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.

37: Tomb Of the Cybermen

Before Watching

Well, for once, this isn’t actually a before watching at all. I’d better explain that. Before this experiment started, last summer in fact, I found out that the Watch digital channel was showing old episodes of classic Who, and, joy of joys, one Saturday they were screening the Tomb of the Cybermen in its entirety. I set the Tivo box to record it, and a couple of days later, when the family were all off doing whatever it was they were doing, I watched it all.

The danger with watching what you have always anticipated to be a classic, without actually having seen any of it before, is that you find all your illusions are shattered, and that actually, it maybe isn’t all that much to write home about. The thing is, though, this wasn’t a critical viewing, like the way I’ve approached all of the 30+ stories I’ve reviewed so far. This was just for pure pleasure, and while I admit that the story certainly isn’t without its flaws, I sat there with a big silly grin all over my silly old face for the whole two hours.

Still, it’s not good me pretending that this is a first time watch, or even a first time for ages watch, as is going to happen when we get to Pertwee, Baker and Davison. So if this turns out to be a more critical, in the correct sense of the word, well, I can only apologise.

After Watching

You can’t really fault the start of the first episode. The location shots, albeit taken in a quarry by the look of things, make Telos look appropriately bleak and inhospitable. In general the design work on this story, and the look of the whole thing is pretty impressive, bar for a couple of things which I shall come to in due course.

So, our heroes have landed on Telos at the same time as an Earth Archaeological expedition, searching for the Tombs of the Cybermen. The members of the expedition are worth spending a few moments discussing. The first thing I noticed, and I don’t like being critical of actors and actresses, but I have to say that in my opinion, the poor devil who plays Hopper, the American accented captain of the Earth ship, gives probably the worst acting performance I’ve yet to see in the course of writing this blog. I’m sorry, but he’s absolutely dreadful – so wooden you practically want to give him a wipeover with Mr. Sheen every time he opens his trap.

Well, Hopper isn’t the most important character by a long chalk, and so if his was the only jarring note, we could probably gloss over it. But, and I’m fully aware that I’m not the first person to make this point, we do need to look at some of the claims of racism which have been levelled at this story in the past. The man who has provided the funds for the archaeological expedition, Eric Klieg, aided and abetted by a lady called Kaftan, is the chief human villain of the piece. Klieg is a suitably foreign sounding name, especially when compared with the comfortably anglo-saxon names of most of the other expedition members. It’s difficult to tell precisely in monochrome, but he certainly appears to have a Mediterranean complexion. Kaftan is a likewise exotic name, and just in case we miss the point, it’s fairly clear that Shirley Cooklin, the actress playing her, has had what appears to be fake tan smeared all over her face. Very cheap fake tan as well, judging by the clearly visible streaks, to which my eye is irresistibly drawn every time she is shown in close up. When we looked at the last story, “”The Evil of the Daleks, one jarring note was the presence of Kemel, Maxtible’s mute Turkish servant. Kaftan too has a huge mute servant, Toberman, played by black actor Roy Stewart.

I want to defend the show, I really, really do. I want to say that look, this was the 1960s, and so you can’t blame the show for making the kind of crass, lazy stereotyping which other shows of the same time went in for. But I can’t. This isn’t a defence, not when you consider why it is that people value Doctor Who as a show so much. The whole point is that it ISN’T like other shows. I don’t think that the show is DELIBERATELY following a racist agenda either here or in “TheEvil of the Daleks”. But I’m very disappointed that nobody apparently stopped to consider just what message using Kemel and Toberman in this way did send out, intentional or not.

