49: The Space Pirates

Before Watching

Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to embark upon a momentous occasion. We have reached the last missing story. Yes, episodes 1, 3.4.5 and 6 are the last 5 recon episodes we will ever have to endure during the whole of this marathon watch. I will allow you a minute to make a silent prayer of thanks.

So, what do we already know about “The Space Pirates”? It’s another Robert Holmes story – fine – and like his slightly earlier “The Krotons” it was a late replacement for a story which didn’t work out. Either I’ve read this somewhere, or seen it in an extras DVD, but the team of Derrick Sherwin and Peter Bryant did have a reputation for taking stories quite a long way in development before deciding that they wouldn’t work for whatever reason. Terrance Dicks had been shadowing Script Editor Sherwin, and by this stage was sharing duties with him. So when a story was dropped at a late stage, they were forced to look around at whatever stories they had in reserve from earlier, and this is how Dicks came to bring “The Krotons” to Peter Bryant’s attention. I believe that it was a similar story with “The Space Pirates”.

It’s fair t say that this story’s reputation is none too sweet. At 195 it is the lowest placed Troughton story in the Mighty 200 – 1 position below The Underwater Menace. By the 2014 Poll it came in 235^th out of 241. However let us be fair. Unfamiliarity with the story can explain the lowly place to some extent, as can received wisdom, it being the sort of story where people who have never seen it will confidently tell you that it’s rubbish. As always, let’s find out for ourselves.

After Watching

Right, so far my yardstick of crap is Season 3’s opener, “Galaxy Four”. This is nowhere near as bad as that. This is an attempt at a straightforward space opera, one might almost say in the genre of a lot of Star Trek. In fact this is probably the first attempt to do a straight space story without aliens or monsters. The plot is fairly sound, and has its roots maybe in the western genre. See what you think: -

The eponymous pirates are after a substance called Argonite. They get it by docking with space beacons, which are made of the stuff, blowing them into component modules, taking them back to their base, melting them down and selling the aragonite. The Earth Space Corps try their best to catch these pesky varmints, but their large ship is too small to catch the fast ships used by the pirates, while their small ship, called Minnows, are fast enough but don’t seem to have the range.

The TARDIS materializes on board a beacon, which is shortly attacked by pirates. The travelers are in a module which is separated from a module containing the TARDIS, and only survive oxygen starvation when they are rescued by an old fashioned space miner called Milo Clancy – more about him after. The Space Corps have Clancy down as possibly the leader of the pirates. Clancy takes them to the nearest planet, Ta. Ta is owned and run by the Issigri Mining corporation, which was founded by Clancy’s old partner, Dom Issigri. They split up, and the Space Corps believe Clancy was implicated in Issigri’s death. It turns out that the pirates actually have their base on Ta, and Madeleine Issigri, Dom’s daughter, is in league with them. When she threatens to break with them, Caven, their leader, he reveals that her father is not dead, but in their captivity. After a lot of toing and froing the Doctor, Milo and the Space Crops foil Caven, who is shot down when a Minnow finally catches up with him, and Madeleine shows repentance and is taken away for trial.

Now ok, you might say that this does not exactly sound riveting, but then if you boil down the plots of a lot of stories to their bare essentials, then they don’t sound all that. The fact is, if you consider that this was written by the late, great Robert Holmes, then this does share certain plot elements with his ever popular “Caves of Androzani” – fights over valuable minerals – corruption in high places being two which spring immediately to mind. The Science Fiction concepts in it are fairly sound, and I never really found myself saying – why is so and so doing that – as can often happen.

Which is not to say that it’s great Doctor Who, because it isn’t. When there’s a monster/alien in the story then you’re interested at least for a while in learning what there is to learn about the monster. Without that, then I think there’s a greater burden on characterization, and if you don’t have any rounded, well fleshed out, or interesting characters, then your story is going to suffer. Milo Clancy, the roguish individual at odds with the conformity and regimentation around him,(a type Holmes was particularly fond of, judging by the number of times they appear in his stories) has his moments, but I find myself continually distracted by the accent Gordon Gostelow adopts throughout the story. If you’re of a similar vintage to me the name might not mean a lot to you, but you’d surely recognize him from a string of character parts on TV in the 60s, 70s and 80s. As I recall he’d often play parts which required a Northern accent (nothing wrong with that before anyone writes in). Now, paying homage to the story’s wild west antecedents, Gordon plays Milo Clancy with a wild west accent. Only . . . he can’t make it stick. His Northern vowels and inflections are consistently breaking through. It’s a little bit like watching a John Wayne film when the Iron Duke suddenly puts an ‘ecky thump, well I’ll go to t’foot of our stairs’ in the middle of a speech.

I rather liked Lisa Daniely’s Madeleine Issigri as wwell. Although I originally felt that she was likely to be the mastermind (or is that mistressmind?) of the pirates, but she was well written and three dimensional enough that I did start to doubt myself until her relationship with the pirates was made explicit. Down among the wines and spirits, I’m not sure exactly whether we were meant to draw the conclusion that General Hermack, played by Jack May, is rather besotted with Madeleine Issigri, which blinds him to the obvious clues that she is at the very least sheltering the pirates – or whether he is just thick. Oh, and before I forget I have to make the observation that Major Ian Warne, played by Donald Gee, is a dead ringer for Jay from The Inbetweeners. The two pirates we actually get to know at all, Caven, the leader, and his second in command Dervish aren’t a typical Holmesian double act, but there is a nice contrast between the frankly evil Caven, and the somewhat more weasley Dervish. Just out of interest, in the Ryk Mayall sitcom “The New Statesman”, his character, Alan B’Stard shares an office in the Palace of Westminster with one Peers Fletcher-Dervish, played by Michael Troughton, Patrick’s son! George Layton gets an early screen credit playing Penn, who is a button pusher on the Earth Space Corps ship. He doesn’t get a great deal to do or say, but hey, his career was going to blossom in the Doctor sitcoms in the 70s.

A word for the model work in this story. The only live action episode we have to judge by is episode 2, but judging by this, and also by the photographs in the recons the work in this story was up to the standard being produced by the same time as Gerry Anderson, and that’s praise indeed. I quite like the look of the Minnow spaceships, but just wish that they didn’t have such a long pointed nose, with a droop at the end, which just looks a little silly. 

Well, I think we’ve been more than fair to the story so far. Now let’s go a little more negative. Most six parters we’ve seen so far are too long and suffer from padding. To my mind this definitely seems prolonged beyond its natural span, and I think that the problem is in the first 3 or 4 episodes. It just takes far too long to get going. You could boil down the best bits from episodes 1 – 3 into one good, lean and mean episode. Unusually for Robert Holmes, a lot of the dialogue could be pruned as well. AS I mentioned when I reviewed “The Krotons” I have read a very interesting biography of the great man, and by the time that he took over script editing duties, Holmes had formulated a very particular approach to a six parter, one which he encouraged all of his writers for Doctor Who to adopt – namely, to write a six parter as two linked stories, one of 4 parts and one of two parts. I’m not entirely sure how he would have done this with “The Space Pirates” if he had adopted this approach, but I do think that it would have been worth at least trying.

For all that it is 6 parts too long, and over padded, there isn’t a lot for The Doctor to do in the story, and it seems that there’s even less for Jamie and Zoe. After this one ended they only had one more story – albeit a 10 week story, and can you imagine what an anti-climax it would have been if this had actually been their last story together? I only hope that “The War Games” lives up to its reputation. (I’m sure that it does. I can still remember watching it first time round when I was five years old.) They deserve a good send off.

