Season Five

That was the famous ‘Monster Season’ then. What can we say about it as a whole? Well, firstly it was far more homogenous than the previous season. The Historicals have gone for one thing. For another, the ‘base under siege’ format is very much to the fore – you can actually argue that only “The Enemy Of The World” is a complete departure from the format. Is this necessarily a good thing? Well, in one way no, because it meant that the weaker stories of the season looked extremely derivative and repetitive. It’s just possible that I would have enjoyed “The Wheel In Space” more if it had come at the end of a more diverse season, for example. Possible – although not extremely likely. On the other hand, if a story like “Fury From The Deep” can stand out amongst the other stories of the season – and for me it does – then it does highlight how good it was.

The Production team had obviously decided by this time what they thought Doctor Who was all about, and for this season they set about providing an unrelenting diet of it. You can’t argue with box office. The fact is that 3 stories from this season made it into the Mighty 200 top 50, and another 2 into the top 100. Comparing it with the first 7 Troughton stories, for those stories the average position in the Mighty 200 works out at 107. For this season it works out as 74. It underlines the fact that people do like good Doctor Who monsters – in this season we had 2 Cybermen stories, 2 Yeti stories, and an Ice Warriors – and one of the other stories, “Fury From The Deep”  had possibly the most frightening scenes we’ve yet seen in Doctor Who. Let’s have a look at the ratings for the season, then: -

Mighty 200 Ratings/ 2014 DWM Poll Ratings

The Web of Fear   23/16

The Tomb of the Cybermen  25/23

Fury From The Deep   41/69

The Abominable Snowmen   59/87

The Ice Warriors   78/141

The Enemy of the World 139/56

The Wheel in Space  156/177

My Ratings

The Abominable Snowmen

Tomb of the Cybermen

Fury from the Deep

The Web of Fear

The Ice Warriors

The Wheel in Space

The Enemy of the World

I do wonder whether, if the Mighty 200 poll was retaken, the positions of both “The Web of Fear” and “The Enemy of the World” would change now that they can actually be seen. As always, this is a purely personal choice. It is very difficult to judge recons against stories that exist in their entirety. As things stand, though, I enjoyed “The Abominable Snowmen” more than I enjoyed any other story this season. I feel bad that the two David Whitaker stories are so far down, yet there really isn’t much to choose between the bottom 4 of my list. 

43: The Wheel in Space

Before Watching

Well, it’s David Whitaker again, so I expect the unexpected. Can he do for the Cybermen what he did for the Daleks last season? Well, possibly so, but then again possibly not. Maybe I’m wrong, but of the Hartnell and Troughton Cyberman stories, this one alone doesn’t seem to have any great fan following at all. I enjoyed “The Tenth Planet” “The Moonbase” and “Tomb of the Cybermen” very much – I’ll say more about watching “The Invasion” as a very young child when we get to it. All three of those stories have their admirers and defenders, though, as well as their critics. The poor old “The Wheel In Space” doesn’t seem to be much of a magnet for positive comment at all, though.

Well, some stories come into fashion and then go out of fashion again, some stories with a lowly reputation deserve a better one, and some stories have a lowly reputation because that’s all that they deserve.  Which one this turns out to be we’ll find out over the course of the next couple of evenings.

After Watching

You know, I got quite nostalgic when the mercury fluid links in the TARDIS started going tonto at the start of this one. It made me quite nostalgic for the first season, when those pesky fluid links were always seeming to cause trouble for the crew. David Whitaker, who wrote this story, based on Kit Pedler’s outlines, was the script editor for the first season, so that’s probably why he chose to use this malarkey to explain the TARDIS making an emergency materialisation on the Silver Carrier, an abandoned and drifting spaceship.

Right, on board the carrier there is a servo robot. This is a very curious looking thing. It has a pair of stubby, articulated legs, a huge stubby, well, fat, body, a head and arms. Now, I know I’m picking unnecessary holes, but the thing is, any good cyberneticist would tell you that it is extremely difficult to make any robot ‘walk’ on articulated legs like a human (unless it’s a costume with a little man inside) so if they could do that, why couldn’t they put all of its gubbins into a smaller and neater body? It just looks odd. Mind you, the tubby one is a murderous little imp too. It nearly does for the Doctor and Jamie and they need to be rescued by astronauts from the Wheel.