Wrenching myself back to the review then, Troughton’s Doctor is probably the most mischievous and quietly anarchic of all of the Doctors, apart, possibly from Sylvester McCoy’s 7^th Doctor, and here he is at his most mischievous and delightfully irresponsible. Actually, the more I watch of Patrick Troughton, the more I’m drawn to the conclusion that some of the best features of McCoy’s Doctor were those that made him like Troughton, at times. He pretty much aids and abets the party in getting into the tombs, and reanimating the Cybermen, and you suspect that this is motivated by a sense of curiosity as much as anything else. In fact, this is actually a terrific story for Patrick Troughton. He acts rings around all of the guest stars playing the human characters, which isn’t difficult considering the rich vein of cardboard that Gerry Davis has mined for their characteristation. George Pastell as Klieg and Shirley Cooklin as Kaftan, for example are very one-dimensional. It’s a bit of a shame that they are so clearly going to be the human villains of the piece that you know it within a minute or two of each one opening their mouths. Going back to Patrick Troughton, he gets a very touching scene with Victoria. It’s a plus point for the story that it acknowledges that Victoria had to join the crew after her father died saving the Doctor in the end of the previous story, The Evil of the Daleks. This was actually the end of the previous season, and so it would be very easy to decide that there’s no need to make any reference to the circumstances under which she joined the crew now. I think it’s a strength of the show that this story does, and it adds just a little more light and shade. As did Hartnell before him, Troughton excels at these little moments of tenderness and pathos, discussing, as he does, the fact that he too has family who now ‘sleep in his memory’ most of the time. Poetry, that. Actually this is a good story for Deborah Watling’s Victoria too. In her scenes with Kaftan she gets to show that she’s made of stern enough stuff to be worth her place on the crew.

As I have already said, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this. But. . . if I engage my critical faculties there are a few observations I can make. Firstly, barring the uneven level of performances of some of the guest stars, it’s pretty tense, exciting and enjoyable right up to the point when the Cybermen reanimate and break out of their tombs. This doesn’t look bad now, but in the mid 60s it must have seemed state of the art. However, once the Cybermen come out of their tombs, well, for me this is where the story runs out of steam somewhat. There’s the usual faffing about, threatening to convert the humans into Cybermen but not getting on with it and doing so which we’ve come to expect in previous Cybermen stories – although to be fair at one point they do give Toberman a rather effective pair of cyber arms. At one point they even go back into their tombs – which does rather beg the question why they bothered getting out of them in the first place.

One difference between this and its two cyberman predecessors is that this is the first time we see a human traitor trying to form an alliance with the Cybermen. We’ve had this happen with the Daleks before – and believe me it will happen again, and again . . . – but not the Cybermen. Klieg and Kaftan belong to the Brotherhood of Logicians, who have reached the far from logical conclusion that the emotionless Cybermen will be so grateful for their release that they will form an alliance with them.

Another development from the previous two Cybermen stories is that for the first time we get to meet the Cyber Controller. We know that this is the Controller, partly because he tells us so, and partly because he looks so different from the others. He doesn’t have the usual piano accordion on his chest, and he has a large painted dome on top of his head in which you can see his brain. Now, a slight digression here. The Cyber Controller in this, and Colin Baker’s “Attack of the Cybermen” was played by an actor called Michael Kilgarriff. Michael Kilgarriff also played the robot in Tom Baker’s first story “Robot”. Michael Kilgarriff was a sometime client of the company that my Mum worked for in South Ealing in the mid-late 80s. She said that he was a very large man, and she found him very, and I quote, ‘actorly’, and rather gruff and brusque. One day, after much urging from my younger brother, she explained to him that we were massive fans of Doctor Who, and would it be possible for him to autograph something for my brother? (I may be wrong, but I think this might have been his copy of the David Banks Cyberman book) A complete change came over the man immediately – he was all smiles, and absolutely delighted to provide the autograph. So obviously a man who had some affection for his time on the show, and delighted to be approached about it.

So, it isn’t the greatest Doctor Who story, and it certainly doesn’t do to analyse it too much. The story really doesn’t go very far, and the effect of Toberman throwing the cyber controller – who by this time has been replaced by a dummy in a suit – really isn’t good. But let your inner child out for a couple of hours, while you’re watching it, and like me, you’ll probably have a big silly grin all over your own face too.