At this point, I am breathing more than just a sigh of relief that we’ve just seen the last of the recons. I thought it might be appropriate to say a word about them. It’s very easy to mock, and make nasty comments about them, and I for one will be delighted if the day ever comes when the missing episodes have all been animated. But let’s give credit to the people who have put them together to make them as watchable experience as possible for those people who want to get as close as possible to the experience of watching the original shows. Let’s spend a moment giving thanks to the memory of John Cura for taking the tele snaps that form the basis of so many of the recons. I haven’t tried watching a recon with vision off and only the sound on, but I can’t imagine for one moment that the experience is as enjoyable as watching a recon.

Having said all of that, I do hope that the BBC continues animating missing episodes. “The Reign of Terror”, “The Moonbase”, “The Ice Warriors” and “The Invasion” all benefit hugely from their animated episodes. “The Web of Fear” springs to mind as one story begging to have its recon replaced by an animated episode.

Coming back to “The Space Pirates”, it has its flaws, but it wasn’t terrible. Miles better than “Galaxy Four” and in fact probably about on a par with “The Dominators”, although for different reasons.

What Have We Learned?

Well, this story reinforced the point which was raised by Season Three’s “The Gunfighters”,that if it is not essential to ask a British actor to do an American accent, then don’t.

48: The Seeds of Death

Before Watching

May I give you a piece of advice? Never, ever watch a classic Doctor who story you have never watched before in the presence of those members of your family who are not fans of classic Who (which for most of us probably means all of them)

This is a little tip I worked out three or four years ago, the first time that I ever watched “The Seeds of Death”. It was being shown on one of the cable channels and I watched the first episode while it was on, and recorded the others. I started viewing episode 2 on a time I was alone in the house, but by episode 3 my wife and eldest two daughters had returned home, and that’s when the comments started. Now, it’s one thing if we’re watching a story I already know, since I can devote enough of my attention to refuting some the comments they make with such witty rejoinders as – why don’t you shut up – and – he who pays the mortgage chooses the channel – etc. , but when you’re watching a story you’ve never seen before you just can’t afford to have your attention diverted away from what’s going on on the screen.

What makes it worse is that they will inevitably draw undue attention to the shortcomings in terms of plot, acting, costume, special effects and anything else that they can find to criticise. Which has the effect of making it relatively impossible to give the story a fair hearing. Well, that was the effect it had on me, anyway. So I’m in the situation of remembering chunks of the story, but having some quite significant gaps in my memory (which I like to think of as’ shouting breaks’ ). I also have it down in my memory as something really rather disappointing, but again, this may simply be the effect of the company I had to put up with while I was watching it. I certainly hope so.

After Watching

If I hadn’t already known that this story featured the return of the Ice Warriors, then the story itself did go to some lengths to conceal the identity of the monsters du jour for the first ten minutes. The only clues are firstly, the credit at the start of the show that showed it was written by Brian Hayles, and the reptilian hissing made by the unseen alien in the first few minutes. Actually I rather like the way that we saw through the alien’s eyes when it first appeared.

The Ice Warriors. Let’s have a look at their plan. They aim to take over Earth – naturally enough. This involves using the Earth’s T-Mat system, which has its control centre on the Moon  - more about that afterwards – to transport the eponymous seeds to major population centres in the cold and temperate regions of the Earth.  When the seeds burst open they exude gas, and spores of a fungus which creates foam (a la “Fury From The Deep”) and absorbs the oxygen from the atmosphere. In a short space of time this will reduce the oxygen content of the atmosphere to by 80%, which will make it unbreathable to humans, but just right for Ice Warriors, and the planet will be ripe for conquest by the Ice Warrior invasion fleet. OK? Appropriately evil behaviour, and not at all inconsistent with what we’ve already seen in “The Ice Warriors”

In “The Ice Warriors” the warriors all had similar costumes and armour. I say similar rather than identical, since one of them did have a noticeably big head in proportion to its body. That armour doesn’t seem to have been used this time, and that’s probably just as well. In the previous story the Warriors were led by Bernard Bresslaw’s Varga, but his armour was exactly the same type as the others. In this one we see the first appearance of what I’ve heard called the Ice Lord armour. This may be a bit of a misnomer, since the term is never used in this story, and I think in “The Curse of Peladon” the character in the same costume, played by the same actor (Alan Bennion) is just called a Lord. This involves wearing a larger, smoother domed metal helmet, and what looks like a fairly ordinary dark jumpsuit, gloves and boots. It does introduce the idea that the Ice Warriors may have a social structure and a hierarchy, which adds a little depth to them, and this is all to the good. It doesn’t explain why the Grand Marshal, whose head we see on a video screen, is wearing a similar helmet to the leader’s, but his has some large sequins stuck to it in places.

The basic problem with the script is a point which it actually does acknowledge for itself. The plot revolves around the fact that at this particular stage of earth History, mankind has forsaken all other means of transport in favour of the T-Mat instantaneous transportation system. I’m not saying that if a wildly improbable thing like real functioning matter transmission were ever invented that it wouldn’t rapidly become extremely popular, and supercede many other forms of transport, but it just wouldn’t see people abandoning other forms of transport completely. The coming of the Railways was widely hailed as the death knell of the canals, but although railways certainly superceded canals, the fact is that the canals are still there, and people still use them. The cnals themselves didn’t mean that people ever stopped completely using a horse and cart. The car never completely killed the bicycle. So anyway, we have the whole of the world’s economy 100% dependent upon this one form of transport. Where is the control based? That’s right – on the Moon. Pretty much the one place you have no other means of reaching if the system breaks down. Now, fair play to the script, more than one character points out the absolute stupidity of this, but none of it explains how mankind would have been stupid enough to design the system in this way in the first place.

Of course, the real reason for taking this stupid decision is that it allows us to have another ‘base under siege’ story. Yes, we’re never going to have another season like Season 5, when the vast majority of stories in the one season all adhered to this same format, but nobody seems to have told Brian Hayles that this sort of story is sooooo last year. And why not? Season 6, with 2 stories to go, has certainly been a season of variety. There were similarities between “The Dominators” and “The Krotons” but there were notable differences as well, and two very different and rather wonderful stories in between in “The Mind Robber” and “The Invasion”. By way of contrast we have here a story which seems in many ways a rerun of some of the memorable features of stories from the last two seasons. You liked “The Moonbase” because it had a moonbase under attack? No problem, this is also set on a moonbase – AND – partly set in a world weather control station, although this one is on Earth. You liked the Ice Warriors? – no problem, all present and correct. Loved the foam in “Fury from the Deep”? We got more foam in this story than you can shake a stick at.

Well, OK, the story is formulaic to an extent, but there are just a couple of interesting touches. The leader under pressure role is actually shared out between Ronald Leigh-Hunt’s Commander Radnor, and Louise Pajo’s Miss Kelly, who takes over once we get to the moon as Radnor fades more into the background. There’s an interesting twist on the traitor character here too. Fewsham, played by Terry Scully, is very quick to help the Ice Warriors, then he helps the Doctor, Zoe, Jamie and Miss Kelly escape back to Earth, but does no return himself, and starts helping the Ice Warriors again, yet then it is his deliberate actions which enables the Doctor to know the Ice Warriors’ overall plans, and to defeat them.

