29/5/10 “Cold Blood”
Preferred it when I didn’t know, to be honest. --Amy
I was cautiously optimistic after “The Hungry Earth,” but “Cold Blood” left me, well, cold. Maybe that’s unfair considering I wanted both more of the same and something unpredictable instead of color-in-the-lines and connect-the-dots. “The Hungry Earth”’s non-cliffhanger picked up right where it began, with the Doctor and Nasreen in the reptile base. “It’s enormous and deserted”—they quickly discover that most of the homo reptilia must be dormant.
Meanwhile, the scientist Silurian is about to dissect Amy. Surely this would be more efficacious if she were stripped rather than making the incision through her clothes? That would have sent male viewers into a tizzy, but I think the logic stands. No one can fault Amy’s resourcefulness, however, when she picks the scientist’s pocket before Mo’s disbelieving eyes and is able to free herself while the scientist is distracted. She and Mo escape. They find reptiles in suspended animation and take their guns, while Mo is bereft to find Elliot in a death-like pall. “He’s still alive,” says Amy, to keep him from flipping his lid. They vow to escape and come back to free Elliot.
Perhaps I should now mention what I didn’t last week, in that I’m not a big fan of either the design, makeup, or costumes of the new Silurians. The design of the costumes seems completely out of left field, as if they were found in a trunk from 1966’s Star Trek. The makeup is similarly jarring. Surely, you say, it’s got to be better than the painfully obvious rubber suits the actors had to wear in the 1970s. But I don’t think so. I realize that, in making the story and the morals accessible to all (including young children who will be watching), Chibnall wanted to emphasize similarities and go for user-friendly “aliens” instead of the clunky remnants from before Doctor Who was cool. Gone is the third eye, the wobbly voices, the stiff execution—instead there is a poisonous tongue, gene strands, warrior classes, making the reptiles more anthropomorphized. (And it’s fair to reinvent since this is a different species than the Third and Fifth Doctor encountered; that is made clear.) But I feel, due to the relative short length of time in which to tell the story (half as much as the original Silurians had), the shorthand created by the new design plus the transparency of the script (in my opinion) has made this story really dull.
The Doctor and Nasreen are taken by Restak, the commander, to the scientists. They want to decontaminate him but he successfully alerts them to the fact he’s not human. “Not got any celery, have you?” As the Doctor tries to work out the plot, he sees the different functional classes in the reptilian society—there’s always a military, isn’t there?”
Rory, on the surface, gives a neat exposition when Ambrose accuses him of lying and pretending to be a policeman. Tony is not well, Ambrose is furious that the aliens have her son and husband and have poisoned her father, and Rory is frustrated his nurse skills haven’t been called into action. I was really hoping Tony was going to transform into a human/Silurian hybrid which might cause some end to the hostilities between the two races, but that was a red herring and only fodder to feed Ambrose’s hatred. She’s “only protecting her own”—as Alaya says, she has the most to lose. No one’s surprised that she kills Alaya, even if it’s accidental (surely the title refers to her murder as much as the literal cold blood of the reptiles); no one’s surprised that she creates the final peril of the story. I find her pathetic as a character, and I have very little sympathy for her, even though intellectually I understand her motives; emotionally she didn’t appeal to me at all and I found it very difficult to accept her actions. They kept pulling me out of the story and ruined the continuity of it for me.
Restak wants to execute the Doctor and Nasreen. She and the scientist, Malohkeh, take them to their “court,” a lovely expanse with a definite resemblance to Cardiff’s Temple of Peace. Amy makes a brave but eventually fruitless rescue attempt with Mo; I was a bit disappointed that, despite Amy’s clear decisiveness in escaping from the scientist’s lab, her rescue attempt went wrong so quickly, but I guess that’s all part of the formula. The Doctor explains what’s going on, and Restak initiates contact with the surface. She wants Alaya “released immediately unharmed,” which is going to be a problem since Ambrose has just killed her. Eldane, who looks like he’s wearing a Baptist minister’s choir robes, intervenes before Restak can kill “the apes.” He outranks her and therefore the Doctor has the chance to intercede. “Are you authorized to negotiate on behalf of humanity?” The Doctor puts forward Nasreen and Amy to do this, despite their doubts on their diplomatic abilities. Nasreen makes a good diplomat, though it looks like Amy spends most of the negotiations asleep!
The Doctor has a speech about fixed points in time and has high hopes for negotiations going somewhere productive. “This is an opportunity.” Much as I wanted to believe the Silurians and humans could come to an agreement, I knew it was all a pipe dream and was a bit impatient with their dangling empty promises in front of us. Mo and the Doctor go after poor Elliot. Malohkeh has “taken samples of the young” in order to understand human growth and development. Elliot is unharmed and awakes in his father’s arms. “We’re in the center of the Earth and there are lizard-men” brings him quickly up to speed.
Rory, Ambrose, and Tony are to bring Alaya to the court. Horrified Rory thinks it best to bring back Alaya’s body, even though it will cause chaos and mistrust. Restak kills Malohkeh because he stands in the way of her cause; in a manner of speaking, it’s like history repeating itself. The scientist Silurian in the 1970 adventure was killed because of his willingness to work toward cooperation between “the apes” and the reptiles. How cheated and frustrated the Doctor must feel when Rory, Tony, and Ambrose bring down the dead Alaya, while Eldane looks on in horror, while Mo’s face shows shock and disgust, when Ambrose reveals the drill is going to obliterate the oxygen in the reptiles’ habitat; surely he must, too, feel some sympathy for the bereft Restak who thinks this all the more reason to destroy the violent, vengeful, deceitful humans. The Doctor worked so hard in his Third regeneration to make the humans and Silurians allies. He couldn’t make it work then, because of the Young Silurian’s sabotage and the Brigadier’s blowing up of the base. I much rather would have seen the Ninth Doctor here confront the factions. The Eleventh Doctor gives everyone a slap on the wrist and a tongue-lashing, but it’s secondary to escaping from the immediate danger of a) Restak’s troops; b) the drill. Both this and “The Beast Below” have painted a very black picture of humanity, which is surely deserved, but in combination with the ending of the episode makes one frustrated and well-nigh suicidal.
The sonic screwdriver is the get-out-of-jail-free card as the Doctor uses it to short-out the Silurian guns in order that the humans can escape and regroup. He quickly puts together a beam to destroy the drill but it will also destroy the tunnel network so that has to be evacuated. Eldane has the clever idea of setting up an automatic fumigation system that will drive the warrior reptiles back to their suspended animation. This works well, and Amy, Rory, Mo, Ambrose, and the Doctor are able to escape. Tony has to stay behind because there is no cure for his venom, except one that the Silurians might find themselves; Nasreen elects to stay, as well. She’s already blown up “her life’s work” so she might as well stay with her love. This is one of the few bright spots as when the reptiles wake in 1,000 years, it will be interesting to see what has become of Tony and Nasreen. I still maintain she would have made a good companion, though!
Ambrose, Mo, and Elliot are carted into the TARDIS, but the Doctor, Amy, and Rory stop and notice the crack that has followed them. The Doctor is annoyed because everyone seems to know what it is except him; he reaches inside it with a handkerchief to pull out a bit of “shrapnel.” The very very driven Restak makes a last appearance long enough to shoot Rory, who jumps in front of the Doctor. I feel quite betrayed by this, as so much time has been spent getting Rory in and out of the TARDIS. He’s not my favorite companion by any stretch of the imagination, but such a demise, especially after “Amy’s Choice” seems a cheap shot, worthy of a lot of shows but not Doctor Who. Jamie reckons he’s coming back, which might make this a bit more bearable. Not only does he die, he gets effaced from memory. This is what happened to Donna’s romance in “Forest of the Dead”; this is what happened to Donna’s memory. Why this emphasis on erasure of memory? It’s emotionally upsetting and in combination with the earlier critique of humankind, hurts.