What Have We Learned?

Let sleeping Cybermen lie

The Brotherhood of Logicians are a bit dull

Season 4

Without doubt the most momentous season since the first. If nothing else, the Doctor’s regeneration at the end of “The Tenth Planet” guaranteed that this season would remain one of the most important in the whole run of classic Who. Put simply, if Patrick Troughton hadn’t pulled off the Doctor in such spectacular fashion, then it could have meant the end of the show. It wasn’t just the Doctor who regenerated and changed, though. The fourth series saw an end to the Historicals – and let’s not forget that my own top rated Hartnell serials were Historicals. It saw the first two Dalek stories to be scripted by anyone other than Terry Nation – and as a result these two are actually the highest rated of all the incomplete stories.Season 4 saw the introduction of, and refinement of the Cybermen, who would feature in a further three Troughton stories, and become the series’ second most enduring monsters after the Daleks.

What I’ve personally seen in this series is the start of the show becoming something I recognize as Doctor Who from my childhood. If we take “The Faceless Ones” for instance there’s a lot that I recognize in this show. Although it is just glimpses at the moment. In this season there is no consistent style which has yet emerged, giving it an almost schizophrenic quality. Both Daleks stories were highlights, and extremely enjoyable. I also enjoyed The Faceless Ones very much, the Moonbase and The Macra Terror, even though the last two of those are flawed pieces of work in some ways.

As I said, though, it’s Patrick Troughton who has pulled the season through. The development his Doctor goes through during the season is every bit as deep rooted as the development of Hartnell’s Doctor between An Unearthly Child and The Dalek Invasion of Earth.  Jamie’s relationship with the Doctor, especially from The Faceless Ones onwards, has become every bit as interesting and as crucial to the workings of the show as Hartnell’s with Ian and especially Barbara. Let’s have a look at the ratings : -

Season 4

Mighty 200 ratings/ 2014 DWM Poll ratings

The Evil of the Daleks – 18/34

Power of the Daleks – 21/19

The Tenth Planet – 55/85

The Moonbase – 112/113

The Faceless Ones – 122/142

The Macra Terror – 137/150

The Highlanders – 145/166

The Smugglers – 159/194

The Underwater Menace – 194/224

My Ratings

Evil of the Daleks

Power of the Daleks

The Faceless Ones

The Moonbase

The Tenth Planet

The Macra Terror

The Smugglers

The Underwater Menace

The Highlanders

So no arguments from me about the quality of both Dalek stories, and there is literally nothing to choose between them. I really liked “The Faceless Ones”, hence its high rating. Personally I would rather watch “The Moonbase”, with two animated episodes, than “The Tenth Planet” with one animated episode. “The Macra Terror” had to come next because it was a really interesting idea – not perfectly realized, but nonetheless one which kept me interested. “The Smugglers” came next for me, a rip roaring, unashamedly boy’s own adventure type story with just enough humour to keep me interested. As regards the last two, well, “The Highlanders” was a better story in pretty much every way – yet if I was forced to choose between them which one I’d rather watch again, it would be “The Underwater Menace” every time. 

36: The Evil of the Daleks

Before Watching

This is one of the most celebrated of all the lost Troughton stories, one of the reasons being that it was the story which saw the final end of the Daleks – well, for five years anyway. What do I expect? Well, part of the trouble is I do remember the synopsis of this one quite well. It dovetails nicely with the Faceless Ones, since the TARDIS was stolen at the end of the last episode. I can remember that it was stolen by a guy who invented a time machine – no honestly – back in Victorian times, and is in league with the Daleks since his daughter, Victoria, has been taken as a hostage to ensure his cooperation. The Doctor ends up going to Skaro, injecting, or infecting Daleks with the Human Factor, and thus starting a civil war, in which the Dalek city, and the Emperor Dalek are destroyed. Obviously made an impression on me when I first read the synopsis. So the real interest for me is in how well it’s done. David Whitaker set a hell of a high standard for a Dalek story with The Power of the Daleks, and so he has a lot to live up to.