Okay, the Wheel. We’re back into fairly familiar territory here. The Wheel – a space station shaped like a wheel, hence the name – is the base which is going to undergo siege. For the first couple of episodes at least this proved to be quite a leisurely story. The Commander, named Jarvis Bennett in this one, I think, is similarly hardboiled to all the others we’ve seen since “The Tenth Planet”. Right, I don’t like to be nasty to actors who are doing the best job that they can in circumstances where rehearsal time was probably extremely limited, and the opportunity for retakes even more so. But I have to say this, the guy who plays Jarvis Bennett is noticeably bad. He starts off at full shriek, and never takes it down even half a notch. This means he has nowhere to go, and indeed his characterisation doesn’t. Just a little soft pedalling in just one or two scenes would create light and shade in his performance, which would make such a difference. There is none, which means that although he certainly isn’t wooden, he comes across as rather hammy and trying too hard. As a digression, purely for pleasure I recently watched Sylvester McCoy’s “Dragonfire”, the last story to feature Bonnie Langford. (Incidentally, that is probably the first time I have written a sentence containing the words- Bonnie – Langford – and – pleasure – without also containing the word – isn’t.) Now, poor old Bonnie Langford, she does get some stick for her acting, but then when you watch a show she’s in, you can see why. It’s not that she isn’t trying – it’s that she is trying too hard. She is acting,and that’s the problem, because you can actually see and hear that she’s acting. Compare her to Sophie Aldred, a proper actress, in the scenes with just Mel and Ace, and it’s all the more obvious. Well, it’s like this for me with Bennett. He has obviously latched onto the idea that his character is a vicious, bullying bore, and by crikey he’s never going to let you forget it in any line that he says.

It’s highlighted too by the fact that there is actually some good acting surrounding the ham that Bennett is providing. Gemma Corwin, played by Anne Ridler particularly shines. She might not be a sultry siren like Tanya Lernov, nor have the pixieish cuteness of Zoe, but she’s strong, intelligent and resourceful, and it’s a tragedy that she gets killed by the Cybermen, and to add insult to injury, at the end of the story control of the base is assumed by brainless Zoe-hating surfer boy Leo Ryan. When Tanya entwines her hand around his towards the end I almost threw up.

Leaving aside performances, then, there certainly seems to be a bit of a bullying culture all round on board the Wheel. Which brings me to Zoe Heriot, played by Wendy Padbury. Right, I need to be careful what I say here. I fully appreciate a couple of facts: -

One) - The ladies who played the companions in the 60s are all old enough now to be my mother (although only just about old enough in Deborah Watling’s and Wendy Padbury’s cases)

Two) In the shows themselves, they were all in their early 20s (apart from Barbara – special case), which means that I am certainly old enough now to be their father.

So any comments I make about their attractiveness or otherwise can get very icky.

Fact is though, that Wendy Padbury’s Zoe is extremely cute.

Not that any of the blokes on the base seem to think so. In fact, the men certainly, and also some of the women on the Wheel, seem to have it in for Zoe and bully her because she has the brains of a supercomputer, with all of the social sophistication of one too. In particular there’s the afore mentioned Leo Ryan, a blonde haired bloke who only has eyes for Tanya, the Russian crew member, who is, to be frank, a complete jerk towards her. I’d love to tell him one of my favourite quotes, from no less an authority than Bill Gates “Remember to be nice to geeks. Chances are that you’ll end up working for one.” She makes for an interesting character, since this is the first attempt at a companion who is supposedly as intelligent as the Doctor himself. Bet she’s screaming with the rest of them before the end of episode 4 – I told myself within a couple of minutes of her first appearance.

The Cybermen, then. As for design the baggy suits are gone, being replaced by a costume which is pretty much just one step away from the classic “Invasion” Cybermen design. The main difference is that the helmets look pretty much the same as in “The Moonbase” and “The Tomb Of The Cybermen” apart from the fact that tear drop holes have been added to the eves, and a dribble hole to the bottom of the mouth. Their physically impressive appearance is emphasized by the fact that there are some seriously tall actors inside these costumes. Personally, I found the reconstructed scene where Cybermen were hatching from eggs (yes, honestly) visually intriguing, although extremely difficult to understand in the context of what Cybermen are actually supposed to be – that is, humans who have replaced their bodies with mechanical bodies.

I do think that the Cybermen are wasted in this story though. For one thing some of their menace is detracted from by the way that they tend to rock back and forward while they are talking. I don’t get that, apart from the fact that it gives the actors something to do. The strange device which is giving them orders looks as if it has been built from a couple of coat hangers and a water balloon. Then there is the party of Cybermen who walk across space – and I don’t mean spacewalk either – to the Wheel, flapping movements with their arms being their only concession to the fact that they are in space.

Their purpose it turns out is to take over the Wheel and use the radio transmitter to direct the Cyber fleet to the Earth. OK – that’s simple enough, and there’s no way that it was a story that should have taken 6 episodes to tell. So you get the whole convoluted Trojan Horse story of the Cybermen sending cybermats in spheres which melt into the hull of the Wheel – good trick if you can do that – and the cybermats, which are larger and more impressive than those in Tomb, destroy the Bernalium which is used to power the Wheel’s laser cannon. Thus the crew on the Wheel send a couple of men to bring bernalium from the silver carrier, and they get hypnotised into carrying the Cybermen over in the bernalium box etc. etc. It’s all so unnecessary. The Cybermen have all this power and hardware – it just doesn’t compute that they wouldn’t have their own sat nav.