None of which is to say that this is a classic, because it isn’t. It is a perfectly functional and watchable story of the probably overdone base under siege story. It suffers, like all bar the very best six parters, from a little obvious padding – it seems to take an awfully long time to get the Doctor and companions to the Moon in the first place, and other than giving us one cliffhanger there is no reason whatsoever why they need to spend so much air time in the rocket. I would also say that the Ice Warriors’ plan to use the transmat is unnecessarily complicated – why not just land covertly and leave the seeds? Here’s another plot hole which is actually central to the plot. Harry Towb, a well-known face in British films and TV shows of the 60s and 70s, plays the technician Osgood. When the Ice Warriors invade the T-Mat moonbase, Towb Osgood disables the T Mat for which the Ice Warriors kill him. After which it turns out that only Osgood was skilled enough to repair it – none of the other technicians there know how to fix the T Mat. What? You have a base of personnel, and only one of them can fix the damn thing? What the hell are all the others there for? Making the tea? Generally the look of the story didn’t detract, although the men ‘s uniform is a bit strange – the bands on their legs make it look as if they are wearing their underpants outside their trousers. Oh, and the temperature control on the moonbase, which Zoe uses to kill some of the ice warriors is like a little sailing ship’s wheel – the sort of thing you get a little barometer inside. Very incongruous in these surroundings. Once the temperature gauge reached 50 celsius it shouldn’t just have been the Ice Warriors who started dying either – that would have killed the humans as well. While I’m carping, I must draw attention to the climax of the story. The seeds and foam are destroyed by water. Really? One question – what’s ice made of? And another fleet being destroyed through manipulation of a radio signal, oh please. Don’t these idiots ever learn?

“The Seeds of Death” is not alone in having some fairly obvious plot holes, and none of these are essentially fatal to the story. Going back to the last time that I watched the story, it was ruined for me by the barrage of comments from my nearest and dearest, some of which were fair, but some of which weren’t. Without that running commentary I found that I could actually start to enjoy this story for what it is – a decent Doctor who adventure story, with some quite impressive monsters, the Doctor and companions in real jeopardy at times, and some exciting action.

What Have We Learned?

The Production team were determined to get their money’s worth from the ‘Fury from the Deep’ foam machine.

The Ice Warriors do have a hierarchy – the higher you go the smoother and more spangly your costume gets. A bit like Strictly Come Dancing.

47: The Krotons

Before Watching

If you’re of a certain age you maybe remember the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” series of repeats. There was a particularly long gap between Tom Baker’s last series, and Peter Davison’s first, and not only that, the series was being moved from its hallowed Saturday teatime slot to a twice weekly evening slot. In order to give the new series the best chance of success, the BBC sanctioned what I believe may well have been the first ever repeats of stories starring previous Doctors. The stories selected were “An Unearthly Child/100000BC”, “The Carnival of Monsters”, “The Three Doctors”, “Logopolis” and “The Krotons”. Now, choosing the first ever story to represent the Hartnell era was an obvious choice to make, albeit that, after the first episode it really isn’t a very good story. Likewise, “The Three Doctors” had to be chosen, as did “Logopolis”, being Tom Baker’s last, and the story in which we were given a few seconds’ look at Davison. But “The Krotons”? It was a story about which I knew nothing at the time, and it’s probably fair to say that it didn’t have much of a reputation among the fans. I think that a lot of us were disappointed with it, especially bearing in mind that this was the first story written by Robert Holmes. I’ll make a small digression about him in a moment. To be fair, John Nathan Turner wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice for a representative Troughton story. One of the requirements for The Five Faces series was that each story had to be a 4 parter. At that time in 1981, “The Krotons” was the only complete four parter in the Archives.

I cannot in all honesty remember much about watching “The Krotons” in 1981. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I probably lost interest in the story as I can just about remember watching the first episode, but not any of the others. So you might well be thinking that I’m currently expecting the worst. Yet there are a couple of reasons for hope. For one thing there’s the presence of Philip Madoc among the cast. As I’ve mentioned before, he was a terrific actor, and actually tailor made for guest appearences in Doctor Who. He almost invariably made any story he appeared in better for his presence. Then there is the fact that it was written by Robert Holmes.

Robert Holmes

I make no apologies for making a digression about the late, great Robert Holmes. I don’t necessarily expect everyone to agree with me – by all means feel free to disagree – but Robert Holmes was my favourite Doctor Who writer, and in my opinion the greatest of all the classic Doctor Who scriptwriters and script editors. (although Terrance Dicks must be discussed in the script editor category as well). He made his debut in Doctor Who with this story, and would script the next but one story, The Space Pirates. Neither of these is generally reckoned to be his best work. But look at the stories he scripted for Jon Pertwee : -

Spearhead from Space

Terror of the Autons

Carnival of Monsters

The Time Warrior

By the time The Time Warrior was broadcast, Robert Holmes had taken over as script editor, and when Philip Hinchcliffe took over as Producer, and Tom Baker as Doctor, they went on to make what many people think were the most consistently successful and excellent seasons in the classic series’ History. During this time Robert Holmes either wrote, or rewrote pretty much from scratch

The Ark in Space (in my list of all-time favourites)

Pyramids of Mars (one of my all-time top 10)

Brain of Morbius (another long term favourite)

The Deadly Assassin ( my honest – to  - God – all – time – favourite – classic  - Doctor – Who – story – of – all – time)

The Talons of Weng Chiang (in my all-time top 10)

Whichever way you look at it, this is an incredible output of quality. He wasn’t finished when he gave up being script editor either, and went on to write

The Sunmakers (a satire which has stood the test of time)

The Ribos Operation (consistently enjoyable opener to the Key to Time)

The Power of Kroll (rather lacklustre segment of the Key to Time)

After John Nathan Turner took over as Producer he implemented a deliberate policy of turning to new writers and ignoring the old guard, and so Robert Holmes, although originally approached to write the script for “The Five Doctors” 20^th anniversary special, didn’t write for the series again until Peter Davison’s final story. Mind you, this was

The Caves of Androzani (voted the number 1 on the Mighty 200 poll)

Having read a fine biography of Robert Holmes I got the impression that although he would be asked to write for the sixth Doctor, it was an uneasy working relationship with John Nathan Turner, and this, and illness probably explains why his last work for the show, “The Two Doctors” and “The Mysterious Planet” weren’t representative of his best work.

Well, all of those stories lay in our future. For the present, though, let’s see if we can draw anything at all positive from “The Krotons”.

After Watching

Well, I’m very sorry, but that wasn’t bad at all. Maybe not a classic – well, definitely not a classic – but a perfectly watchable slice of late-Troughton classic Who. And yes – I did watch all 4 episodes in one sitting, and not to get the whole thing over with, either. I’m not just saying this because it was written by my boy Holmes – the fact is that I was rather enjoying it, and wanted to see more.

Watching the show, I couldn’t help drawing some similarities between this story, and two earlier stories, “The Savages” from the 3^rd season, and “The Dominators” from the start of this 6^th season. I’ll explain the similarities as we go along.

The TARDIS lands on an unnamed planet, inhabited by a humanoid species called the Gonds. Hmm – is it just me, or do you see the word Gond and immediately start adding an –a – before the last letter? Oh, it is just me. Ok then, moving swiftly on. The planet looks very similar to Dulcis, but then on a BBC budget, in a black and white show I’m afraid that it is always going to look like that.

The Gonds, then, live in a city of rather primitive stone dwellings – although thankfully their costumes are nowhere near as ridiculous as the Dulcians’. In the middle of this city they all seem to be gathered round a futuristic looking polygonal metal door. Their two most promising students have been selected to go through the magic doors, to become companions of the Krotons. The Krotons are an alien race of crystalline form who crash landed on the planet many hundreds of years earlier. Still in the first episode, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe watch as the male Gond student is ejected from the back doors, and then liquidated, or ‘dispersed’ in Kroton – speak by a pair of guns which are similar to those used by the War Machines.  It transpires that the Krotons have developed the ability to convert mental energy into pure energy, and they extract this from the brightest Gonds, before kicking them out of the ship, and killing them before they go running back to the rest to tell them what is happening.

At the start of the story, the Gonds look on the Krotons as their benefactors, since the Krotons have been steadily doling out carefully chosen Scientific knowledge to them, and accelerating their development. The Krotons, being crystalline entities mostly made of tellurium, are in a state of being slurry in tanks. They need a lot of mental energy to reconstitute them.