After Watching

There’s a remarkable lack of preamble at the start of this story which is really all to the good. We get a very brief recap reminding us that the TARDIS has been stolen from Gatwick, and then our heroes, the dream team of Troughton and Hines are off on its trail.

The plot, even when you boil it down to essentials is rather complex. The Doctor and Jamie trace the TARDIS to one Edward Waterfield, a dealer in Victoriana. The stock in his store seems remarkably new. When Jamie suggests that maybe he has just popped back in time to pick up his stock, he is poo poohed by the Doctor, and yet it turns out to be the correct explanation.

Waterfield, who has been bankrolled by eccentric, and extravagantly bearded industrialist Theodore Maxtible, has invented a method of time travel using static electricity. I didn’t really understand the explanation, but it’s all done with mirrors apparently. The first time that they wired it up and fired it up, flash, bang wallop, and an army of Daleks came out of it. The Daleks immediately took Waterfield’s daughter, Victoria, hostage, as you do, and insisted that Waterfield use his machine to bring them the TARDIS and the Doctor.

Waterfield arranges a meeting with the Doctor and Jamie in 1966, then gases them, and transports them back in time to Maxtible’s mansion. The Daleks then explain that they are sick and tired of losing to the humans on penalties after extra time, and so they want the Doctor to isolate what they call ‘the human factor’ , and inject it into Daleks to give them whatever it is that makes human beings able to defeat them. The Doctor uses Jamie to do this, and creates some very childlike Daleks who become his friends, and learn to question orders.

At this point the Daleks, along with the carpet chewing Maxtible, Victoria, the Turkish Servant Kemel, Waterfield and Jamie all are transported to Skaro, where the Doctor gets to meet the Emperor Dalek. The Doctor informs the Emperor that he has created Daleks who question orders, who will teach other Daleks to question orders, and this way he will eventually be overthrown, to which the Emperor gleefully replies that the real purpose of the experiment was to isolate the Dalek factor, and spread this to humans. It is tested on Maxtible who does indeed become a human Dalek – and the Doctor, who, not being human, doesn’t. He replaces the Dalek factor with his own phials of the human factor and begins converting Daleks. A civil war soon ensues in which Skaro, the Emperor and Maxtible are all seemingly destroyed – although it is hinted at that one Dalek may have survived. Edward Waterfield redeems himself by saving the Doctor’s life at the expense of his own, and thus the Doctor takes Victoria on board the TARDIS as his newest companion.

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Human factor – Dalek factor – Krypton Factor – X – Factor - Max Factor - it all sounds like complete hokum and it is. Yet this story is such an embarrassment of riches that you never stop to think that. It’s one of the great tragedies of the wipings that only one episode of this story actually exists. Episode 2 is not even the best episode of the story, and yet it looks cracking. I could weep when I think that episodes 6 and 7 could have survived instead of some of those that actually made it.

What’s so great about “The Evil of the Daleks”, then?

The use of three settings/time periods. The story starts in the present day (20^th July, 1966 to be precise.)Now, unlike The War Machines, TEOTD isn’t trying to be especially trendy and ‘swinging’ and as a result the scenes with Jamie and the Doctor holding a council of war in a coffee bar look totally authentic, as does Waterfield’s antique shop. We know that Waterfield isn’t what he seems right from the start because he has some rather impressive Victorian sideburns – almost into mutton chop whisker territory.

Then the action switches to Maxtible’s mansion, which is highly impressive with all of its acres of wood paneling, its heavy carpets and high neo-gothic time cabinet. The state of the art Victorian laboratory with all the beautifully shaped test tubes and equipment that Maxtible shows to the Doctor is a joy too.

