands he kill her instead. This wildly illogical behaviour does Azal’s head in, and he collapses in confusion, giving Doctor, Jo, Master and all the chance to escape before he explodes, sending the church up in flames in a rather good model sequence. The Master tries to escape in Bessie, but is foiled by the Doctor’s remote control device.

Now, you can look at this story and say that it’s rather original, or on the other hand you can look at it and say that it’s very derivative. It’s original in the context of Doctor Who. We haven’t really had any story which has even touched on the unique development of humanity before. We haven’t had a story which has looked at the Science v. Magic debate before. On the other hand, this clearly draws on some well known sources. I’ve already mentioned the film of “Quatermass and the Pit” and I can’t help coming back to it. Alright, the dig is not an archaeological one, but a non human skull is found while digging an Underground station. The name of the station? Hobb’s End. The film does explain that Hob is an archaic alternative name for Old Nick, or the Devil. A buried and ancient spaceship is found, and it turns out that conceptions of the devil are race memories of these aliens etc etc. Surely it’s not just me who can see the links here. The quasi Satanist scenes in the crypt are rather reminiscent of quite a lot of 60s and 70s horror films I’ve seen since as well. The idea of a supernatural being who has been worshipped/feared on Earth turning out to be an incredibly ancient and powerful alien was explored in the “Who Mourns for Adonais?” episode of the original Star Trek, first broadcast in 1967, where the crew encountered the Greek ‘God’ Apollo. This was actually a really good exploration of the theme – its exhumation for the 1989 Star Trek film “The Final Frontier” was rather less successful.  I’m sure that I read an interview with Dennis Spooner in the Doctor Who Monthly Magazine back in the 80s where he said that he always wanted to do a story in which the TARDIS crew encountered ‘God’ – only it would turn out not to be God at all, just an alien being of unimaginable power.

Actually, though, it doesn’t really matter that much how derivative or original a story is. While we might award brownie points for originality, no amount of it can save a story when it’s just plain bad. Likewise, a story can draw heavily from a number of well known sources, and still turn out to be fresh and enjoyable. So maybe I’m easily pleased, but “The Daemons” still pleased me. Roger Delgado, of whom you already know I am a huge fan, looks even more silkily sinister as a vicar. I enjoyed Damaris Hayman’s splendid portrayal of the white witch Miss Hawthorne, even if I did find that the whole Magic v. Science debate dealt with rather heavy handedly. I enjoyed the sub plot of UNIT’s attempts to break through the heat shield. Oh, and I’m also on the side of those who don’t have a huge problem with the line,

“Jenkins – chap with wings. Five rounds rapid” Even the ending, which is one of the most English things I have ever seen, did it for me. Watching a group of young ragamuffins dancing around the village maypole, mufti clad Mike Yates asked if the Brigadier fancied a dance, to which the Brig replied he’d rather have a pint.

What Have We Learned?

Ok – the destruction of Atlantis – version 2 – it was the Daemons wot did it now.

BBC3  as conceived in 1971 was a very different kettle of cathode rays to BBC3 today.

58: Colony In Space

Before Watching

“Colony In Space” was novelized as “The Doomsday Machine”. Why I mention that is because I have clearer memories of the Target book than I do of the story itself. It is a significant story in its own right, even if for no better reason that it’s the first time that the third Doctor gets to take a trip in his TARDIS. This is the doing of the Time Lords, who decide to use the Doctor to foil the Master’s plans to obtain aforesaid doomsday weapon. Now, the Master appears in all 5 of the stories of this eighth season, and this is probably the one which has had least acclaim from fans over the years, which is a bit surprising when you consider that the alien setting should at least give the story a bit of novelty value if nothing else. I’m looking forward to seeing how much, if anything, we get to see of the Time Lords. Maybe this doesn’t feature in the story on screen, but in the book I’m pretty sure that it started with the Time Lords discovering that the records concerning the Doomsday weapon had been either tampered with or stolen – can’t remember which myself. Well, if the general consensus, that this isn’t much cop, proves to be correct, then never mind. “The Daemons” is just around the corner.

After Watching

I found that as I watched “Colony in Space” I found myself indulging in one of those prolonged bouts of “this-should-be-better-itis”. Were my expectations so unreasonable? Well, there are reasons for thinking that this was going to be better than it was. Let’s examine them.

Malcolm Hulke

If we look at Malcolm Hulke’s Doctor Who pedigree you’ll hopefully agree that he’s been one of the writers whose involvement always holds out promise that you’ll get something of interest. He co-scripted “The Faceless Ones”, which was one of the unexpected treats of season 4, and also the brilliant “The War Games” which I loved. In season 7 he scripted the always enjoyable “The Silurians” and did uncredited work in writing the actual scripts for several of the episodes of “The Ambassadors of Death”.

So what is the essential problem of “Colony in Space”? To an extent with the previous 2 stories there was a feeling of the Master being added to the script at quite a late stage, and that’s true of this story as well. In fact, it does feel like a four parter that has been unnaturally prolonged simply to include him, and the weapon and the alien city too. For most of the first 4 episodes at least what we have is a dour gritty ‘western’ about the plucky settlers being subject to the unscrupulous attempts of the evil mining company to force them off their claims. And the problem with that is that I’m just not really all that interested in cowboys and indians. They were my Dad’s generation’s thing, not mine. It would maybe have worked better had the two stories been more integrated, but they really aren’t. The alien natives, their city and their weapon don’t hardly impinge on the main story about the Colony, and I kind of think that another draft to integrate them more fully with each other might have worked wonders. Just my opinion, and as always, feel free to disagree.