Phew – okay, now I said that this reminded me a little of “The Savages”, and the way that the Gonds are drained of their mental energy is another take on vampirism essentially, in the same way that the Savages’ vitality is drained  off to be used by the city dwellers. Now, the fact is that the combined intellects of both Zoe and the Doctor, in episode 2, proves enough to reconstitute two of the Gonds. I did say that “The Krotons” also reminded me of “The Dominators”. The Dominators need radiation to provide energy to enable their spacecraft to take off – while the Krotons need mental energy to enable their spacecraft to take off. The Dominators assess their Dulcian slaves, discarding those who lack the intelligence to be useful to them – ditto the Krotons. There is a conflict of philosophies between the pacifists and those who want to resist the oppressors, although it is made slightly more interesting in “The Krotons” with Philip Madoc’s character who starts as a loyal servant of the Krotons, becomes a hard and fast resistance leader who uses this hardline stance to take over as the leader of the Gonds, and then, when the Krotons say that they will leave the planet if the Gonds hand over the High Brains – Zoe and the Doctor – then he becomes a de facto collaborator. It would not be believable in many other actors – to Philip Madoc it’s a piece of cake.

Well, so far so good – and judged on the aspects of the story we’ve looked at so far the story was fine by me. Now let’s get to the Krotons themselves. There’s two aspects to the Krotons we need to discuss – their appearance and their voices. Starting with their appearance, the Krotons are supposed to be crystalline entities. To be fair, their ‘heads’ do resemble giant crystals. It is possible that the design of their bodies was inspired by the appearance of a snowflake under a microscope, or another type of crustal. The trouble is the rubber skirt at the bottom of the costume which is there to hide their legs. The director takes care to try to show this as little as possible, but whenever it is visible your eye is just drawn to it, and you can’t help thinking about its pure wrongness. On the whole the design looks a bit like the designers were approached with the brief – look lads, here’s a fiver, that’s all we can afford, do the best that you can -. As for their voices, well, they are a little bit of a Roy Skelton Off-the-Peg selection, but do have the advantage over the distinctive voices of the Quarks that you can, at least understand what they say.

One final connection with “The Dominators” is that the Doctor has no compunctions about blowing them to kingdom come with their own bomb. In the same way he has no qualms about dispersing the two Krotons using sulphuric acid. The idea of it is rather horrific, although the execution is less so.

I rather think that “The Krotons” is seen to best advantage when looked at as one component in a developing season. This relatively undemanding 4 parter comes immediately after “The Invasion”, and is as different from that story, as “The Invasion” was from “The Mind Robber”. So, as I said, no, it’s not a classic, but it’s perfectly watchable and quite enjoyable – even if I didn’t in 1981.

What Have We Learned?

“The Krotons” doesn’t deserve the opprobrium heaped upon it after “The Five Faces of Doctor Who”. It is certainly watchable, even if it isn’t Robert Holmes’ best work.

Zoe is clearly better at intelligence tests than the Doctor

46: The Invasion - Episodes 5 - 8

Before Watching

Shall I tell you the truth? OK, I will. I did watch this story when it was first broadcast, but other than a succession of images – mostly to do with marching Cybermen, I hadn’t any real memories of the specific story details. Then last summer I was browsing through a British Heart Foundation charity shop (other charity shops are available) and saw that they had a copy of Ian Marter’s Target novelization of the story. Yeah, of course I bought it. So I read it that evening – and yes, I rather enjoyed it too. So I pretty much know what’s going to happen in the rest of the story – the Cybermen will appear, but the story really has been Vaughn’s story so far, and it is going to continue to be so. I haven’t a problem with that.

What I will be interested to see is just how the story can juggle all these foregrounded characters – on the goodies side you have The Doctor, Jamie, Zoe, Isobel Watkins and the Brig and the UNIT boys. Then on the villains’ side you have Vaughan, Packer, the Cyber Planner, and half a dozen Cybermen. Somebody is going to lose out, even in an 8 episode story. I’m pretty much hoping it will be Isobel Watkins. There’s something about her, some indefinable quality which manages to get on my wick and set my teeth on edge. To be fair to Sally Faulkner, the actress who played her, I think she was actually written stupid and incredibly self-centered, but knowing this doesn’t make it any less annoying when she persists in calling the Captain her ‘dolly soldier’. Dolly Soldier?! What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I don’t want to be horrible, but this is one area in which maybe this story can be criticized. As I understand it the original idea was for Professor Travers to be in the story, but Jack Watling was unavailable, which is why they created the character of Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel. Presumably, had Travers been in the story, then part Isobel plays would have been taken instead by Anne Travers, the Professor’s daughter (as opposed to Deborah Watling, who was Jack Watling’s real life daughter.) Anne was a scientist, and more than that a grounded, strong, believable character, and would have been far better in my opinion than this self centred airhead.

Well, as I said, I read the novelization last summer, so I know that even though we’re four episodes in we’ve still got a lot of story to go, and wasting time here won’t accomplish that. So let’s go.

After Watching

Again, ladies and gentlemen, the plan was to not force myself to watch more than two episodes in an evening. Well, that went by the board again, as this set of 4 episodes (disc 2 on the official DVD) were another single sitting job – not because I had to, but because I wanted to. So that means I really enjoyed it, right? Of course – but that is, I enjoyed it on its own terms, as a fine adventure yarn, rather than a piece of great Doctor Who. I’ll try to explain that.

I can’t help thinking that the middle episodes, up to maybe halfway through episode 7, really start to get away from The Doctor, and for the first time since Hartnell’s first season it feels as if the Doctor isn’t really the star of his own show. I think that I know what the problem is too. It’s all in the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT. In this story he becomes little more than a UNIT operative. Ah – you might say – but isn’t that what he is in the Pertwee era a lot of the time, and that seemed to go perfectly well. Yes and no. The Third Doctor’s relationship with UNIT was a little more complicated than it seems to be in this story. In the Third Doctor’s time his relationship with UNIT was pretty much a marriage of convenience. Stuck in Space and Time after being tried by the Time Lords at the end of “The War Games”, UNIT provide a useful base for him to work at trying to get the TARDIS working, and breaking the Time Lord’s Edict. In return, UNIT get to call him their Scientific Advisor, and can avail themselves of the use of his services from time to time. It’s fair to say that the Doctor does not always help UNIT willingly, and there’s often friction between him and the Brig over the methods that UNIT uses – ie – if it’s green, bomb the hell out of it. Well, coming back to “The Invasion” it really is all far too cosy. The Doctor slots quite nicely into the organization, and there’s never the hint of the slightest conflict between himself and the Brig, which maybe would have added a little something extra to the story. After all, the second Doctor is, in my opinion, the least ‘establishment’ of all of the Doctors, and it might have been fun to see how UNIT might have reacted to a little of his inspired anarchy.

Doesn’t Kevin Stoney continue to be outstanding, though? There’s a wonderful, wonderful scene in which Professor Watkins is brought to him, and Watkins wearily concedes that he will have to do as Vaughn says, since Vaughn will surely torture him, and he cannot stand torture. He expresses his desire to kill Vaughan, and Vaughn hands him a gun, and tells him to shoot. You can’t tear your eyes away from the screen while he’s on here – it is played to absolute perfection. Of course, you know that Watkins, a decent man, is not going to be able to shoot Vaughn, because murder is wrong – but then he does! Three bullet holes appear in the chest of Vaughn’s jumper! It transpires that Vaughn has been part cyber converted. What a fabulous, fabulous scene – probably one of my favourite scenes of all of the ones I’ve watched since we started with “An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC”.

Well, we did get to see some more of the Cybermen too. I think I’ve already mentioned that this mark 5 cyberman ( I count the Moonbase and Tomb of the Cybermen separately, since despite their many similarities there is a clear difference in the hand arrangement.) is my favourite design – although there’s also a lot to be said for the mark 7 (Earthshock)  design too. Visually, director Douglas Camfield really gets the best out of them as well. The scenes marching down the steps of St. Paul’s and past The Horn pub are remarkable in as much as they really are every bit as good as the iconic photographs lead you to believe. It would have been nice to get some verbal confrontation between one of them and the Doctor, or Vaughn, but no, in this story it all happens through the Cyberplanner, which is a bit of a shame, and detracted a little from the story for me.