Finally we get to make our first return trip to Skaro since The Daleks. The Dalek city is different here, or rather, it looks more developed. There’s still the corridors and assymetrical doors, but now long pathways, and the Emperor’s room is very arresting.

The Performances: Marius Goring, as Theodore Maxtible wasn’t the first big name to appear in Doctor Who, but he was certainly a real triumph for the casting director. For one thing he so looks the part. There’s a famous photo of Isambard Kingdom of Brunel, with a cigar in his mouth and a top hat on his head, standing by the chains of the great eastern, and I’m sure that Maxtible has the exact same amount of cigar sticking out of his mouth in exactly the same angle as Brunel’s in a huge number of the telesnaps. For me it’s a well-judged performance in that Maxtible doesn’t appear as mad, or callous and indifferent to the plight of fellow human beings at the start, you come to realize these things. Maxtible’s continued belief that the Daleks will show him the method to turn base metals into gold despite all the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary isn’t necessarily unbelievable either, and in fact has echoes of Mavic Chen from The Daleks’ Master Plan. I don’t know so much about the Dalekified Maxtible in the last episode though. You see, it doesn’t really matter how you try to imitate a Dalek – even if you don’t stick your arm out in front of you, you will always sound like a kid in a playground pretending to be a Dalek. So I didn’t find that to be as effective as it might have been.

John Bailey put in a lovely turn as Edward Waterfield. At first the man seems to be just a nasty, cold, two bit villain, but once he gets the Doctor back to Maxtible his human side starts to come through. It’s clever the way that, of the pair, Maxtible is revealed to be the real villain of the piece, while Waterfield, it turns out, is just a misguided scientist/inventor (one of many in classic Doctor Who) who is in an impossible situation, and just trying to do whatever he can to save his daughter. It’s a tribute to John Bailey’s acting skill that his jumping in front of a Dalek gun to save the Doctor was completely believable, and now seemed to be completely in character.

Deborah Watling, as Victoria, featured a surprisingly small amount considering that this was her debut story, so it was difficult to judge what she brought to the table. In fact, for the middle part of the story it’s Jo Rowbottom’s spirited maid, Mollie, who looks the most likely candidate in the next companion stakes.

With all of this also on offer, the fact is that this is the Doctor and Jamie’s story. The Highlander’s faith in the Doctor seems to have been totally destroyed when he overhears the Doctor conspiring with Waterfield and Maxtible to use Jamie for the tests to extract the human factor. Yet by the end , on Skaro, the Doctor asks Jamie to trust him, and he does. It’s a brief yet perfect demonstration of the unshakeable foundations of the relationship between these two characters, and a testament to the chemistry between Patrick Troughton and Fraser Hines that they manage it so economically and so seemingly effortlessly.

Is it without flaws? No, of course not, no story is. There’s Kemel, for one thing. Now, I’m not saying that Sonny Caldinez who played him did a bad job, but I just think he’s a bad character who introduced a worrying note into the story. Kemel is a Turkish Wrestler, who works as a heavy for Maxtible. After a fight with Jamie, Jamie saves his life, and he helps him from then onwards. Here we have the only black character in the story, unable to speak, and being referred to by other characters as possessing the mind of a child, clearly only valued for his physical strength. Now, you may very well say, well come on, you can’t judge something that was made in the mid 60s by the standards we have today. Maybe not, but neither should we sweep it under the carpet. Now, I have seen the whole of Tomb of the Cyberman a couple of years ago, and we have to consider the fact that there is a very similar character, called Toberman – a huge, mute, physically strong man played by a black actor. Is it racist? Yes, I’m afraid that it is, without a corresponding black actor in a far more positive role to offset it. Am I accusing the production team of deliberate racism? Not necessarily, but at the least I think you have to admit that this is lazy stereotyping, and I wish that the team had stopped to think a little about this before going this way with Kemel.