It’s not even allowed to be the focus of the end of the episode because the loose ends are retied with the return to 2020. If I hadn’t just seen “The Silurians” I might have been more forgiving of this episode, but I found it dull in places and painful in others, which isn’t my idea of a good Doctor Who.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Terror of the Autons
24/5/10 “Terror of the Autons”
“I like being childish.” --The Doctor
Robert Holmes was certainly a genius in many respects, and one of those was in creating fear from everyday objects and really going in for the kill, much like the Vast Toffee does today (and perhaps even surpassing him). This is a fairly well-crafted story, quite disturbing in many aspects, and while the Master’s menace is conveyed by Roger Delgado’s performance, the Master himself seems a bit . . . declawed. From the beginning, it seems like he’s more interested in playing games with the Doctor than doing anything meglomaniacal or psychopathic. It isn’t as good as “Spearhead from Space,” but as sequels go, it gives the Autons a continued ability to intimidate.
Although the story tries to take advantage of its setting at the circus (we get to see some elephants and lions, for example), it falls into stereotype and could have been both creepier and more atmospheric if it had used the setting a bit more creatively. (That said, it didn’t need to ramp up the creepy factor like “From Out of the Rain” did.) It’s very interesting that the Master makes his first appearance in the circus, however, as it was either Russell T Davies or Murray Gold who remarked in the notes to the soundtrack for series 3 that the Master always had a sideshow side to his character, hence why “The Master Vainglorious” sounds rather circus-like. The first thing we know of him is that he has a horsebox that sounds like the TARDIS. He introduces himself to Rossini, the showman, as “I’m usually referred to as the Master.” “Oh yes?” “Quite universally.” We don’t find out until a bit later—and through a rather clumsy method of exposition—that he’s a Time Lord, though I suppose people must have suspected. I wonder what people DID think in 1971? You realize right away that, whoever the Master is, he’s not nice.
The Doctor, meanwhile, is tinkering away. This story also introduces Jo Grant, Dr. Liz Shaw’s successor. Jo Grant is very much based on Katy Manning’s natural character, methinks, and no one makes any effort to disguise her. The Doctor mistakes her for the tea lady and goes into a tizzy even though she’s “a fully qualified [UNIT] agent” (um, how?). When his experiment catches on fire, Jo does the sensible thing and extinguishes it, for which she gets the infamous epithet, “Look what you’ve done, you ham-fisted bun vendor!” “I’m your new assistant!” she announces, forever changing the name from “companion” to “assistant” (for better or worse). Jo is, in this scene, wearing one of her more sensible outfits, and I actually like the choker.
“I want someone with the same qualifications [as Liz Shaw],” the Doctor rants at the Brigadier. “UNIT’s not the place for trainees,” says the Doctor, and though the Brigadier agrees, he admits that Jo has relatives in high places. This says a lot about UNIT, Jo, and the Doctor—he feels they’re foisting off the noob on him, the Brigadier feels he has to grease the oils of the system by returning favors, and Jo probably has a complex that she’s not good enough because she’s been riding on the coattails of others’ success. She certainly doesn’t improve her ditzy image later on in the story—it’s the introduction of Mike Yates, too, and while the two flirt a bit, he mostly gently takes the mick out of her.
Meanwhile, Autons are being produced in a plastics factory (again), this time under the auspice of the Master, and one of the Time Lords comes floating through the air (is he in a TARDIS or isn’t he?) to annoy the Doctor. “You look quite ridiculous in those clothes,” the Doctor justly says. “If you’ve come here to be rude . . .” The Time Lord has come to gloat a bit but also to warn the Doctor that the Master has landed on the planet and is going to make trouble for him. The Time Lord thinks the Doctor is meddlesome but nothing compared to the Master: “your hearts are in the right places.” “He’s an unimaginative plodder!” snaps the Doctor. When the Time Lord points out that the Master did better than the Doctor in school, the Doctor says, “I was a late developer.” This conversation has done more to humanize the Doctor’s mysterious background than the previous eight years of the show put together! I’m not sure that I like it, to be honest, but it’s all in the spirit of that era of Doctor Who, like it or lump it. I’m just disappointed that the Doctor couldn’t have conveyed to us the information about the Master via some other means—they even talk on the phone to each other later (albeit briefly).
Speaking of the Master, he uses the tissue decompressor for the first time in this story, too. He’s recruited a human stooge, Rex Farrell (who I’m reliably informed later plays Davros) who he’s used the power of his hypnotism to full effect on. There’s minor conflict in the shape of Rex’s dad who used to run the factory; he’s the sort of man who wouldn’t be taken in by psychic paper. Unfortunately, another of Farrell’s colleagues is sucked into a plastic sofa that “looks like a black pudding.” As Jamie quite rightly said, it’s pretty disturbing (much more so than Mickey being eaten by the wheelie bin!). There’s a brief moment of danger when Jo is hypnotized by the Master into carrying a bomb back into UNIT (where does she put all those keys?).
Jo is totally made a victim by the Master’s hypnotism, although we have realized it could happen to anybody. “Schizoid association,” the Doctor tells the UNIT staff as Jo appears to fall into a traumatic trance. “The Master can completely control the human mind.” Notice that he said “human”—that seems an odd place to specify. As Jo recovers and the Doctor tries to direct plodding UNIT into finding the Master, Farrell Snr. is forced by the Master to take home a troll doll—“disgusting object” he quite correctly calls it. I dislike the troll as much as Mrs. Farrell does, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I expected the doll’s strangling of Farrell Snr. to be an episode cliffhanger (though it was poorly staged it was still quite effective) but I guess his death is a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately Mrs Farrell’s acting as she later tells the Doctor and Jo what happened leaves something to be desired! As the Doctor and the boys go out to play at the circus, Jo is annoyed at being left behind. “You all just tell me to keep out of the way.”
At the circus, the Doctor meets Rossini. He wants to know how much the Master has bribed him. “Gentlemen don’t discuss money.” “Gentlemen don’t discuss anything else.” Rossini uses his “Strong Man” to keep the Doctor prisoner. At first I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised as the Doctor started to engage the Strong Man (played by the same actor who played Toberman) in conversation, but that quickly went nowhere. The Doctor and Jo ended the episode “almost being lynched” by those nasty circus people!
The rest of episode 3 is really quite superb with a full-fledged Auton shoot out. The Doctor tells the bewildered UNIT soldiers that Autons can’t be killed by bullets, so they make a hasty getaway. Jo takes the Doctor to task for being ungrateful to the Brigadier for saving his life. “You’re quite right, Jo. I’ll apologize later if I have the time.” The Doctor has taken advantage of being inside the horsebox/TARDIS to remove some components and gets upset when they won’t make his TARDIS fly. Although Jo accuses him of being childish, you have to admire his tenacity—I identify with this stubborn streak of the Doctor’s.