When we got to the denouement, there were echoes in it of the ending of “The Wheel In Space”. What I mean by that is the the Cybermen still need to be guided in from space by a radio signal. Alright, this time it’s the great cyber bomb which is going to destroy the earth, but the principal is the same. How do we deal with it – switch the flippin radio off. Not rocket Science. Mind you, rocket science is what they use to shoot down the cyber ship. I wonder why Derrick Sherwin decided to have UNIT ask the Russians to borrow a rocket to launch a missile at the cybership, rather than the Americans? I wonder what would have really happened in 1968 if the western world had asked the Soviet Union – Can we borrow one of your lovely rockets, please?

I think that “The Invasion” demonstrates just which different factors have to all work together to make a good Doctor Who story. By rights, 8 episodes should be too long to sustain a single story, and really and truly there isn’t really quite enough plot to keep you going here. What makes it work is good – and in some cases great – acting, terrific direction, and design which is far better than it has any right to be for the money that the show could afford to spend. No doubt about it, this was the shape of things to come.

What Have We Learned?

The Cybermen don’t actually have to do that much – just be there looking impressive

UNIT have remarkable resources at their disposal

Kevin Stoney is a class act whenever he is the chief villain

We can add hand grenades and intensified emotions to the ever growing list of things which can kill Cybermen

46: The Invasion - Episodes 1 - 4

Before Watching

It’s probably because it got me at a very impressionable age – 4 or 5 as I recall, but the Invasion style Cyberman is the image that pops into my head whenever I hear the word ‘Cyberman’ It was the first time that they had the helmets with the full ’earmuffs’ for want of a better word. Following on from the suits first seen in “The Wheel in Space” these had costumes made of rubber diving suits sprayed silver. One of the iconic images from 60s Doctor Who – in fact from the whole of classic Doctor Who, is the Cybermen walking down a set of stone steps with the dome of St. Paul’s in the background, an image every bit as arresting as the image of the Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”.

Going on what I’ve seen in the 4 previous Cybermen stories, though, maybe the Cybermen do have most appeal to younger children, for I’m afraid that I’ve started to find myself falling out of love with them as a feature of classic Doctor Who. I’ll try to put that into context.

An imposing visual image is great for a Doctor Who monster/villain, and it’s a really important starting place. But in the same way that a well-conceived and written monster is going to struggle with viewers if it looks ridiculous in the first place, a visually interesting monster is not going to be enough if it is just a one dimensional motiveless malignity. Which, come to think of it, is an accusation that can be levelled at the Daleks. We’ll take a look at the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Daleks and Cybermen afterwards, I think. So, coming back to Cybermen –

they were once humanoids from earth’s twin planet Mondas whose reliance on mechanical replacements for body parts eventually led to them becoming essentially cyborgs, who have also removed useless things like emotions from their organic brains. Ok – so far so good. What are they like, then?

The Cybermen are warriors, bent on the conquest and domination of other races. Ok – why?

They are superior to other races, therefore it is logical that other races should be converted to Cybermen as well, since they would then be a higher form of life too. Ah, now here we have a problem. You see the Cybermen have been defeated in 4 consecutive adventures by human beings. So shouldn’t they come to the conclusion that logically, through beating them 4 – 0. The humans are therefore superior beings, and they, the Cybermen, should leave them alone?

Ah.

Part of the problem I’m having with the Cybermen at the moment is that they are so physically superior to their human enemies that they shouls be able to carry out their plans through sheer brute force. Look, take the Moonbase. The Cybermen can function perfectly well in a vacuum. So why don’t they just walk up to the outside of the Moonbase, and start punching holes in the dome. The base would have run out of tea trays sooner or later, surely. They seem to go out of their way to make things difficult for themselves, and this is something which becomes difficult to accept after a while.

Daleks v. Cybermen

I don’t know that you can argue that the Daleks and the Cybermen were the two most iconic monsters to feature in classic Doctor Who. There’s a host of well-conceived, well realised monsters who appeared in one story, and never returned, and there are even some other popular monsters who appeared in more than one story – the Autons, Ice Warriors and Sontarans being three that spring to mind off the top of my head. None of them though featured in anything like the number of stories, and generated anything like the amount of speculation about back story as the Daleks and Cybermen.

Were the Cybermen conceived as an alternative to the Daleks, bearing in mind Terry Nation’s desire to take his creation off to America and attempt to make a series about them? That’s one view that has gained a certain amount of support over the years. Me, I don’t know. The fact is that Season 4, which saw Hartnell’s regeneration into Troughton, while it featured the first two Cybermen stories, “The Tenth Planet” and “The Moonbase”, also featured two Dalek stories. After that, though, Terry Nation did take his Daleks off to the USA, and it wasn’t until the 9^th season that they’d return in “The Day of the Daleks”. In the meantime, 2 Cybermen stories featured in Troughton’s series 5, and one, “The Invasion”, in Series 6. In this story, “The Invasion”, it is the Cybermen who are used as the monsters in the first UNIT story, which was very much a dry run for Bryant and Sherwin’s plans to create an Earthbound series from season 7 onwards, which suggests that at this time the Cybermen were looking to be the number 1 monster of the show.

All of which makes it all the more perplexing that there was no Cyberman story throughout the Jon Pertwee Era, until Season 12, which was Tom Baker’s first. I think that there’s maybe an answer to this in the fact that maybe Kit Pedler didn’t want to come up with another Cyberman story, and the production team might have been wary of asking another writer to start from scratch with them. Maybe, also the team were wary of having a monster come back for a second crack at invading Earth. The Daleks, for example, didn’t return after “The Day of the Daleks” until season 10 and crucially after the Time Lords had lifted the ban on the Doctor travelling through time and space.

Looking forward past that, the Daleks featured in 2 Tom Baker stories – season 12’s “Genesis of the Daleks” and the disappointing season 17 story “Destiny of the Daleks”. Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe, the great script editor – producer team who made the first 3 seasons of Tom Baker’s tenure – were not great fans of the Daleks, and even persuaded Terry nation to pen “The Android Invasion” rather than another Dalek story. The Cybermen did not feature again until Peter Davison’s first season, when they were exhumed to marvelous effect in the highly praised “Earthshock”. Not for the first time the Cybermen had undergone a radical redesign, and this firmly reestablished them as a recurring monster throughout the rest of the run of the classic series.

The Daleks, of course never needed such a radical redesign. In fact you could argue that the most obvious redesign of the Daleks occurred between their appearences in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and “The Chase”, where two horizontal metal bands around the top of the Daleks’ bodies were replaced by vertical bars, which I believe were supposed to be solar cells, which enabled the Daleks to convert solar energy to static electricity.

I always used to wonder who would win in a fight between Daleks and Cybermen – a question which was pretty clearly answered during David Tennant’s time in the ‘new’ series. (It seems odd to talk of something which is 10 years and 8 series old as new). If you had to fight one, certainly, you’d be better off fighting a cyberman. Apart from anything else, there have been so many ways to kill a cyberman over the years, while the Daleks are tough critters, even if it is remarkably easy to sneak up behind one, and put something over its eyestalk, while you bash its gun out of its housing.

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

Hmm – I know I’m rambling on a bit here, so let me just tell you how I’m going to review this story, and then we’ll get on with it. If you cast your mind back to “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, you’ll maybe remember that I reviewed it in three installments of 4 episodes each. That worked well enough as far as I was concerned, and so I’m going to split my “The Invasion” Review into two parts.