With that admittedly jarring note, then, the story isn’t perfect. But I have to say that for 60s Doctor Who, this is about as good as it gets. The return to Skaro particularly intrigued me. On his previous visit, in The Daleks, the Doctor knew nothing about them at all. Now, on his second visit, he knows more than enough. Indeed, somewhere along the line he has also learned about the Dalek Emperor, for when they meet for the first time the Doctor says that he had wondered whether they would ever meet. A word of praise for the design of the Dalek Emperor. He looks like a Dalek, but he doesn’t. He’s considerably larger than a Dalek, and on top, instead of a single dome, he has a sort of arrangement that puts me in mind of the ice cream head of Mr. Whippy. It has an eye stalk but no gun, and I would guess that it’s immobile since it is connected to external tubes, for whatever reason. I think that this is ultimately clever design work. Nothing is actually said on screen, but this presentation of the Emperor leads you to draw conclusions about the futility of power and control. The Emperor has total control over all the Daleks, and yet when one begins to question his orders, he is totally unable to defend himself, and his power turns out to be all a façade.

All in all, even being mostly recon, The Evil of the Daleks is a tour de force, and I can completely understand why it was chosen, at the end of series 5, to be the first ever Doctor Who summer repeat.

What have we learned?

If you’re thinking about using mirrors and static electricity to build your own time machine, don’t.

The Doctor has learned that the Daleks are led by an Emperor at some time prior to this adventure.

35: The Faceless Ones

Before Watching

I know a couple of things about this one which do lead me to anticipate and speculate. I know that the co-writer is Malcolm Hulke, in his first story for Doctor Who – well, his first one to get made, anyway. He went on to pen some of the more memorable stories of the Pertwee era, giving us the Silurians and Sea Devils, for instance. I’ll be interested to see whether his story sticks out from what we’ve seen in this series so far.

That;s anticipation. As for speculation, well, it’s the last story for Ben and Polly, which leads me to wonder just how Troughton’s Doctor handles companions leaving. We’ve seen a couple of fantastic scenes from Hartnell on such occasions, but somehow I can’t see this Doctor going in for that. I imagine something much more understated, more sort of ‘off you go then’. Time will tell.

After Watching

There was much to enjoy about this particular story. You have to remember that I was at an impressionable age during Jon Pertwee’s tenure, so I’m very used to stories set on contemporary Earth, yet it strikes me that we’re 35 stories into the series now, and this is only the second, following g the trail blazed by The war Machines. While we’re making a comparison, in the War Machines the Doctor was able to effortlessly walk into the middle of the action, and be accepted seemingly by everyone in authority. This is a huge contrast to the first couple of episodes of The Faceless Ones, where absolutely nobody in authority seems prepared to listen to the Doctor at all, which is frankly far more believable.

The TARDIS materializes on the runway of Gatwick airport, giving Jamie the chance to ask about ‘yon flying beastie’. What they find out eventually is that based in a hangar, and calling themselves Chameleon Tours, a race of aliens – the Chameleons – are using the tour company as a front to carry out their dastardly purposes. They use what appears to be a Vickers VC10 airliner – incidentally one of the most beautiful airliners Britain even built. Young people are given the opportunity of taking incredibly cheap flights. During the flight, they are all miniaturized. The wings of the VC10 retract, and it becomes a spaceship, presumably a rocket. It docks with the mother ship, where the miniaturized humans are stored, ready to be transported to the Chameleons’ home planet. It transpires that the Chameleons are victims of nuclear war. As a result they need to use human beings. When processed properly, a black armband connected to both human and chameleon enables the chameleon to assume the human’s identity. The key plot point which enables the Doctor to triumph is that once the armband is removed from the human original, the Chameleon suffers what might be termed a spontaneous existence failure. The Doctor’s companions du jour – more about that later – find the originals hidden in cars in the airport car park, and use these to convince the Chameleons to leave the Earth and its humans alone. He also promises to give their scientists a few ideas about other ways to solve their problems.