Also the same problem that dogged the other Cyberman stories is evident in this one. At the climax, they are just so easy to defeat. The Doctor boosts the repaired laser cannons – bye bye cyberships. Effective, but not very uplifting.

So all in all, something of a disappointing end to Season Five – a story which for me is only really at all memorable for the introduction of Zoe.

What Have We Learned

Quick setting plastic is the latest addition to the every growing list of things that can kill Cybermen

Nerd baiting will be just as popular in the future as it is today

42: Fury From The Deep

Before Watching

I know : -

a) that this is another companion’s departure story. Victoria will be staying behind at the end of this one. I’m not really sure why, but I am sure that all will be revealed as the story develops.

b) this is a story about foam and giant seaweed.

That’s about it as regards what I know about the story. Well, apart from the fact that it’s another story for which no episodes exist. We’ve just had that nice run of all of “The Enemy of the World”, and most of “The Web of Fear”, with only one Web recon to put up with, but I’m afraid that they’re back with a vengeance for the next week or two. Only one episode exists of the final story of season 5 –“ The Wheel in Space”. I probably shouldn’t be looking so far forward now, but after this we’re definitely on the home stretch in Season 6, where only one story – “The Space Pirates” – is completely recon, and no less than 4 stories are complete. Well, that’s to come. Meanwhile, on with “Fury from the Deep”.

After Watching

Ladies and gentlemen, today’s version of the hard boiled commander who is cracking up will be played by Victor Maddern and called Robson – not Hobson, but Robson. The base under siege will be played by an offshore drilling complex, and the alien nasties will be played by some foam producing giant seaweed. Alright, it’s easy to say that this story is returning to season five’s preferred format, but I don’t want to give you the impression that this story is without merit.

Things that make “Fury from the Deep” memorable

I’m not the first and I certainly won’t be the last to note that this is the first story in which the sonic screwdriver makes its appearance. In this story a screwdriver, really, is all that it is – but it’s powers will increase exponentially as time goes by throughout classic Doctor Who, until Eric Saward has a terileptil to stamp on it in “The Visitation”- possibly for one of the same reasons why K9 was discarded – he just ended up making life too easy for the Doctor.

The foamy seaweed monster. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, a man in a suit will almost always look like a man in a suit. Psychotic vegetation usually plays well in science fiction television and films – think Day of the Triffids and the Tom Baker story “The Seeds of Doom” to name but two. We’ve only got photographs – and a few snatched seconds of live action from the last episode to go on – but this was a pretty effective monster. I’ll say more about Mr. Oak and Mr. Quills a little later, but I also thought the way that some of the guests acted out possession by the creatures was really very effectively done. Robson, Victor Maddern’s character, was such a complete contrast under possession compared with what he was like before. Under the influence of the aliens, he is unnaturally quiet and calm, and all the more frightening because of it.

The build up to Victoria’s departure. Maybe this is just me, but I thought that this whole build up to Victoria’s tearful farewell was really well handled. It made me think about Victoria as a character in her own right, than as just another in a line of female assistants. After all, it’s really not that long ago – 6 stories to be precise, that she had to join the crew because of the death of her father on Skaro, saving the Doctor. I thought that there was more than a trace of guilt as well as compassion that led to the Doctor taking her on board, and there’s an underplayed conflict going on between the two of them throughout this story. Victoria, it seems, has come to the end of her tether with the constant moving around, and the constant threats to life and limb. As far as the Doctor is concerned, that’s what makes life so interesting. So while it might have been nice to see Victoria elucidate a little more her statement that she couldn’t face going back to Victorian times – why ever not? – it was still well done the tender way that the Doctor accepted Victoria’s misgivings about leaving with him and Jamie, and gave her the time and space to make up her mind. There is also maybe just a little hint that she and Jamie might have become a little more than travelling companions if she’d stayed. He wants the Doctor to stop her from going, and she tearfully forces him to promise that he won’t leave without saying goodbye.

What might well be the show’s first great guest star double act. Double acts like Jago and Lightfoot in “The Talons of Weng Chiang”, Garon and Unstoffe in “The Ribos Operation” and Glitz and Dibber in “The Trial of a Time Lord” are seen as being very much a hallmark of the late great Robert Holmes, and indeed they were. However here we have the first example of one, and it’s a season before Holmes’ first scripts for the show. Oak and Quills are two technicians who are caught in the foam and taken over by the foam. They pose as two unctuous repairmen, and perform a lovely scene with one of the female characters which starts off in very comedic vein – in fact they remind me a little of Wint and Kidd from Diamonds are Forever – but then takes a very dark turn indeed, as the two characters mouths open what seems to be impossibly widely, and they start spewing gas at her. In fact, that has to be one of the truly scariest scenes in the 5 seasons I’ve watched so far.