After Watching

This isn’t the first animation I’ve seen. Off the top of my head “The Reign of Terror”, “The Tenth Planet”, “The Moonbase” and “The Ice Warriors” all have animated episodes. I have to say, though, that episode 1 of “The Invasion” is my favourite. I’m not really sure what made me like it more than the others, unless, maybe, that it is a particularly good episode – which it is. Actually, the first 4 all are.

Let’s have a quick look at the story so far. The TARDIS’ technical issues continue at the start of the first episode, as it materializes in space since the landing control is stuck. Don’t question it, just go with the flow. A spaceship on the far side of the moon fires at it, and it only just manages to materialize on Earth at the last second. Now, one of the original ideas of the story was, I think, that they would link up with Professor Travers from “The Web of Fear” and “The Abominable Snowmen”, but Jack Watling was unavailable, and so the characters of Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel were substituted. The Doctor calls on Professor Watkins to ask for his help in repairing the TARDIS circuits which have been damaged, and finds that he has not been seen for a while. He decides to pay a call on International Electromatics, the firm he has been working for, and meets the boss, Mr. Tobias Vaughn. Vaughn is particularly interested in the TARDIS circuits, and the Doctor has little choice but to leave them with him. As he and Jamie leave Vaughn, two shady men trail them, and eventually pick them up in a car, which then takes them to an airbase. Much to his surprise, the Doctor is reunited with the former Colonel Lethbridge Stewart from “The Web of Fear”, now promoted to Brigadier. The Brigadier is now running UNIT – that’s United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. UNIT themselves are investigating Vaughn and IE, and the Brigadier enlists the Doctor’s help.

Meanwhile, Zoe and Isobel have become bored waiting for the Doctor. They go to IE to find them, and Zoe ends up giving the computer in reception a stroke. The two girls are captured and put on ice by Packer, Vaughn’s security chief. When they return to Isobel’s flat, Jamie and the Doctor learn that the girls have gone to IE, and stage a rescue operation, after another encounter with Vaughn and Packer. With the help of a UNIT helicopter they escape. Vaughn isn’t daunted, as he has hypnotic control over General Rutlidge, who has the power to order the Brigadier to cease the UNIT operation. This doesn’t stop the Doctor, since together with Jamie he takes a canoe along the London sewers in order to gain secret entry to the IE warehouse. It is in the sewers that they catch their first sight of a Cyberman being activated. Phew!

You’ve probably noticed that the first Cyberman in the story doesn’t appear until the last few seconds of the 4^th episode – halfway through the story. Considering that this is a story which provided us with many of our archetypal images of classic series Cybermen you’d think that this is a drawback. And you’d be wrong to think so. Without any word of a lie, I am thoroughly enjoying this story so far. There’s so much to enjoy here, after all.

There’s Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughan for a start. He hasn’t been in the show since the previous epic length story, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” where he brilliantly played the dastardly Mavic Chen. In a totally different way, Vaughn is every bit as good a villain as Chen, and that’s saying something. There are some actors who bring something special to the show in every story they appear – I think of the great Philip Madoc, of course, and of the Bernards – Kay, Horsfall and Archard - and Kevin Stoney firmly belongs within this illustrious band. A quick google tells me that he makes a third and final appearance in the next cyberman story – “Revenge of the Cybermen” from Tom Baker’s first season. Vaughn, in some ways, is a close cousin of Chen. Chen, if you remember, betrayed his race while allying himself to the Daleks, believing that he would be able to double cross them when the time came, never expecting them to double cross him. Vaughn has already announced his plan to use his allies to conquer Earth, and then use the machine that Professor Watkins is in the process of perfecting to dispose of them. His baiting of the brutish Packer all adds to the texture of the show, and the depth of his characterization.

Actually, I say brutish, for on the page, that’s what Packer is. Yet on screen there’s something else going on here, I think. Hacker is played by Peter Halliday, and while being in no way puny, he isn’t the huge dominating physical thug that you might have expected, And yet it still worked. It took me a while to work out why, and then it struck me – rather than being the school bully himself, Packer is actually the school bully’s crony. I don’t know if you ever used to watch Grange Hill, but if you did you’d maybe remember the most noteworthy of all the bullies, one ‘Gripper’ Stebson. Gripper always had a couple of weasel faced individuals hanging around him. That’s who Packer is, and that’s just how Peter Halliday is playing him. A brainless thug wouldn’t care about his boss double crossing the Cybermen, and he wouldn’t are about Unit’s response to firing at their helicopter, while Packer does. Nice work, in a show which really isn’t short on acting quality.

This is the first appearance of UNIT in the show, and it’s pretty different from what we came to know and love in the Jon Pertwee era. In Jon Pertwee’s time, UNIT was always more about the Task force than the Intelligence. This is the opposite. The Brigadier first appears in a very hi tech control room inside what looks like a Lockheed Hercules transport plane, and UNIT have clearly been doing their homework in gathering information and intelligence on Vaughn. In fact, I found myself asking – what happens to the Brig between this story and Spearhead from Space to make him lose his imagination and so much of his effectiveness? Come to think of it, what the hell happened to the control room on the Hercules too? Someone should look in the Brig’s suspiciously large garage, me thinks.

In many ways the experience of watching this is uncannily reminiscent of watching a Jon Pertwee story – hardly surprising what with UNIT, and being set on contemporary Earth, I suppose. But there’s the whole tone of it as well. It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, but I don’t necessarily think that this is the kind of story that plays to Patrick Troughton’s strengths. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he is as good in the part as ever, only after the first couple of episodes I can’t help starting to get the feeling that the Doctor himself is getting lost in the story. Maybe it’s just that there’s so many goodies competing for your attention – Kevin Stoney’s masterclass in acting villainy, UNIT, the nagging doubt in your mind that maybe the Cybermen really aren’t going to ever make an appearance at all.  Well, we’ll see.

I mentioned that the first appearance of an actual Cyberman didn’t happen until right at the last gasp of episode 4. That’s true, but this doesn’t take account of the Cyber Planner. Now, in “The Wheel In Space” you might recall that the Cybermen were not led by a Cyber Controller with a big head and no accordion on his chest, but by a cyber controller made, so it seemed, out of a water balloon and half a dozen wire coat hangers. Now the cyber planner in the Invasion is at least a little more impressive, and housed behind a sliding door in Vaughn’s office. I don’t know, though, for me having the Cybermen led by this machine makes them more and more like dull robots – which is not how the Cybermen were conceived, I’m afraid.

What Have We Learned?

The Colonel has been promoted

UNIT seems to have a lot of money to play with in the 60s – and must have been the victim of severe government funding cutbacks by the time that Jon Pertwee first darkened their doors. 

45: The Mind Robber

Before Watching

I’ve mentioned this particular stories several times before, so you won’t be surprised to see me say that I’m pretty familiar with it even before we start our critical viewing. Familiar? Who am I kidding? I bloody love this story. I can’t turn off the voice of the 4 year old me who watched entranced as the Doctor and Jamie (mark 2) taunted Zoe before pulling her out of what I thought was a giant drum, but actually turned out to be a jar. So in a way this review is going to be self-defeating, since I can’t necessarily be critical of the story, in the proper sense of the world. Actually, that’s probably not too bad a thing for me. I’d hate it if I could ever watch this story and be dismissive or blasé about it.

After Watching

Right, a quick question. How much do I love “The Mind Robber”. Answer – well, if it helps, I planned to do what I usually do, two episodes in one evening. After episode 2 I just kept on watching until I’d sat through all five, then for good measure I followed it up with the documentary on the making of the story which is one of the special features on the DVD. A while ago, when I was reviewing “The Web of Fear” in Season Five, I made the point that the official BBC DVD is disappointing in the lack of special features. The other side of the coin is that I probably wouldn’t have been complaining at all if the usual official BBC DVDs didn’t provide you with some very nice goodies. In this case it was a documentary called “The Fact of Fiction”,  all about the making of “The Mind Robber” which lasted slightly more than half an hour.