The Master, the Autons, and Robert Holmes bring in the creepy by engineering a plot for thousands of Britons to die as plastic daffodils will smother them. Mike Yates is about to make Jo cocoa with the Doctor’s Bunsen burner but is caught in the act (!). “You might have been right, Doctor,” says the grudging Brigadier, who wanted to try to blow things up. “I usually am.” The Doctor outwits the Master, of course, and no one gets smothered by daffodils; the Master escapes, however, leaving Rex as his very literal fall guy. The Doctor feels certain the Master will return because he’s trapped him on Earth with a stolen component from his TARDIS. Too much of a good thing . . .!
“I like being childish.” --The Doctor
Robert Holmes was certainly a genius in many respects, and one of those was in creating fear from everyday objects and really going in for the kill, much like the Vast Toffee does today (and perhaps even surpassing him). This is a fairly well-crafted story, quite disturbing in many aspects, and while the Master’s menace is conveyed by Roger Delgado’s performance, the Master himself seems a bit . . . declawed. From the beginning, it seems like he’s more interested in playing games with the Doctor than doing anything meglomaniacal or psychopathic. It isn’t as good as “Spearhead from Space,” but as sequels go, it gives the Autons a continued ability to intimidate.
Although the story tries to take advantage of its setting at the circus (we get to see some elephants and lions, for example), it falls into stereotype and could have been both creepier and more atmospheric if it had used the setting a bit more creatively. (That said, it didn’t need to ramp up the creepy factor like “From Out of the Rain” did.) It’s very interesting that the Master makes his first appearance in the circus, however, as it was either Russell T Davies or Murray Gold who remarked in the notes to the soundtrack for series 3 that the Master always had a sideshow side to his character, hence why “The Master Vainglorious” sounds rather circus-like. The first thing we know of him is that he has a horsebox that sounds like the TARDIS. He introduces himself to Rossini, the showman, as “I’m usually referred to as the Master.” “Oh yes?” “Quite universally.” We don’t find out until a bit later—and through a rather clumsy method of exposition—that he’s a Time Lord, though I suppose people must have suspected. I wonder what people DID think in 1971? You realize right away that, whoever the Master is, he’s not nice.
The Doctor, meanwhile, is tinkering away. This story also introduces Jo Grant, Dr. Liz Shaw’s successor. Jo Grant is very much based on Katy Manning’s natural character, methinks, and no one makes any effort to disguise her. The Doctor mistakes her for the tea lady and goes into a tizzy even though she’s “a fully qualified [UNIT] agent” (um, how?). When his experiment catches on fire, Jo does the sensible thing and extinguishes it, for which she gets the infamous epithet, “Look what you’ve done, you ham-fisted bun vendor!” “I’m your new assistant!” she announces, forever changing the name from “companion” to “assistant” (for better or worse). Jo is, in this scene, wearing one of her more sensible outfits, and I actually like the choker.
“I want someone with the same qualifications [as Liz Shaw],” the Doctor rants at the Brigadier. “UNIT’s not the place for trainees,” says the Doctor, and though the Brigadier agrees, he admits that Jo has relatives in high places. This says a lot about UNIT, Jo, and the Doctor—he feels they’re foisting off the noob on him, the Brigadier feels he has to grease the oils of the system by returning favors, and Jo probably has a complex that she’s not good enough because she’s been riding on the coattails of others’ success. She certainly doesn’t improve her ditzy image later on in the story—it’s the introduction of Mike Yates, too, and while the two flirt a bit, he mostly gently takes the mick out of her.
Meanwhile, Autons are being produced in a plastics factory (again), this time under the auspice of the Master, and one of the Time Lords comes floating through the air (is he in a TARDIS or isn’t he?) to annoy the Doctor. “You look quite ridiculous in those clothes,” the Doctor justly says. “If you’ve come here to be rude . . .” The Time Lord has come to gloat a bit but also to warn the Doctor that the Master has landed on the planet and is going to make trouble for him. The Time Lord thinks the Doctor is meddlesome but nothing compared to the Master: “your hearts are in the right places.” “He’s an unimaginative plodder!” snaps the Doctor. When the Time Lord points out that the Master did better than the Doctor in school, the Doctor says, “I was a late developer.” This conversation has done more to humanize the Doctor’s mysterious background than the previous eight years of the show put together! I’m not sure that I like it, to be honest, but it’s all in the spirit of that era of Doctor Who, like it or lump it. I’m just disappointed that the Doctor couldn’t have conveyed to us the information about the Master via some other means—they even talk on the phone to each other later (albeit briefly).
Speaking of the Master, he uses the tissue decompressor for the first time in this story, too. He’s recruited a human stooge, Rex Farrell (who I’m reliably informed later plays Davros) who he’s used the power of his hypnotism to full effect on. There’s minor conflict in the shape of Rex’s dad who used to run the factory; he’s the sort of man who wouldn’t be taken in by psychic paper. Unfortunately, another of Farrell’s colleagues is sucked into a plastic sofa that “looks like a black pudding.” As Jamie quite rightly said, it’s pretty disturbing (much more so than Mickey being eaten by the wheelie bin!). There’s a brief moment of danger when Jo is hypnotized by the Master into carrying a bomb back into UNIT (where does she put all those keys?).
Jo is totally made a victim by the Master’s hypnotism, although we have realized it could happen to anybody. “Schizoid association,” the Doctor tells the UNIT staff as Jo appears to fall into a traumatic trance. “The Master can completely control the human mind.” Notice that he said “human”—that seems an odd place to specify. As Jo recovers and the Doctor tries to direct plodding UNIT into finding the Master, Farrell Snr. is forced by the Master to take home a troll doll—“disgusting object” he quite correctly calls it. I dislike the troll as much as Mrs. Farrell does, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I expected the doll’s strangling of Farrell Snr. to be an episode cliffhanger (though it was poorly staged it was still quite effective) but I guess his death is a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately Mrs Farrell’s acting as she later tells the Doctor and Jo what happened leaves something to be desired! As the Doctor and the boys go out to play at the circus, Jo is annoyed at being left behind. “You all just tell me to keep out of the way.”
At the circus, the Doctor meets Rossini. He wants to know how much the Master has bribed him. “Gentlemen don’t discuss money.” “Gentlemen don’t discuss anything else.” Rossini uses his “Strong Man” to keep the Doctor prisoner. At first I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised as the Doctor started to engage the Strong Man (played by the same actor who played Toberman) in conversation, but that quickly went nowhere. The Doctor and Jo ended the episode “almost being lynched” by those nasty circus people!
The rest of episode 3 is really quite superb with a full-fledged Auton shoot out. The Doctor tells the bewildered UNIT soldiers that Autons can’t be killed by bullets, so they make a hasty getaway. Jo takes the Doctor to task for being ungrateful to the Brigadier for saving his life. “You’re quite right, Jo. I’ll apologize later if I have the time.” The Doctor has taken advantage of being inside the horsebox/TARDIS to remove some components and gets upset when they won’t make his TARDIS fly. Although Jo accuses him of being childish, you have to admire his tenacity—I identify with this stubborn streak of the Doctor’s.
The Master, the Autons, and Robert Holmes bring in the creepy by engineering a plot for thousands of Britons to die as plastic daffodils will smother them. Mike Yates is about to make Jo cocoa with the Doctor’s Bunsen burner but is caught in the act (!). “You might have been right, Doctor,” says the grudging Brigadier, who wanted to try to blow things up. “I usually am.” The Doctor outwits the Master, of course, and no one gets smothered by daffodils; the Master escapes, however, leaving Rex as his very literal fall guy. The Doctor feels certain the Master will return because he’s trapped him on Earth with a stolen component from his TARDIS. Too much of a good thing . . .!