Some innovative direction. I will come clean and admit that I’ve read Michael Briant’s memoir, which contains a few pages on the making of “Fury From The Deep” We’re lucky that the great shot of the TARDIS spinning down into the water still exists, that was a neat idea. I liked the use of helicopters as well, although it’s difficult to know just how effective they would be when we only have photographs to go on.

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

Well, OK, it’s not perfect. I’m not saying that this would necessarily have been better as a four parter, but there’s enough fat on the joint that you could have easily trimmed off one episode and it would possibly have made the story move more smoothly. Maybe this is just me, too, but I was a little disappointed that the weed’s purpose and motivation was simply global conquest. To what end? For what purpose? I mean at least with the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors, you knew what was driving them onwards. With the weed – well it just seems that it is doing it because it can, and that’s never the greatest reason. Likewise, the fact that it turns out to be susceptible to Victoria’s screams is a bit of a let down –although not noticeably more than the Cybermen’s susceptibility to radiation/gravity/nail varnish remover (delete where applicable) or the Ice Warrior’s reaction to heat. But hey, for atmosphere, and sheer scariness, this scores pretty well, all things considered.

What Have We Learned?

Life in the TARDIS with the Doctor is not necessarily always a barrel of laughs.

41:The Web of Fear

Before Watching

You may remember the big fuss a couple of years ago when the BBC announced that they had recovered all the lost episodes of “Enemy of the World” and all bar one of “The Web of Fear” Now, as you know if you’ve been with me for any great length of time,  I loved the Target novelization of “The Abominable Snowmen” when I read it in about 1975. I really looked forward to reading “The Web of Fear” when it was published, and then, as often happens when you build up to a sequel, I wasn’t quite so taken with it when it first came out. Still, let’s be positive. Looking at the ingredients for “Web of Fear”– Patrick Troughton – Fraser Hines – Yetis – London Underground – First appearance of the Brigadier (only a colonel in this one) – they’re enough to give me the confidence that this should be a pretty positive experience, especially bearing in mind how much I enjoyed Haisman and Lincoln’s “The Abominable Snowmen” which was mostly recon.

After Watching

My opinion? Well, despite the generally extremely positive fan response to this story when it first went online, and the DVD first came out, I found it to be a bit of a curate’s egg if I’m totally honest. As I watched I found myself thinking that this story has got some great positives, but also some flaws. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Flaws

For one thing it’s a 6 parter, one of which doesn’t exist. The BBC telesnaps reconstruction is perfectly functional, but it’s not great, especially considering that on some of the Troughton DVDs – “The Moonbase”, “The Ice Warriors” and “The Invasion”, for example, they have actually used animation to go with the audio of the missing episodes. Animation of the kind that was used in “The Moonbase” or “The Ice Warriors” would have certainly been an improvement on what they’ve given us. This was a bit disappointing. While we’re on the subject, there were no extra features on my DVD which was a huge disappointment. It smacks of rush releasing the thing. I think that this calls for a small digression. You can get Doctor Who stories in two places on DVD. There are the DVDs which came with the Doctor Who DVD Files Magazines – and what you get in these are what you pay for – the episodes themselves with no special features. Then there’s the official BBC DVDs, which in my experience are often excellent in terms of the special features and bonuses that you get. For example, at the same time as I bought this one, I also bought the Legacy Collection, which is actually the current Shada DVD, and the amount of bonuses you get in that one gives you real value for money, which “The Web of Fear” doesn’t. Still, I digress, and back to “The Web of Fear”.

I’ll be honest, it was all getting a bit samey too. I mean there is some amazing set design work which has gone on for this serial. None of it was shot on the London Underground, and yet it looks so like it that London Underground famously wrote to the BBC complaining about unauthorized filming in their tunnels and stations. But, I was getting so sick of tunnels and stations that it came as a real relief when the soldiers had to face a yeti attack above ground. Being more positive, this actually came at exactly the right time in the story to break it up a little.

The yeti themselves sadly didn’t quite live up to the yeti I created in my imagination when I read the books. When you’re a die-hard fan of classic Doctor Who you should be pretty good at silencing the inner voice which cackles ‘man in a suit – man in a suit!’ every time you see an alien, but I sometimes found it difficult in this one. I’m not convinced that the yeti redesign for this story, headlamp eyes and all, is really an improvement on what we saw in “The Abominable Snowmen”. 

The ‘comedy Welsh’ soldier played by Derek Pyott really got up my nose at one point, and I almost found myself hoping that Lethbridge Stewart would take out his pistol and shoot the cowardly git for insubordination.