Right then, the genesis of the story is that producer Peter Bryant and Story Editor Derrick Sherwin really wanted Peter Ling to write for Doctor Who. For the uninitiated, Peter Ling was the co-creator of the long running and inexplicably popular ITV soap opera, Crossroads. Given a virtual free hand, Peter Ling really wanted to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, which can be seen in the number of sources that he drew upon for “The Mind Robber”. Now, as we saw with the last story, the production team du jour had a problem with Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s “The Dominators” which was the previous story we reviewed. The decision was made to cut it from 6 episodes to 5. An extra episode had to be added to “The Mind Robber” – yet Peter Ling’s story wouldn’t stretch to 5 episodes. Thank heavens they made the decision for Derrick Sherwin to write a whole new episode 1, after which Peter Ling’s story would begin. If they’d tried to pad the action of “The Mind Robber” as it was to fill five episodes I think it would have had a hugely detrimental effect to the story. So Derrick Sherwin had to write, in effect, a 1 episode story, which could use no new sets, and no actors other than the regular cast. Does that sound familiar? To me this sounds very like the brief under which “The Edge of Destruction” was produced in season one. To be fair, in the end, they did utilize some robot costumes which had been made for an episode of “Out of the Unknown” and painted a sort of primrose yellow to appear white when filmed.

Under the circumstances the episode that Derrick Sherwin then wrote is a masterpiece, and a perfect example of the way you can make limitations in terms of budget actually work in your favour. The cliffhanger at the end of “The Dominators” saw the TARDIS in the path of a volcanic lava flow. Unable to take off properly due to continuing fluid link problems, the Doctor uses the emergency procedures which take the TARDIS outside of normal reality. Some very weird things begin happening. While the Doctor is in the TARDIS’ power room, first Jamie sees his native Scotland on the scanner, at the same time as hearing some rather stirring bagpipe music. No cliché there then. (Sorry. I do honestly love this episode, and the whole story). When Zoe tells him she can’t see it and it’s not real, then Jamie goes off to see the Doctor, and she sees a vision of her home city. In the end the lure of the image is too strong, and Zoe wanders out of the TARDIS into a white void. Jamie goes to look for her, and the pair of them become stranded. When the Doctor realizes what has happened he does not follow immediately, but sits down in a chair, and battles with the mind that is providing these visions. Meanwhile, out in the void Jamie and Zoe find themselves surrounded by strange white robots. The Doctor calls them with his mind, and they walk slowly, tortuously slowly back towards the TARDIS. When they’re a few steps away he rushes out, and drags them back in. This represents possibly the first moment we’ve had time to draw breath, but it proves wrong to do so. Something is drastically wrong with the TARDIS, and suddenly it shatters, leaving the Doctor nowhere to be seen, and Jamie and Zoe clinging helplessly to the TARDIS console as it whirls off into the endless void.

What a start to the story. Although of course it isn’t really a start to the story, since it is so different in style from what will come afterwards. At the start of episode 2 there isn’t really an explanation of how the travelers arrive safely in the forest of words, but then in a way I suppose that it the story saying – Look, it’s surreal. Anything can happen, so deal with it. Right?! – The next part of the story – Peter Ling’s original beginning for the story, has the Doctor and companions initially split up, and having to make their way through what turns out to be a maze, solving various puzzles as they go, and paying the price for failure if they don’t. In the commentary on the DVD all the principal actors who contributed, along with director David Maloney commented on how much they enjoyed working on the story – and how much Patrick Troughton himself enjoyed it – and it seems to be one of those happy production where everyone involved seems inspired to be at their most creative. So, when Frazer Hines was quarantined for a week or so of precious shooting time when he contracted chicken pox, this was actually incorporated into the storyline. A group of lifesized toy soldiers (one of whom was played by Ian Hines, Frazer’s brother incidentally) clank around through most of the episodes, and Jamie goes to attack one, whereupon he is shot, which turns him into a cardboard cutout. The Doctor finds him, and sees that his face has been removed, and he has to choose from sets of eyes, mouths and noses to reassemble it. He gets it wrong, and voila, Jamie can be played for a couple of episodes by actor Hamish Wilson until Frazer Hines is allowed back on set. This looks, and feels as if it has always been supposed to be part of the story.

It’s probably time for me to start drawing some comparisons with “The Celestial Toymaker” from season 3. The stories are similar in the way that the Doctor and companions are taken into a place where the normal laws of causality do not apply, and the master of the domain can shape and alter reality in any way that he chooses. They are similar in the way that various challenges have to be met. So why does “The Mind Robber” work so much better than “The Celestial Toymaker?”. Partly it helps that the travelers have to do so much figuring things out for themselves as they go along – there is no big ninny in an Aladdin costume setting rules, and telling them that their next challenge is going to be even harder than their last etc. etc. What is happening is made clear from episode one of TCT, which works against it, while it takes much longer for it to become clear exactly what is going on and what is at stake in TMR. The level of menace, while still being very much on the level of fantasy, is much greater in this later story, and ‘real’ fictional figures – Gulliver – Rapunzel – The Minotaur and Medusa are quite cleverly woven into it. Mind you, so are a couple of ‘real life’ human beings in Blackbeard and Cyrano de Bergerac, but even that is legitimate when you consider how real lives can become fictionalized over the passage of time.

The story provides a succession of memorable images. The TARDIS console, spinning off into oblivion (while at the same time providing an excellent view of Ms. Padbury’s posterior which has been rightly praised over the years by far better authorities on the subject than me) – The forest of words being revealed to be the pages of a book – the white robots making Jamie and Zoe into fictional characters by squashing them into the pieces of a book. So if a couple of ideas in the script aren’t as well realized as we maybe would have liked – the forest of words, for example, where the scene in the studio in which the characters play the scenes in no way matches the from the top view, then that’s something I find it pretty easy to overlook.

The ending has been criticized by a number of commentators for not really living up to what has gone before. Personally I think it works perfectly well. During the story at odd times we have seen what appears to be the controller of the Land of Fiction, a human being calling himself the Master. (The Time Lord Master, originally played by Roger Delgado, is no connection with this Master, and it will be a couple of seasons before we meet him for the first time.) It turns out that the Master is just a puppet of a supercomputer- whose most obvious part rather resembles the Conscience Machine from “The Keys of Marinus” – a large transparent polyhedron with lots of technical gubbins inside it. The Doctor, having worked his way into the Master’s Lair, enters into a kind of storytelling duel, for the Master sees the Doctor as someone who can take over, and thus enable him to be set free. Not what the computer wants, mind you, for the computer wants to use the Doctor to break free, and make all living creatures part of its domain. Alright, alright, you’ve heard worse than that in the past. Of course, the Doctor is having to work under a handicap, namely, if he mentions himself, then he automatically loses, since he will be making himself into a fictional character. A little too metaphysical? But that’s the genius of this story – you don’t have to take it on that level, but it’s there if you want to. During the battle, the White robots are ordered to attack and destroy, and they end up doing just that to the computer.

Jamie and Zoe are all for leaving the Master where they found him, but the Doctor intercedes for him, and as it is, everything that the computer has done is going to be undone anyway, which allows us to watch the destruction of the TARDIS being reversed. Which brings me to one other link between this story and “The Celestial Toymaker”. One of the more effective features of that story is Peter Stevens’ overgrown schoolboy Cyril, so clearly based on Billy Bunter that Frank Richards’ estate did allegedly complain to the BBC. Now, in the documentary, Peter Ling himself said that he had actually based the character of the Master on Frank Richards! At one point the Master reveals that he has written a series of adventure stories for the Ensign boys’ magazine about Captain Jack Harkaway (hmm – who does that name remind me of?) Actually it was Frank Richards himself who did this.