The Hungry Earth (SPOILERS)
22/5/10 “The Hungry Earth”
Amy: “Have you always been this disgusting?”
The Doctor: “No, it’s a recent thing.”
A two-parter with potential, but we’ll see how it goes. I feel glad that I saw “The Silurians” first as I have something with which to compare it (though obviously it’s not necessary). The setting is Cwmtaff, South Wales 2020, and no matter where it was actually filmed (possibly the Wye Valley; possibly near Merthyr Tydfil), a wave of homesickness for Swansea washes over me. Anyway, Jamie was the first to note that, with scientists rejoicing over “drill depth achieved!”, it’s “Inferno” all over again. “Onwards and downwards,” declares the happy and excited Tony Mack, who will always be Mr Allen from Master and Commander to me; his colleague Dr Nasreen Chaundry is similarly pleased. They declare a good weekend to all and go home, as Tony’s son-in-law Mo arrives for the night shift (having left behind wife Ambrose—what the hell kind of name is that?—and son Elliot, who prefers to listen to books on headphones—how 2020). Unfortunately, poor Mo gets sucked into the ground at the drill site, which Jamie immediately declares to be much more effective than Colin Baker being dragged into the ground by hands in Trial of a Time Lord.
The Doctor, Amy, and Rory, believing themselves to be going to Rio for Carnavale (a reference to Loups-Garoux, I wonder?), instead are persuaded to stay in Cwmtaff because the Doctor thinks “the ground feels strange.” As he runs off to investigate, Rory chides Amy for wearing her engagement ring—“Amy, you could lose it.” As he goes to return the ring to the TARDIS, he tells them he will “catch them up.” Instead, he gets nabbed by Ambrose, who assumes he’s CID and asks him to investigate disappearing graves (I seem to recall a similar case happened in the West Indies many years ago). The Doctor is also interested in the graves because there are patches of “blue grass.” “The ground’s attacking us,” he says, with suitable menace. “Stay away from the earth, Amy.”
He and Amy eventually come to the drill site where Nasreen and Tony give way; the investigation is stopped by more holes appearing and Amy getting sucked underground. This could be presented as an extremely hair-raising scare (I can imagine children could be affected to the point they don’t want to go out into the garden!) but the moment is over pretty quickly. “Tell Rory . . .” Amy says before she disappears—the focus becomes on getting the vanished people back alive. Elliot quotes Sherlock Holmes to Rory; the Doctor shoots a slingshot into a dome (rather like the one in The Simpsons Movie!)—that seems quite appropriate somehow. The Doctor chides Nasreen and Tony for assuming that the appearance of the blue grass is a big “X marks the spot.” “Trace minerals not seen in this country for 21 million years.”
The Doctor, Rory, Nasreen, Tony, Ambrose, and Elliot have to hole up in the church, as the sole inhabitants of Cwmtaff over the weekend (convenient but possible), as it goes dark. “I want the whole area covered with sensors,” declares the Doctor. “No weapons—it’s not the way I do things,” he tells Ambrose, but somehow I feel she’s going to be like Miss Dawson from “The Silurians” and have a vested interest in killing all the non-humans. Elliot tells the Doctor he wants to move to a big city. “Did you get away?” he asks the Doctor. “Yes.” “Do you ever miss it?” “So much.”
The lights go, the power fails; left defenseless against something coming up out of the ground, Tony grabs Nasreen and kisses her. “Tony!” “Like you didn’t know.” In the confusion, Elliot is left outside (dumb). “He’s out there on his own!” I think if I was Elliot, the anticipatory fear would have killed me long before anything else got me. Elliot does get taken, but the Doctor and Rory manage to take a hostage of their own. The Doctor is gleeful and stands in for a fanboy: “I know who they are.” In a rather Signs¬-like atmosphere, the Doctor goes to interrogate the hostage, a “remnant of a bygone era on Earth.” The Doctor, like fandom in general, can’t seem to decide on what to call his hostage—Silurian, Eocene, or Homo Reptilian—so he asks for her name, which is Alaya. “I do hate a monologue,” says the Doctor, as his warrior Homo Reptilian refuses to cooperate. The drilling disturbed the “Tribe,” now the Tribe are going to wipe out “the apes.” (This scene would have been really interesting if the Ninth Doctor were to take the Eleventh’s place.) “There’s a peace to be brokered here,” insists the Doctor. Alaya is willing to die for her people; “what will you sacrifice for yours?”
The Doctor, with some of the frustration of the Third Doctor, tries to keep tensions appeased. “They’re not aliens . . . They’re only as evil as you are.” One feels sure this doesn’t exactly wash with the others, even though the Doctor tells them, “you have to be the best of humanity.” Rory is, of course, receptive but concerned about Amy; Nasreen is possibly a bit like Dr. Flowers from The Monsters Inside.
Amy, somewhere below the surface, is trapped in a claustrophobic space and is reenacting humanity’s worst nightmare of premature burial, before she’s gassed, anyway. I really like Nasreen. I was just reading an essay about how an older female companion for the Doctor (older meaning older than Donna) has been long overdue, though we’ve had some contenders in the past (Todd from “Kinda,” Amelia Rumford from “The Stones of Blood,” Miss Hampden in “The Awakening,” not to mention Dr Evelyn Smythe). Nasreen is so excited by the Doctor’s knowledge and alien-ness, she even wants to go below the surface in the TARDIS with him to get the hostages back—true companion material (I hope that doesn’t mean she’s going to die). “This is . . . fantastic!” she says of the TARDIS interior. The TARDIS gets pulled through a vent shaft (?), and for me it’s like traveling in the Evelator in the New Mexico Natural History Museum down through the Earth and 65 million years back in time . . . “Why aren’t we burning alive?” Nasreen asks when they reach their destination. The Doctor is unsure, but they are rather cowed by the fact Alaya’s Tribe is actually a huge civilization. Not much of a cliffhanger, but there we go.
Amy: “Have you always been this disgusting?”
The Doctor: “No, it’s a recent thing.”
A two-parter with potential, but we’ll see how it goes. I feel glad that I saw “The Silurians” first as I have something with which to compare it (though obviously it’s not necessary). The setting is Cwmtaff, South Wales 2020, and no matter where it was actually filmed (possibly the Wye Valley; possibly near Merthyr Tydfil), a wave of homesickness for Swansea washes over me. Anyway, Jamie was the first to note that, with scientists rejoicing over “drill depth achieved!”, it’s “Inferno” all over again. “Onwards and downwards,” declares the happy and excited Tony Mack, who will always be Mr Allen from Master and Commander to me; his colleague Dr Nasreen Chaundry is similarly pleased. They declare a good weekend to all and go home, as Tony’s son-in-law Mo arrives for the night shift (having left behind wife Ambrose—what the hell kind of name is that?—and son Elliot, who prefers to listen to books on headphones—how 2020). Unfortunately, poor Mo gets sucked into the ground at the drill site, which Jamie immediately declares to be much more effective than Colin Baker being dragged into the ground by hands in Trial of a Time Lord.