- and yet –

The story aims for an atmosphere of claustrophobia, and boy, does it get one, which is a real departure from what we saw in “The Abominable Snowmen”. I liked the basic premise at the start of the story – that Professor Travers brought a yeti back to England after his adventures in “The Abominable Snowmen”. Years later he was forced by financial circumstances to sell it to a private museum. He tries to buy it back, but the current owner (and I’m sorry to play the racism card again here, but he is a rather insulting Jewish caricature) refuses. Well, needless to say, the yeti becomes reactivated and causes mayhem, and this is the start of the Great Intelligence’s next attempt to gain corporeal form and take over the world nyaah haaa haaa.

There’s nothing original about my next point, but it is one which should be stressed every time that anyone writes seriously about this story. Speaking as a lifelong lover of the London Underground railway, these sets are extremely convincing. In fact parts of some of the stations which are overdue for a makeover still look like this. We’ve seen how contemporary London serves as a wonderful backdrop to both “The Dalek Invasion of earth” and “The War Machines” and this is a very new twist on that idea. Because of the setting, there is an ongoing contrast between the gloomy murk of the tunnels and the harsh artificial lighting of the station areas, and this only adds to the atmosphere.

I remember the late Michael Winner being interviewed by Barry Norman about his film “Death Wish 2” once, and he said words to the effect of – Well, it’s a sequel, Barry, and we all know about sequels. In Rocky 2, Rocky didn’t go off and become a missionary, so  in Death Wish 2 it’s ugly old Charlie Bronson shooting up the muggers again.- All of which is a very entertaining way of making the point that sequels very often retell the same story as the original, sort of like the law of diminishing returns. Actually, in subtle yet important ways, “The Web of Fear” does not tell the same story as “The Abominable Snowmen”. In this one the identity of the traitor under the control of the great Intelligence is not made clear until very late on, after several red herrings – one of whom is the Colonel/Brigadier himself – are presented to us. For another thing, this time The Great Intelligence is now after the Doctor’s body. I bet he says that to all of the Time Lords. The Doctor is really up for a mental battle with it as well, and it takes Jamie to pull him away from the machinery. Would he have defeated the Great Intelligence? We won’t know.

I’m sure I read rumours that plans were afoot for Haisman and Lincoln to write a third yeti story with a final showdown between the Doctor and the Great Intelligence – (we’d have to wait for Matt Smith for this final showdown to happen). I don’t know how much truth there is in that. I know that there next, and last, story for Doctor Who was “The Dominators” which we’ll be reviewing in a couple of weeks, since it’s the first story of season 6.

What have we learned?

Let sleeping yetis lie.

That Lethbridge-Stewart chap is a useful character. We could use him again , you know.

Has the Doctor had his last encounter with the Great Intelligence? Not yeti. 

40:The Enemy of the World

Before Watching

I know no more than a couple of things about this one. It was rediscovered a couple of years ago, at the same time as our next story, “The Web of Fear”. So this one now exists complete – yay. As for the story itself, well, I know that it was written by David Whitaker, so I expect something a little bit from left field. I know that there was a Target novelization but I never read it, and I don’t know that much about it other than it uses that tried and trusted chestnut, the Doctor is a dead ringer for a villain. Yes, I remember the Massacre (and very good it was too.) In this one the Doctor is the spitting image of Salamander, who is the chief villain of the piece. Other than that this is a complete voyage of discovery for me.

After Watching

Eh, ma freend, eef you know what ees good for you, you read ma review, huh? Yes, let’s get Patrick Troughton’s Mexican accent out of the way first. Basically, the villain, Salamander, whom the Doctor resembles so much, is a Mexican. Now, the thing is this. If you make at least one of the characters in a family drama a Mexican, specifically a Mexican villain, then the audience are going to expect the full Eli Wallach (if you haven’t seen “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”, then please go and do so now. I shall wait until you get back.) So that’s what Patrick Troughton gives us. It is rather more caricature than character, but, eh, zat ees life, ma freends, huh? It’s a testament to Patrick Troughton that the Doctor, posing as Salamander, manages to speak slightly – and only slightly – differently to Salamander.

I think in all honesty that this story, for me, benefits from coming in the middle of Season 5, since it is so different to what has come before, and what is likely to come afterwards. Salamander, after all, is a very human enemy – in fact there are no aliens or inhuman monsters in the story at all, unless I blinked and missed them all. In brief, Salamander at the start of the story is posing as Humanity’s great benefactor. He has developed the technology to control weather and climate throughout the world, and will thus use this technology to defeat poverty and hunger. Yay. Control of weather and climate is something of a recurring theme in this series – prior to this story it was a theme explored in both “The Moonbase” and “The Ice Warriors”. Of course, Salamander is an amoral megalomaniac, who seeks to use his position of humanity’s great benefactor to establish a world dictatorship for himself.

Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as all that. Well, it is a David Whitaker story, after all. The Doctor spends a lot of time umming and ahhing about whether the rebels against Salamander can be trusted, and whether Salamander is as evil as they say he is. Eventually it becomes clear that Salamander is using technology to create natural disasters, which create the political vacuum into which he can step. Also, he has a group of technicians living underground, whom he has convinced that there has been a disastrous nuclear war on the surface. They must stay below, and carry out Salamander’s instructions if the Earth is to be saved, he tells them. They, alas, are mostly dull enough to believe him.

The Doctor foils Salamander’s plans by exposing them, after convincing Bruce, Salamander’s hard-nosed Security Chief. It turns out that Swann, the former Security Chief, who was the one who came up with the plan for the Doctor to pose as Salamander, is just as bad as Salamander himself, and exposed as the mastermind behind Salamander’s plans all along at the end of the story, before getting his comeuppance. A typical David Whitaker twist, that one.

I’ll be honest, 6 episodes of this sort of 60s action thriller would normally be more than enough for me. But as I said earlier, it is such a contrast to what we’ve had so far this season that it gets by pleasantly enough, and it certainly helps to have a whole story of live action. In this season alone, 5 episodes of The Abominable Snowmen are missing, 2 of the Ice Warriors, 1 of the Web of Fear, all of Fury from the Deep, and all bar one of The Wheel in Space. I know that things improve next season, since we’ve complete stories in The Dominators, The Mind Robber, The War Games, and only one or two episodes of Invasion are missing – so there is light at the end of the tunnel, but I do find a consistent diet of recons, and animations when they exist, is really starting to grind me down.

The first episode starts with a bang. After the TARDIS lands on a beach, and the Doctor has gone for a dip wearing nowt but his long johns, the three travellers are chased along a beach by a hovercraft. Now here’s a funny thing. The hovercraft looks for all the world like a van which has had a tail and propeller stuck on the back, and a superstructure built around it to resemble a hovercraft. So when it pulled away I fully expected to see tyre tracks in the sand. But there weren’t any. I do wonder how they managed that.

The first person that they encounter is a rebel, well played by Mary Peach. I have to say that the cast all give a pretty good account of themselves again in this story – aided and abetted by a script which gives all the main characters the chance to display at least a little depth. Bill Kerr plays Swann very well, and I didn’t see him turning in the last episode until it actually happened. I noticed an early appearance for Milton Johns. If you don’t know the name, you certainly know the face. During the 1970s he practically cornered the market in slimy weasels, in fact his appearance was a helpful shorthand. If Milton Johns appeared in a show, he either was the baddie, or he was in league with the baddie, however the script might suggest differently. He’s just great.

If I’m being critical, I would say that you do need all your main actors in a story like this to give good performances, because at 6 parts in length there’s not enough real story here to keep it going otherwise. In some ways it seems like a step into Avengers territory, and the thing about The Avengers was that that particular show had self-contained adventures which didn’t need developing and sustaining over 6 episodes. Well, what the hell. One of Doctor Who’s strengths over the years is the willingness of production teams to take a gamble and try something different.

What have we learned?

Eh, ma freends, you jus’ cannot trust anyone zese days, huh?

You don’t have to be alien, or indeed, a monster, to be a monster

39: The Ice Warriors

Before Watching

Now, as it happens I do not recall ever reading the Target novelization of this story, even though I can clearly remember it sitting on my brother’s bookshelf. I’m not really sure why. I know that Brian Hayles had twice had stories produced which were heavily rewritten – in the case of “The Celestial Toymaker” and “The Smugglers”. However this story introduced his most lasting contribution to Doctor Who – the eponymous Ice Warriors. Having grown up with the Third Doctor I have clear memories of them in the two Peladon stories. However, I think that I should also say that a couple of years ago I watched “The Seeds of Death”. I made the mistake of watching it with two of the non-we (my wife and eldest daughter), and had to put up with jibes about some of the special effects, and the at times funereal pace of the story, without really being able to come up with good responses – in my opinion at the time the effects were rather, er, crappy, and the story was pretty slow. Or so it seemed. Well, that was The Seeds of Death, which we’ll come to in due course. For now, though, it’s The Ice Warriors, and this one must have had something going for it or they would never have brought the eponymous warriors back for a second story. Would they?

After Watching

We are now in the middle of the 5^th season, the so-called ‘monster season’. And therein lies my problem with “The Ice Warriors”. If I was watching this in a vacuum, if you like – or not as part of a developing season, I have no doubt that I’d be happy to just accept it for what it is, and be able to dwell on the positives, which undoubtedly exist. The trouble is I am watching it as part of a developing season, and as a result this all feels awfully familiar, even though I’ve never seen it before. Let’s have a look at what I’m on about here, shall we?