So, anything more I need to mention? Well, actually, yes. It’s a beautifully acted story, with honours going to Emrys Jones, a very well respected actor of the 40s and 50s, as The Master. We can also applaud a strong performance from Bernard Horsfall as Lemuel Gulliver. All of Gulliver’s lines were actually taken from Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and Horsfall imbues them with great dignity and a real sense of the period in which they were written. No wonder this wasn’t the only Doctor Who story he’d appear in. David Maloney did say that there was a three year rule – that guest star’s had to wait three years between reappearences, so he’d cast Bernard Horsfall in shows three years apart, but that he’d had special dispensation to use him as a Time Lord in “The War Games” , which we’ll come to in a few weeks’ time.

So let’s return to our starting point. I bloody love the “Mind Robber”, and now, having watched it as part of an ongoing series, if anything I love it even more. Season five, while not devoid of its highlights, presented us with a show which was in serious danger of becoming very samey. Then along comes “The Mind Robber” as weird, imaginative and downright wonderful as anything the show has given us before, while at the same time being completely different. There wasn’t much wrong with a show that could deliver up anything like this. Although the fact that Peter Ling never write for the show again is a shame. A shame if he was asked but never had the time, and shame on the show if he was never asked.

What Have We Learned

Anyone calling himself The Master is usually up to no good.

Fiction is important. It matters. 

44: The Dominators

Before Watching

Aliens with high round shoulders and pudding bowl haircuts. Ridiculous looking blocky robots called Quarks who were never going to catch on even if you’d given away a gallon petrol with each one. That’s about all the Dominators means to me right at this moment. Oh, alright, I know that its reputation really isn’t all that sweet.

I also know that Norman Ashby, the credited writer of the series, is a pseudonym for the writing team of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who scripted one pretty good, and one great story in Season 5. Now, Terry Nation wrote other stories for Doctor Who than his Dalek stories, but these have never been anything like as popular. So I shall be interested to see whether this Haisman and Lincoln non-Yeti story has value in its own right, and has just not been that well regarded because it’s a departure from what they’ve done before.

After Watching

Hmmm. There’s some odd things in this story. Reading about it since watching it I discovered that it was cut short from 6 to 5 episodes, and Haisman and Lincoln were unhappy about it – and also there were rights issues with the Quarks I believe. Like anyone would be interesting in merchandising those! So it’s probably not unfair to say that this was a production carried out under something of a cloud – sadly the Haisman and Lincoln partnership never went on to write for the show again.

On the positive side this was not another base under siege. In fact, if anything, it’s the baddies, the Dominators, whose base is under siege in the last episode. The story, when you boil it down to essentials, is rather simple, and you can see why it was decided to cut it to 5 episodes. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Dulkis, a planet of peace loving humanoids. At the same time a ship belonging to the fleet of the Dominators, a harsh and arrogant race, also lands on Dulkis. The craft needs desperately to refuel. The island it lands on is the site of the Dulcians’ nuclear test. The ship almost immediately absorbs all of the island’s radioactivity. The Dominators’ plan is to drill into the planet where the crust is thinnest, set off a radiation seed device, and refuel on the radiation created through the destruction of the planet. The pacifist Dulcians will be killed when their planet is destroyed.

To some extent we’re treading familiar ground here. Once again we confront the issue of pacifism, and the Dulcians are so pacific that they make the Thals look like a gang of drunk football supporters whose manhood has just been called into question.  The strange minidresses that the men wear only serve to heighten this feeling, which was probably intentional on the designer’s part. I can’t help liking the Dominators’ costumes, though. You’re not quite sure whether it’s just the uniform that they are wearing, or whether their heads really do begin halfway down their chests. Actually, while we’re on the subject of the Dominators themselves, there’s something quite clever going on with them in this show. It’s quite common for a race of megalomaniac aliens bent on domination to be all the same in terms of attitude and behaviour. In this story there are just the two Dominators, Rago the Navigator, and his subordinate, Toba. To put it bluntly, Rago and Toba do not get on at all. Toba has a sadistic streak, and wants nothing more to go around and destroy every Dulcian he can find. This really annoys Rago, who knows how low they are on energy, and the tension and conflict between the two of them does add another level of interest to the story – and this is sorely needed too. Full marks to David Hunter, sorry, Ronald Allen who plays Rago, and Kenneth Ives who plays Toba.

As I said, though, there are some strange things in this story. Which brings me to the Quarks. The Quarks are essentially robots. They’re about four foot tall, no more than that, with two blocky legs, a body like a mini fridge, two arms which are a bit like table legs and which fold out from the body, and a head which is a bit like a ball with a few spikes sticking out of it on top, and on each of the 4 sides. Now, look, for all I know the designers had a budget of about tuppence ha’penny, and did well to come up with what they did. But I can’t see that anyone could think that these robots could ever have the same appeal that the Daleks had. Now, there’s no shame in that – successes like the Daleks – something that strikes such an instant chord with the viewing public – are very rare, and if one turns up during the life of a series then it’s doing well. But then it seems strange that, bearing in mind the limitations of their appearance, the production team seems to have gone out of their way with the choice of voice they have given the Quarks. On the one hand, I’ll give them a couple of brownie points for eschewing the traditional monotonous computer voices you might expect. On the other hand, and I’m not exaggerating this for comic effect, I cannot understand a word that they say in the high pitched tone that they use. Now, in my book, that’s a serious drawback. Still, at least the Quarks do have some serious firepower.

So far though, we have been able to say a mixture of positive and not so positive things about the story. If we’re going to be honest, though, we have to say, or I have to say at least, that the Producer Peter Bryant was probably dead right when he cut the story by an episode because it just wasn’t working. If we examine some of the elements which contribute to the overall story, the exploration of the Dulcians’ pacifism is rather lumpen and heavyhanded when set alongside the way that pacifism is considered in the writers’ own “The Abominable Snowmen”. I don’t know if we’re actually being invited by the writers to feel that it will serve the Dulcians right if their planet gets blown up, but that’s pretty much the impression I got from it.

If a story has enough action, of the right sort, carried out with enough style and panache, then script flaws become far less important. This is one of the failings of “the Dominators”. Yes there’s a bit of toing and froing between the Island of Death and the Capital City, but we’re on pretty much famine rations of action for the first 3 and a half episodes.

It’s not as if this is not a story that didn’t have potential. I for one found the couple of hints we had about the civilization/society that produced the Dominators, and feel that there would have been scope for us to learn a little more, which would have added some much needed depth to the story. As it is though it’s a bit of a waste of two good performers who play them.

Looking at the regulars, then, this is Zoe’s first story as a full-fledged companion, and it’s one of those instances of a story not really knowing what to do with one of the companions. There’s one or two good scenes for her – when she seems completely disinterested by the prospect of exploring with Jamie and the Doctor in episode one, and when the Doctor pricks her pomposity in the Dominator’s ship – which incidentally has rather nicely realized interiors, and certainly competently produced model shots when it takes off. Jamie, though, is pretty well foregrounded as he gets to escape from the quarks more than once, to destroy quarks, and to supply the idea that will finally foil the Dominators’ plans.

Well, there it is, anyway. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to put your finger on why a story doesn’t work very well. Sometimes it isn’t. The script of “The Dominators” wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst we’ve seen by a long chalk. The cast try their best with what they’ve been given, and nobody turns in what I could point to as a bad performance. The model work is decent, and sets and interiors pretty good in my opinion. Is it, I wonder, one of those stories which would have a better reputation if it was only available in recon. On reflection, I doubt it. Some stories just aren’t all that good, and this was one of them.

What Have We Learned?

The Quarks probably sound great . . . if you’re a dog. Otherwise they’re unintelligible.

If you’re taking people on a tours, any place called anything like The Island Of Death is probably one to avoid