The Doctor, Amy, and Rory, believing themselves to be going to Rio for Carnavale (a reference to Loups-Garoux, I wonder?), instead are persuaded to stay in Cwmtaff because the Doctor thinks “the ground feels strange.” As he runs off to investigate, Rory chides Amy for wearing her engagement ring—“Amy, you could lose it.” As he goes to return the ring to the TARDIS, he tells them he will “catch them up.” Instead, he gets nabbed by Ambrose, who assumes he’s CID and asks him to investigate disappearing graves (I seem to recall a similar case happened in the West Indies many years ago). The Doctor is also interested in the graves because there are patches of “blue grass.” “The ground’s attacking us,” he says, with suitable menace. “Stay away from the earth, Amy.”
He and Amy eventually come to the drill site where Nasreen and Tony give way; the investigation is stopped by more holes appearing and Amy getting sucked underground. This could be presented as an extremely hair-raising scare (I can imagine children could be affected to the point they don’t want to go out into the garden!) but the moment is over pretty quickly. “Tell Rory . . .” Amy says before she disappears—the focus becomes on getting the vanished people back alive. Elliot quotes Sherlock Holmes to Rory; the Doctor shoots a slingshot into a dome (rather like the one in The Simpsons Movie!)—that seems quite appropriate somehow. The Doctor chides Nasreen and Tony for assuming that the appearance of the blue grass is a big “X marks the spot.” “Trace minerals not seen in this country for 21 million years.”
The Doctor, Rory, Nasreen, Tony, Ambrose, and Elliot have to hole up in the church, as the sole inhabitants of Cwmtaff over the weekend (convenient but possible), as it goes dark. “I want the whole area covered with sensors,” declares the Doctor. “No weapons—it’s not the way I do things,” he tells Ambrose, but somehow I feel she’s going to be like Miss Dawson from “The Silurians” and have a vested interest in killing all the non-humans. Elliot tells the Doctor he wants to move to a big city. “Did you get away?” he asks the Doctor. “Yes.” “Do you ever miss it?” “So much.”
The lights go, the power fails; left defenseless against something coming up out of the ground, Tony grabs Nasreen and kisses her. “Tony!” “Like you didn’t know.” In the confusion, Elliot is left outside (dumb). “He’s out there on his own!” I think if I was Elliot, the anticipatory fear would have killed me long before anything else got me. Elliot does get taken, but the Doctor and Rory manage to take a hostage of their own. The Doctor is gleeful and stands in for a fanboy: “I know who they are.” In a rather Signs¬-like atmosphere, the Doctor goes to interrogate the hostage, a “remnant of a bygone era on Earth.” The Doctor, like fandom in general, can’t seem to decide on what to call his hostage—Silurian, Eocene, or Homo Reptilian—so he asks for her name, which is Alaya. “I do hate a monologue,” says the Doctor, as his warrior Homo Reptilian refuses to cooperate. The drilling disturbed the “Tribe,” now the Tribe are going to wipe out “the apes.” (This scene would have been really interesting if the Ninth Doctor were to take the Eleventh’s place.) “There’s a peace to be brokered here,” insists the Doctor. Alaya is willing to die for her people; “what will you sacrifice for yours?”
The Doctor, with some of the frustration of the Third Doctor, tries to keep tensions appeased. “They’re not aliens . . . They’re only as evil as you are.” One feels sure this doesn’t exactly wash with the others, even though the Doctor tells them, “you have to be the best of humanity.” Rory is, of course, receptive but concerned about Amy; Nasreen is possibly a bit like Dr. Flowers from The Monsters Inside.
Amy, somewhere below the surface, is trapped in a claustrophobic space and is reenacting humanity’s worst nightmare of premature burial, before she’s gassed, anyway. I really like Nasreen. I was just reading an essay about how an older female companion for the Doctor (older meaning older than Donna) has been long overdue, though we’ve had some contenders in the past (Todd from “Kinda,” Amelia Rumford from “The Stones of Blood,” Miss Hampden in “The Awakening,” not to mention Dr Evelyn Smythe). Nasreen is so excited by the Doctor’s knowledge and alien-ness, she even wants to go below the surface in the TARDIS with him to get the hostages back—true companion material (I hope that doesn’t mean she’s going to die). “This is . . . fantastic!” she says of the TARDIS interior. The TARDIS gets pulled through a vent shaft (?), and for me it’s like traveling in the Evelator in the New Mexico Natural History Museum down through the Earth and 65 million years back in time . . . “Why aren’t we burning alive?” Nasreen asks when they reach their destination. The Doctor is unsure, but they are rather cowed by the fact Alaya’s Tribe is actually a huge civilization. Not much of a cliffhanger, but there we go.
mawdryn undead
22/5/10 “Mawdryn Undead”
“It’s dull and fat and ugly, just like you, Hippo.” –Turlough
The Black Guardian trilogy has fared badly in my viewing since until recently I had only ever seen “Enlightenment.” I did actually rather like that story, partially because of all the costuming, partially out of respect that it was written and directed by women, as we know, a comparative rarity in Doctor Who. None of the stories are particularly highly regarded, and it’s easy to see why. I found “Mawdryn Undead,” despite its unusual title, to be fairly incoherent (though it didn’t help I had Jamie whispering Black Guardian/Turlough double entendres to me the whole time). Nicholas Courtney is the only saving grace here—the wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff might have worked on paper, but it’s incredibly confusing, and the ending deus ex machina is terribly convenient.
I admire Paddy Kingsland’s music from stories such as “Full Circle” and “Logopolis,” but in “Mawdryn Undead,” he seems to have gone berserk and taken a page out of Malcolm Clarke’s book. The result is wince-inducingly painful to listen to and doesn’t help the lightweight action on screen at all. The action opens in an English public school, very much out of Chariots of Fire with straw skimmers for the boys. I’ve seen enough of the alleged vices of such places in Broome Stages and “Human Nature” to feel quite uneasy about the relationship between Turlough and his “friend” Hippo (Ibbotson). It’s not much of a friendship, is it? I really feel quite sorry for Hippo if the only friend he can get in school is one who deceives and bullies him, gets him in trouble, and has the makings of a sociopath. Too harsh? We got a glimpse of how interesting (and indeed, almost likeable) Turlough can be in Paul Magrs Ringpullworld, so it’s a disappointment to me to find him so self-serving and petty-minded here. To be fair, this is Turlough’s introductory story and we know by the end of “Enlightenment” that he’s gone on a story arc that, presumably, makes him a better person, due to the Doctor’s influence. Turlough is not one of the most sympathetic of the companions, but he does create an interesting dynamic (presumably why I’ve included him, peripherally, in a couple of my own fan fics!).
In the story, Turlough decides to “borrow” what turns out to be the Brigadier’s vintage car and forces Hippo to go along with him. They crash (with the Brigadier, conveniently), and during a moment of concussion, Turlough goes into a very unconvincingly brightly-colored background where he is contacted by the Black Guardian (last seen in the Key to Time), who recruits him to kill the Doctor. Of course, Turlough doesn’t know who the Doctor is, nor is he entirely sure of this strange encounter—it’s full of enough double entendres for anyone to exploit. Turlough, despite appearances, isn’t a human—stuck in this public school far away from home for some reason, parents dead, arrangements made through a “strange solicitor in London” (Great Expectations?). He wants so badly to get away he is certainly willing to listen to the Black Guardian (Turlough a precursor to Harry Potter?). The school’s Headmaster is somewhat kindly toward the misbehaving pupil (evidently feeling sorry for him), but the Brigadier, who is a teacher at this school (!), thinks “you’ve got a rotten one there.”