The brusque and opinionated leader who starts cracking up under the pressure? Check.

He’s called Clent in this story, but he’s clearly conforming to a type established in the first two Cyberman stories with Cutler and Hobson. Having said that, though, Clent as a character is a cut above the previous two mentioned since he’s played by the brilliant Peter Barkworth, about whom I’ll say more later on.

The base under attack from alien nasties? Check.

At first this looks rather similar to the set up in “The Tenth Planet” – although it isn’t because it’s considerably further in the future. The basic premise to the story isn’t a bad one at all – the Earth is in the grip of another Ice Age, and the base is one of several in the line of the advancing glaciers, using ‘ionisation’ technology to halt the advance and turn it back. Some of the scenes outside the base are actually fairly impressive – there’s copious amounts of ice and snow about, which makes you wonder whether there wasn’t any in The Abominable Snowmen because they’d set it all aside for this one.

Big, lumbering, alien nasties who have better technology than the humans, but are rather stupid. Check

Even today Bernard Bresslaw’s Varga the Ice Warrior looks pretty impressive. Fair play to Bernard Bresslaw, he’s certainly best known for comedy, having taken a number of roles in Carry On films, and also in the 60s TV sitcom “The Army Game”, but he brings more than just an impressive physical presence to this role. The sibilant menace of his reptilian voice is somehow at odds with his massive frame, yet it becomes all the more effective for that. They’re all big lads, the actors playing the 4 Ice Warriors, but there is something strange going on with some of their costumes. Bernard Bresslaw’s is very impressive, and well proportioned, as is one of the others. But the other two costumes – well, how should I put it? Either their heads are too big, or their bodies are too small, or a bit of both, and they do look slightly ridiculous, especially when the 4 are all together and you can’t avoid making the comparison.

The Alien nasties have a basic but fatal weakness. Check.

With the Tenth Planet Cybermen it was radiation, and with The Moonbase Cybermen it was nail polish remover (and gravity). With the Ice Warriors – well, it’s pretty obvious really when you think about it. Just turn the central heating thermostat up.

The amazing piece of technology which can be turned on the alien nasties to save the day. Check

They called it the Gravitron in “The Moonbase”. In this one it’s the Ioniser. This is the machine that melts the glaciers by , er, ionising them. Quite a bit of the story is held up waiting for Clent to discover whether he can use the Ioniser against the Ice Warriors’ ship – if it has atomic engines he can’t, if it doesn’t, then happy days.

Well, you can maybe see where I’m coming from now. There’s just so much in this story that we’ve seen before. It’s a bit of a shame, considering that what the story does, it actually does pretty well, and arguably better than the predecessors that I’ve mentioned.

What Have We Learned?

In the future, before the Earth gets burned to a crisp by solar flares, it’s going to be frozen to death by a new Ice Age

38: The Abominable Snowmen

Before Watching

This one has a special place in my heart, and it’s all because of the Target novelisation. Terrance Dicks’ “Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen” was the first novelisation based on a Troughton story to be published back in about 1975, and that’s exactly when I read it. Now, you have to remember that I was in the primary school at the time, so not necessarily the most demanding or discerning of readers. Nonetheless, the story struck an instant chord with me, and it’s one that I’ve often wished would be found. I can remember the story in the novelisation very clearly, not least because I found out last year that the book was available for the kindle for a couple of quid, and so I downloaded it more quickly than you can say Padmasambhava.

As for the TV story, well, again, I do have some previous with this story. Many years ago, and we must be talking about the early 1990s here, UK Gold had a Doctor Who weekend, one of the delights on offer being that they were showing episode 2, the only existing episode of “The Abominable Snowmen”. I vaguely remember being slightly disappointed, although not why I felt so.

One more word before we start then. A quick google brings me the joyous piece of information that Henry Lincoln, co-writer of this story, is indeed the same Henry Lincoln who went on to make a decent packet of money with that piece of glorious hokum, “The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail”.

After Watching

Oh, isn’t it nice sometimes when something you enjoyed so much as a kid isn’t revealed to your adult self to be a piece of rubbish. Or put it another way, I thoroughly enjoyed that. I loved the start of the story, where it was obvious that the Doctor had been having adventures which we knew nothing about. When he realizes he has landed near the Detsen monastery in the Himalayas he remembers he has been there before, during a time of strife and troubles, when he took their holy ghanta – a sort of decorated bell – into safe keeping. So his motivation for leaving the TARDIS to visit the monastery is clear, he is fulfilling his promise to return the ghanta. That isn’t the most complicated plot device, but it does, in a very understated way, underline what must be a great source of sadness for the Doctor. Even when he does land in a familiar place, all the people he knew there are likely to be long dead, or not even born yet. Also it underlines how Padmasambhava’s life has been extended by the Great Intelligence, since he was there the last time the Doctor visited, a couple of hundred years earlier.