The Actors

You know that I have my list of faves whom I always like to see guesting in a Doctor Who story, and there’s no less than two of them in this one. First of all we have one of the three Bernards, Bernard Kay to be precise. We last saw Bernard Kay in “The Faceless Ones”, and he does his usual excellent job with what is only really a subordinate role. Ideally, if you’re going to go to the trouble of getting Bernard Kay, then you want to make the best use of him. I wouldn’t have minded seeing him given something a little more meaty to do. He plays Caldwell, a mining engineer who is subordinate to Captain Dent, the real villain of the piece, and although he does have to play out the moral dilemma of deciding whether to do what the company, in the person of Dent, orders him to do, or whether to do the things his conscience orders him to do. But truth be told, he is under used here.

We also get John Ringham. John Ringham memorably played Tlotoxl in “The Aztecs”, and was then seen playing a more heroic role in “The Smugglers”. Here he plays Ashe, the leader of the colonists, trying to tread a fine line in sticking up for his people, and at the same time not letting their defence of themselves descend into anarchy and violence. It’s a decent part, and he plays it very well, as you’d expect.

This story is rarely written about without somebody pointing out that this story also featured Helen Worth, who went on to spend the next 40 years playing Gail in “Coronation Street”. Now, I haven’t watched “Coronation Street” for years, but I have always had a soft spot for Gail/Helen, and so I was a bit disappointed to see that her role in the story is pretty much cardboard for the most part. Given a proper chance she could have done a lot more.

So could Tony Caunter. Maybe best known as Roy in Eastenders, Tony Caunter certainly had a fine body of TV work on his CV, but his character in “Colony in Space”, Morgan, is just a one dimensional thug, and there’s little or nothing any actor could do with him without wildly over acting, or ad libbing.

I can’t write a review of a “Master” story without mentioning Roger Delgado. I personally think that this is the weakest of the 4 stories we’ve seen so far which features him, for which I don’t blame the actor. You can see him as a purely functional character in this story though. It has to be a Time Lord who steals the records of the weapon, nobody else would be powerful enough. The records have to be stolen from the Time Lords, or else they wouldn’t have sent the Doctor there. As it is he doesn’t turn up for a lot of the story, and I’m afraid that the dialogue between himself and the Doctor is rather lumpen and uninspiring compared with previous stories. I guess even Delgado and Pertwee couldn’t build bricks without straw.

The Alien World

This is the first time that the Third Doctor gets to take a trip in time and space, and the first time we get to see an alien world in colour. It’s a bit of a shame. We’ve already explored how the story seems to relegate the alien city and its inhabitants to a subsidiary narrative, but it does have the effect that nothing is developed. On the first trip you maybe expect to see an alien civilization, and we really don’t. On his first visit to the alien city ideas are introduced – the idea of a once great race that has fallen from its lofty perch, descending into superstition and barbarism is an interesting one, but it’s not developed. Again, the separate castes or grades of the ‘Primitives’ is an interesting idea, but it’s not developed. I don’t know if it’s deliberate either, but as we go up the brain chain of the Primitives’ society they become less and less impressive. The priests are shorter, more wrinkly and shriveled than the warriors, although they have a more interesting dress sense, and the Guardian of the weapon is sadly the most pathetic of the lot. Now, in a way this is actually clever if it’s deliberate. If you’re trying to put across the message – well, this is what the degenerated race who built the machine had come to and this is why their civilization collapsed, then fair enough. But there’s pathetic, and then there’s too pathetic.

A word too about the Primitive warriors. At least the temptation to give them dark skins was resisted. Even then though, maybe it’s just me, but their masks seemed to bear some resemblance to some African tribal art that I’ve seen.

The Time Lords

I was intrigued to see the prologue with the Time Lords at the start, but I did feel that there were a couple of problems with it while I was watching. They’re almost in this story like a halfway house between the all powerful super-monks of the last episode of “The War Games”, and the quasi military quasi air traffic controllers of “The Three Doctors” Their appearance does pose a few questions to me.

If the Doomsday weapon is so powerful, and they are so scared of the Master getting his hands on it, then why don’t they get it themselves? Since the Master is the one who’s after it, surely this is a Time Lord matter, and their interfering can be permitted? Since as it is they are interfering anyway by sending the Doctor. Likewise, if it’s so important, then why leave it to the Doctor to find out what his mission actually is? Why not at least give him a clue or two, even if you can’t be bothered to give him proper instructions.

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

Well, at least dear old Jo is a ‘real’ companion now, having taken her first trip in the TARDIS.  Also, and I know I often say this, but even with a story like this, where you can’t say that it is particularly gripping, at least you can say that in the main story, the ‘plucky if sometimes misguided colonists v. evil big business’ if it is a little facile then at least its heart is in the right place.

What Have We Learned?

The Time Lords trust the Doctor enough to send him on a mission they should sort out themselves, even without telling him what he’s supposed to do for them.