On board the TARDIS, Tegan is still worried about the aftermath of “Snakedance,” complaining to the Doctor of her “terrible dreams.” The Doctor isn’t all that sympathetic to what she’s going through, though he is willing to try to get her back to Earth—“I want to be surrounded by familiar things.” Nyssa has changed into a completely new costume, one that makes her look much more grown up (the fanboys drool). The three of them get caught up in a “warp ellipse” and get on board a beautifully furnished starliner (it made me think of the endless hallways in Beauty by Robin McKinley). Turlough also appears aboard, having been exhorted by the Black Guardian into a transmit that is shaped like an obelisk (cue double entendres—“Waking or sleeping, I will be with you!” “You will obey me in all things!”, etc). Part one ends with Turlough about to smash the Doctor’s head with a rock (shades of “10,000 BC”?).
While it would have been quite amusing if, when startled, Turlough dropped the rock on his own head instead of throwing it off to the side, both the Doctor and Turlough escape injury back on Earth in 1983. Having lost the TARDIS, the Doctor meets 1983 Brigadier and is surprised to find him a teacher; “I happen to like teaching.” However, more surprising is the fact the Brigadier doesn’t seem to remember the Doctor. There is a lot of kerfuffle as 1983 Brigadier details the 1977 breakdown that, it appears, is the reason he’s forgotten about the Doctor. “Someone just walked over my grave.” “Maybe it was a Yeti.” Eventually they establish that in 1977 the Brigadier met Tegan in the TARDIS, so the Doctor tries to get the Brigadier to remember the events then so that they can work on them in the present.
Indeed, in 1977 Nyssa and Tegan leave the TARDIS to find in the transmat capsule a horribly burned man they assume, naturally enough, I suppose, to be the Doctor. Tegan runs outside to get help as Nyssa tries to make the “Doctor” more comfortable in the TARDIS—Tegan runs into 1977 Brigadier. They don’t seem to be too concerned about the Doctor as they trade anecdotes for awhile. The “Doctor” appears to regenerate within the TARDIS and becomes quite a startling creature with a pulsating brain (or spaghetti on his head, as you wish). A word now, I suppose, should be said about the costumes by Amy Roberts and Richard Croft. “Startling” is certainly the word for them—on one hand, I’m really impressed by the audacity in making something so alien. Mawdryn and his friends eventually shuffle around in big, impractical gowns with rainbow-colored crepe streamers, their brains protruding under plastic domes, in their red and sparkly starliner. It’s certainly bold, and such a story demands such excess (well, it was 1983 as well!).
Tegan, upon discovering the “Doctor” in this strange state, is quite skeptical that he is actually the Doctor. “We must give him the benefit of the doubt.” With the real Doctor and the 1983 Brigadier also aboard the starliner, the Doctor is worried that the two Brigadiers will meet up. “I could meet myself?” “Obviously.” Of course, never introduce a gun if you’re not going to use it, so when the two Brigadiers eventually meet up, it’s no surprise. However, that’s only achieved through a lot of getting lost in corridors, the Black Guardian shouting at Turlough through the little crystal and vice versa, and various comings and goings.
Mawdryn introduces himself as one of seven other alien scientists (it’s never made clear who or what they are) who tried to adapt Time Lord technology so they could live forever. Of course, it went terribly wrong, as they continue in a state of decay (see what I did there?), never dying. They have been trapped aboard their starliner for centuries, working on ways to end their lives. Hence the “undead” of the title, which brings up another point of comparison: the post-Anne Rice idea of vampires who were rather more cursed with their long “lives” than having gained anything by them, all stemming (at least in the world of Dracula 2000) from Dracula aka Judas, the first vampire as punished for his betrayal of Jesus (you could even stretch it to Satan in Paradise Lost, but let’s not go there). I’m not sure there’s anything to be gained from making this comparison, and I’m sure it never even occurred to Peter Grimwade—though the idea of eternal life as a punishment rather than a boon does seem like a reoccurring theme in the Fifth Doctor’s era (Borusa, of course). Mawdryn and the other scientists are certainly punished, and the only way they can see to end their suffering is for the Doctor to give his remaining Time Lord powers which would, of course, render him no longer one.
Throughout all this moral dilemma, the two Brigadiers are in a delicate ballet, the Black Guardian is snarling at Turlough, and Nyssa and Tegan have been infected (“not intentionally”) with the “mutative virus” (brings to mind Vincent O’Brien’s essay on Prometheus in The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who). It causes them first to mutate horribly (à la Mawdryn when he first appears) and then when the Doctor “reverses the polarity of the neutron flow,” they turn into children (think Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator). The Doctor, realizing he has no alternative, decides to get switched into the machine to give over his Time Lord powers. I was shocked at how blasé Tegan and Nyssa are about letting the Doctor make this sacrifice on their behalf. Never mind, it isn’t needed, as Turlough has failed to keep the two Brigs apart. “The two Brigadiers shorted out the time differential”—“Zap,” as Tegan says.
The aliens die, the Brigadiers are returned to their own time streams, and the Doctor trusts Turlough enough to let him travel with them. There are some interesting ideas in “Mawdryn Undead,” and the ambition of the plot is exceeded only by the design and costume work. However, it has difficulty coming together and instead of complexity, you end up with tedium. At least Nicholas Courtney rescued it from total boredom.
“It’s dull and fat and ugly, just like you, Hippo.” –Turlough
The Black Guardian trilogy has fared badly in my viewing since until recently I had only ever seen “Enlightenment.” I did actually rather like that story, partially because of all the costuming, partially out of respect that it was written and directed by women, as we know, a comparative rarity in Doctor Who. None of the stories are particularly highly regarded, and it’s easy to see why. I found “Mawdryn Undead,” despite its unusual title, to be fairly incoherent (though it didn’t help I had Jamie whispering Black Guardian/Turlough double entendres to me the whole time). Nicholas Courtney is the only saving grace here—the wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff might have worked on paper, but it’s incredibly confusing, and the ending deus ex machina is terribly convenient.
I admire Paddy Kingsland’s music from stories such as “Full Circle” and “Logopolis,” but in “Mawdryn Undead,” he seems to have gone berserk and taken a page out of Malcolm Clarke’s book. The result is wince-inducingly painful to listen to and doesn’t help the lightweight action on screen at all. The action opens in an English public school, very much out of Chariots of Fire with straw skimmers for the boys. I’ve seen enough of the alleged vices of such places in Broome Stages and “Human Nature” to feel quite uneasy about the relationship between Turlough and his “friend” Hippo (Ibbotson). It’s not much of a friendship, is it? I really feel quite sorry for Hippo if the only friend he can get in school is one who deceives and bullies him, gets him in trouble, and has the makings of a sociopath. Too harsh? We got a glimpse of how interesting (and indeed, almost likeable) Turlough can be in Paul Magrs Ringpullworld, so it’s a disappointment to me to find him so self-serving and petty-minded here. To be fair, this is Turlough’s introductory story and we know by the end of “Enlightenment” that he’s gone on a story arc that, presumably, makes him a better person, due to the Doctor’s influence. Turlough is not one of the most sympathetic of the companions, but he does create an interesting dynamic (presumably why I’ve included him, peripherally, in a couple of my own fan fics!).