This story illustrates what Doctor Who – indeed the best family dramas – can do. It is perfectly possible to take the story and enjoy it as just an adventure story, which it is, but there is some more to it than that. If you take Padmasambhava, here we have what was obviously once a good man, who has been taken over by the Great Intelligence, and had his life prolonged several times beyond its natural span. All what is left of his own will wants to do is to accomplish the nefarious purposes of the great Intelligence, so that it will leave him and he can die. Now, this never occurred to me when I read the book, but the Doctor, although he gives conflicting reports of his own age, may well be centuries older than Padmasambhava.

I don’t find the Yeti scary. That’s not surprising. I don’t find the Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warrirors, Sontarans scary now, although they have each sacred the bejesus out of my in their time when I was a lot younger. I find it really hard to decide whether the Yeti would have scared me that much when I was younger. I suppose that when you cover anything, however big, in that kind of fake fur you are always inviting comparison to a giant teddy bear. Or the honey monster. Or some of the larger muppets. They’re probably much scarier in close up, where you can see what appear to be nasty looking claws. I really like the idea of the control spheres, though. It just adds another layer of sophistication to the threat that the monsters pose, that when you think they’re harmless because they have been deactivated, all it takes is for one of those wee silver balls to roll its way into the chest cavity and whoops apocalypse.

Well, let’s get down to brass tacks. The plot. The TARDIS lands close to the Detsen monastery in Tibet. The Doctor has been here before, and recognizes the chance to return the Holy Ghanta he agreed to look after for them. When they reach the monastery they don’t get anything like the warm welcome they expected. The monastery is having a bit of a problem with them pesky yetis, and the situation isn’t helped by the presence of Professor Travers, a British yeti hunter, played by Victoria’s (Deborah Watling’s) real life dad.

It transpires that the aged master monk, Padmasambhava, who was there when the Doctor previously visited the monastery a couple of centuries earlier, was whizzing along the astral plane one day, minding his own business, when he was met and taken over by the Great Intelligence. Over many years, working under the Great Intelligence’s influence, Padmasambhava has stealthily built the yeti robots, that will carry out what needs to be done to enable the Great Intelligence to take on corporeal form, and then consume the whole world nyaaahh haa haaaahhhhh! After much toing and froing and all kinds of how d’you doings the Doctor helps the monks stand firm against the yeti when they attack the monastery, and together they defeat Padmasambhava, and along with him, the Great Intelligence.

It’s maybe not a great work of science fiction, but there’s the rub. This is an adventure story, and as such it gives director and cast an ample amount to work with to create a very exciting and enjoyable Doctor Who story, all the more praiseworthy considering that this is a 6 part story. I found the whole thing very atmospheric. This is a little surprising since, my overwhelming image of the Himalayas is huge jagged peaks, and snow. Lots of snow. In this story there is not so much as one flake in sight . . . and nobody mentions it! What a stroke of genius! You can’t help noticing the lack of snow at first, especially, I found, in episode 2, which is the one episode currently in the archives, but after a while, because all of the characters seem to think that this is perfectly normal, and because nobody else mentions it, then you really just come to accept it, even though the Himalayas never really stop looking like rolling welsh hillsides – which is exactly what they are, I think.

The cast give it their all though, without necessarily going over the top. I didn’t realise that Wolfe Morris, who played Padmasambhava was the brother of Aubrey Morris. Even if you don’t know the name, you’ll know the face, as Aubrey Morris is an English character actor who has been in tons of stuff over the years. I remember him particularly as the captain of the Golgafrinchan space Ark in the tv version of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy”. That was Aubrey, though, and this is Wolfe. He’s quite different physically from what I expected – some wizened, drained little husk of a man – being a little on the large side – but he makes up for it with the way that he uses his voice. The Padmasambhava voice that he uses most of the time is calm, soothing, almost mellifluous. However the voice he produces for the Great Intelligence is almost the complete opposite – in many ways the pure evocation of motiveless evil. Quite a tour de force when you consider that these voices are being produced by the same person, often within the same sentence.

Thematically, well it’s not the most complex story, and for me basically boils down to the main theme, that of men of peace – Buddhists – being confronted with the need to take action, and stand up and defend against violence, using whatever force they can bring to bear. As much as “The Daleks” is about the Thals shedding their pacifism to take control over their own destinies, so it is here, with the monks in the place of the Thals. As I mentioned earlier, though, the figure of Padmasambhava adds another thematic level to the story.

Sometimes with a partially missing story, you get the idea that it wouldn’t necessarily be enhanced all that much if the episodes were found. I honestly don’t think that this is the case with “The Abominable Snowmen”. This is a story that I thoroughly enjoyed.

What Have We Learned?

The Himalayas can be a snow free zone.

The Great Intelligence is neither great, nor particularly intelligent.