Alright, written on the page in a few lines like that it doesn’t look like much. But there’s far more to making a good story than just having a good plot idea or two, although that obviously always helps. 6 parts means padding, but it also means you can afford a more leisurely storytelling approach, and sometimes this can build real mystery and suspense in the way that it does during the first couple of episodes of The Faceless Ones.

Then you’ve got performances from the guest stars. Donald Pickering is suitably chilling as the leader of the Chameleons’ Earth task force, Captain Blade. He was last seen in the trial sequences of “The Keys of Marinus”, but he’s here for the long haul in this story. Then, just as action seems to be flagging a little as the Doctor is just going round and round in circles with the Commandant in the airport, who should arrive but Bernard Kay, playing Inspector Crossland of Scotland Yard, investigating the disappearances of young people who have flown with Chameleon Tours. He’s a Doctor Who stalwart is Bernard Kay, having added quality to both The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Crusade already. Crossland finds his way onto a Chameleon Tours flight, and is actually used as the original for the leader of the Chameleons. Good choice. The list of memorable guest stars goes on. Wanda Ventham (does she ever get sick of having people begin their description of her career with the phrase ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s Mum’?) plays a terrific cameo as Jean, the Commandant’s assistant, who doesn’t have much to do, but does it extremely well. Then there’s Pauline Collins.

Right, this gets a little complicated. Ben escapes from the bureaucracy in the airport, and sneaks off to investigate Chameleon Tours’ hanger. He gets caught, and frozen, and apart from a few minutes at the end of the story, that’s Michael Craze’s time on the show either. Polly also gets caught by the Chameleons, and she is copied. This gives you the great scene where the Polly copy, asked to verify the Doctor and Jamie’s story, denies that she has ever met them. At first this looks like yet another case of a companion being brainwashed, until it becomes clearer that it’s far more sinister than that. Like Michael Craze, that’s it for Anneke Wills until the end of the story. This sidelining of Ben and Polly leaves a vacuum, into which steps Pauline Collins, playing Samantha Briggs. She does it bloomin’ well too. Sam Briggs has come to Gatwick to investigate the disappearance of her brother, who was last heard from taking a Chameleon Tours flight to Rome. Sam is sparky, feisty, bright, brave and decent – in other words perfect companion material. She also seems to have a bit of a thing for Jamie. She announces she has bought a Chameleon Tours ticket, and won’t let Jamie taker her place, despite the danger. So Jamie engages her in a bout of tonsil tennis, neatly stealing her ticket at the same time. In the end, she even forgives Jamie, and gives him another snog before they part. I can’t help thinking that maybe she was being lined up to join the crew, but for whatever reason it was decided not to go ahead with it. If Pauline Collins really was offered the chance to come on board as an assistant and turned it down, then you can’t really say that she made the wrong decision, looking at her career since, compared with many of the other companions. It’s a shame, though. She was one of the huge plus points of this story.

I already know that Jamie and the Doctor would pick up Victoria in the next story ‘Evil of the Daleks’, and when she left she would be replaced by Wendy Padbury’s Zoe Heriot, but I can’t help wondering if they ever considered having at least a few stories with just the Doctor and Jamie. The chemistry between Troughton and Hines is so obvious in this story that it would probably have worked pretty well.

Right, the leaving scene. This was, as I suspected it would be, a little low key. Not as emotional as Susan’s, not as reluctant as Ian and Barbara’s, not as congratulatory as Steven’s, and thankfully nowhere near as perfunctory as Dodo’s – well, she never had one. It’s a little low key, although it was nice to see Ben offer to stay if the Doctor needed them – he was a sailor and knew all about duty, that man.

What Have We Learned?

Jamie is a bit of a ladies’ man, and not above using his manly wiles to get what he wants.

The Doctor is always more happy to negotiate than annihilate.