In the story, Turlough decides to “borrow” what turns out to be the Brigadier’s vintage car and forces Hippo to go along with him. They crash (with the Brigadier, conveniently), and during a moment of concussion, Turlough goes into a very unconvincingly brightly-colored background where he is contacted by the Black Guardian (last seen in the Key to Time), who recruits him to kill the Doctor. Of course, Turlough doesn’t know who the Doctor is, nor is he entirely sure of this strange encounter—it’s full of enough double entendres for anyone to exploit. Turlough, despite appearances, isn’t a human—stuck in this public school far away from home for some reason, parents dead, arrangements made through a “strange solicitor in London” (Great Expectations?). He wants so badly to get away he is certainly willing to listen to the Black Guardian (Turlough a precursor to Harry Potter?). The school’s Headmaster is somewhat kindly toward the misbehaving pupil (evidently feeling sorry for him), but the Brigadier, who is a teacher at this school (!), thinks “you’ve got a rotten one there.”
On board the TARDIS, Tegan is still worried about the aftermath of “Snakedance,” complaining to the Doctor of her “terrible dreams.” The Doctor isn’t all that sympathetic to what she’s going through, though he is willing to try to get her back to Earth—“I want to be surrounded by familiar things.” Nyssa has changed into a completely new costume, one that makes her look much more grown up (the fanboys drool). The three of them get caught up in a “warp ellipse” and get on board a beautifully furnished starliner (it made me think of the endless hallways in Beauty by Robin McKinley). Turlough also appears aboard, having been exhorted by the Black Guardian into a transmit that is shaped like an obelisk (cue double entendres—“Waking or sleeping, I will be with you!” “You will obey me in all things!”, etc). Part one ends with Turlough about to smash the Doctor’s head with a rock (shades of “10,000 BC”?).
While it would have been quite amusing if, when startled, Turlough dropped the rock on his own head instead of throwing it off to the side, both the Doctor and Turlough escape injury back on Earth in 1983. Having lost the TARDIS, the Doctor meets 1983 Brigadier and is surprised to find him a teacher; “I happen to like teaching.” However, more surprising is the fact the Brigadier doesn’t seem to remember the Doctor. There is a lot of kerfuffle as 1983 Brigadier details the 1977 breakdown that, it appears, is the reason he’s forgotten about the Doctor. “Someone just walked over my grave.” “Maybe it was a Yeti.” Eventually they establish that in 1977 the Brigadier met Tegan in the TARDIS, so the Doctor tries to get the Brigadier to remember the events then so that they can work on them in the present.
Indeed, in 1977 Nyssa and Tegan leave the TARDIS to find in the transmat capsule a horribly burned man they assume, naturally enough, I suppose, to be the Doctor. Tegan runs outside to get help as Nyssa tries to make the “Doctor” more comfortable in the TARDIS—Tegan runs into 1977 Brigadier. They don’t seem to be too concerned about the Doctor as they trade anecdotes for awhile. The “Doctor” appears to regenerate within the TARDIS and becomes quite a startling creature with a pulsating brain (or spaghetti on his head, as you wish). A word now, I suppose, should be said about the costumes by Amy Roberts and Richard Croft. “Startling” is certainly the word for them—on one hand, I’m really impressed by the audacity in making something so alien. Mawdryn and his friends eventually shuffle around in big, impractical gowns with rainbow-colored crepe streamers, their brains protruding under plastic domes, in their red and sparkly starliner. It’s certainly bold, and such a story demands such excess (well, it was 1983 as well!).
Tegan, upon discovering the “Doctor” in this strange state, is quite skeptical that he is actually the Doctor. “We must give him the benefit of the doubt.” With the real Doctor and the 1983 Brigadier also aboard the starliner, the Doctor is worried that the two Brigadiers will meet up. “I could meet myself?” “Obviously.” Of course, never introduce a gun if you’re not going to use it, so when the two Brigadiers eventually meet up, it’s no surprise. However, that’s only achieved through a lot of getting lost in corridors, the Black Guardian shouting at Turlough through the little crystal and vice versa, and various comings and goings.
Mawdryn introduces himself as one of seven other alien scientists (it’s never made clear who or what they are) who tried to adapt Time Lord technology so they could live forever. Of course, it went terribly wrong, as they continue in a state of decay (see what I did there?), never dying. They have been trapped aboard their starliner for centuries, working on ways to end their lives. Hence the “undead” of the title, which brings up another point of comparison: the post-Anne Rice idea of vampires who were rather more cursed with their long “lives” than having gained anything by them, all stemming (at least in the world of Dracula 2000) from Dracula aka Judas, the first vampire as punished for his betrayal of Jesus (you could even stretch it to Satan in Paradise Lost, but let’s not go there). I’m not sure there’s anything to be gained from making this comparison, and I’m sure it never even occurred to Peter Grimwade—though the idea of eternal life as a punishment rather than a boon does seem like a reoccurring theme in the Fifth Doctor’s era (Borusa, of course). Mawdryn and the other scientists are certainly punished, and the only way they can see to end their suffering is for the Doctor to give his remaining Time Lord powers which would, of course, render him no longer one.
Throughout all this moral dilemma, the two Brigadiers are in a delicate ballet, the Black Guardian is snarling at Turlough, and Nyssa and Tegan have been infected (“not intentionally”) with the “mutative virus” (brings to mind Vincent O’Brien’s essay on Prometheus in The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who). It causes them first to mutate horribly (à la Mawdryn when he first appears) and then when the Doctor “reverses the polarity of the neutron flow,” they turn into children (think Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator). The Doctor, realizing he has no alternative, decides to get switched into the machine to give over his Time Lord powers. I was shocked at how blasé Tegan and Nyssa are about letting the Doctor make this sacrifice on their behalf. Never mind, it isn’t needed, as Turlough has failed to keep the two Brigs apart. “The two Brigadiers shorted out the time differential”—“Zap,” as Tegan says.
The aliens die, the Brigadiers are returned to their own time streams, and the Doctor trusts Turlough enough to let him travel with them. There are some interesting ideas in “Mawdryn Undead,” and the ambition of the plot is exceeded only by the design and costume work. However, it has difficulty coming together and instead of complexity, you end up with tedium. At least Nicholas Courtney rescued it from total boredom.
Amy's Choice (SPOILERS)
15/5/10 “Amy’s Choice”
Rory:“We have to grow up eventually.”
Amy: “Says who?”
I doubt I’m going to have much to say on this story: it was a lovely short experiment of going sideways in time that evoked memories of the Celestial Toymaker and maybe even the “The Mind Robber,” and if you predicted the outcome, you’re wiser than me (though that’s not hard). At the end of it, I don’t know that you can say that it’s more than a clever idea, brilliantly executed, with some interesting characterization. I wouldn’t say you come out of it feeling cheated because the stakes, which you thought were high, were not that high after all—but it does seem like a trick that can only be pulled once, which is entirely appropriate as the Dream Lord and the Doctor chide each other for their cheap tricks. Would it stand the repeated scrutiny of “Blink”? It’s not necessary that it should. It’s just a great example of how Doctor Who can take so many different formats and go crazy with them—‘cause that’s what it did; in places it didn’t feel like Doctor Who to me.
Upper Leadworth, another fairy tale, is evoked with bucolic landscapes and sweet music, which is appropriate as it sees a very pregnant Amy baking cupcakes (and eventually eating the batter, once she decides her labor pains are a false alarm). The Doctor arrives on the pleasant scene with a “Rory! I’ve cracked your flowers.” He can’t seem to come to grips with Amy’s pregnancy—“you’ve swallowed a planet!”—even when she tells him point-blank. He’s acting very avuncular and, maybe it’s the overdose of Pertwee I’ve been fed in the last few weeks, but it seemed Pertwee-esque! Walking around Leadworth, Amy and Rory are convinced “it’s very restful.” They are put to sleep by some insidious birds—“there wasn’t a lot of time for birdsong in those days.”
They wake up (?) in the TARDIS in “present day,” with the Doctor ranting about “I had a terrible nightmare about you two!” They’ve all dreamed the same thing, though, and as the good ol’ Doc said in “Snakedance,” “Dreams are important . . . never underestimate them.” When forced to admit the Doctor’s nightmare was the same dream Rory and Amy had, the Doctor has to backpedal a bit. “Not a nightmare, more of a really good . . . mare.” As they start flipping back and forth between visions, no one, including the audience, is certain what is reality and what is the dream. This kind of story affects everyone because we’ve all had realistic dreams, and likewise, we have had days that seemed dreamlike. Lao-tzu put it quite meditatively when he said he didn’t know whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, but here the unconscious is the perfect goldmine for both desires and fears. The Doctor is concerned because “I never dropped off like that before”—indeed, we’ve always seen that he requires very little sleep. “Look for all the details, things that don’t ring true.”
Leadworth: Rory is a doctor, not a nurse, “like you always dreamed.” The OAPs are sinister—“you’re incredibly old, aren’t you?” TARDIS: they’re drifting into a cold star. At this moment, the self-styled Dream Lord shows up, a prick in the truest sense of the word. “I’d heard such good things,” he taunts the Doctor, wearing a parody of the Doctor’s costume. “Nice look.” “I’m not convinced.” The Doctor is annoyed over the cheap tricks; the Dream Lord makes fun of him, “what an intergalactic wag you are.” He tells them that one reality is real and one is the dream. To die in the dream means waking up to safety; to die in reality is to die. Early on, it’s less a problem of the Doctor’s than Amy’s—“choose, even. . . . You can’t fool me—I’ve seen your dreams.”
The Doctor thinks Leadworth might be the dream because “this village is SO DULL.” Rory is very attached to this vision of bucolic bliss with a settled life and pregnant Amy and Rory’s ponytail. “I want the other life,” he says, as the TARDIS starts to freeze. Amy is incredibly flippant, as all companions are, about reality in the face of a lifetime of wonders with the Doctor. She can’t imagine a better life than the one she’s got in the TARDIS. Leadworth: attack of the old people, who improbably have creatures in their mouths that turn other people into dust. (There’s a cool castle.) I think whoever noted the prevailing eye imagery has yet one more feather to add to their cap. Mary Whitehouse would be foaming at the mouth if she saw Rory hit an old lady with a 4 x 4 (though he did gibber beforehand, “I can’t hit her!”).
The Dream Lord’s darts are very well-aimed, so much so that the Doctor realizes a lot sooner than we do who he is—someone who knows him very well—“only one person hates me as much as he does.” In the TARDIS, the Doctor asks the three to come to a consensus on which is the dream and which is the reality. Rory votes for Leadworth: “Are we disagreeing or competing?” shouts the Doctor. There are some clever dialogue moments from Simon Nye, including Rory apologizing to Amy each time he bumps her (sleeping) up some stairs in their house in Leadworth. The Dream Lord confronts Amy—“he always leaves you alone . . . anything could happen.” The Doctor does let Amy down, by allowing Rory to die. More from blind grief than anything else, I take it, Amy decides Leadworth is the dream and she and the Doctor drive a van into a house.
She seems to be right, as they wake up in the TARDIS—but the Doctor reveals that this, too, is a dream. They all wake up exactly as we left them at the end of the previous story. A fleck of some kind of dream dust got into the TARDIS rotor, which is how they all dreamed the same thing—because it was the Doctor’s consciousness, it assumed a life-or-death outcome, which Rory brings up. The Dream Lord was none other than a facet of the Doctor—I thought this was where the Valeyard must come from—which is incredibly poignant when you think about it. No one hates the Doctor as much as he hates himself? Under his bravado he even thinks his methods are silly, his flaws all-too-visible, a vein of competition over Amy just possible.
“If we visions have offended / think but this and all is mended / that we have but slumbered here / while these visions did appear.”
Rory:“We have to grow up eventually.”
Amy: “Says who?”
I doubt I’m going to have much to say on this story: it was a lovely short experiment of going sideways in time that evoked memories of the Celestial Toymaker and maybe even the “The Mind Robber,” and if you predicted the outcome, you’re wiser than me (though that’s not hard). At the end of it, I don’t know that you can say that it’s more than a clever idea, brilliantly executed, with some interesting characterization. I wouldn’t say you come out of it feeling cheated because the stakes, which you thought were high, were not that high after all—but it does seem like a trick that can only be pulled once, which is entirely appropriate as the Dream Lord and the Doctor chide each other for their cheap tricks. Would it stand the repeated scrutiny of “Blink”? It’s not necessary that it should. It’s just a great example of how Doctor Who can take so many different formats and go crazy with them—‘cause that’s what it did; in places it didn’t feel like Doctor Who to me.
Upper Leadworth, another fairy tale, is evoked with bucolic landscapes and sweet music, which is appropriate as it sees a very pregnant Amy baking cupcakes (and eventually eating the batter, once she decides her labor pains are a false alarm). The Doctor arrives on the pleasant scene with a “Rory! I’ve cracked your flowers.” He can’t seem to come to grips with Amy’s pregnancy—“you’ve swallowed a planet!”—even when she tells him point-blank. He’s acting very avuncular and, maybe it’s the overdose of Pertwee I’ve been fed in the last few weeks, but it seemed Pertwee-esque! Walking around Leadworth, Amy and Rory are convinced “it’s very restful.” They are put to sleep by some insidious birds—“there wasn’t a lot of time for birdsong in those days.”
They wake up (?) in the TARDIS in “present day,” with the Doctor ranting about “I had a terrible nightmare about you two!” They’ve all dreamed the same thing, though, and as the good ol’ Doc said in “Snakedance,” “Dreams are important . . . never underestimate them.” When forced to admit the Doctor’s nightmare was the same dream Rory and Amy had, the Doctor has to backpedal a bit. “Not a nightmare, more of a really good . . . mare.” As they start flipping back and forth between visions, no one, including the audience, is certain what is reality and what is the dream. This kind of story affects everyone because we’ve all had realistic dreams, and likewise, we have had days that seemed dreamlike. Lao-tzu put it quite meditatively when he said he didn’t know whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, but here the unconscious is the perfect goldmine for both desires and fears. The Doctor is concerned because “I never dropped off like that before”—indeed, we’ve always seen that he requires very little sleep. “Look for all the details, things that don’t ring true.”
Leadworth: Rory is a doctor, not a nurse, “like you always dreamed.” The OAPs are sinister—“you’re incredibly old, aren’t you?” TARDIS: they’re drifting into a cold star. At this moment, the self-styled Dream Lord shows up, a prick in the truest sense of the word. “I’d heard such good things,” he taunts the Doctor, wearing a parody of the Doctor’s costume. “Nice look.” “I’m not convinced.” The Doctor is annoyed over the cheap tricks; the Dream Lord makes fun of him, “what an intergalactic wag you are.” He tells them that one reality is real and one is the dream. To die in the dream means waking up to safety; to die in reality is to die. Early on, it’s less a problem of the Doctor’s than Amy’s—“choose, even. . . . You can’t fool me—I’ve seen your dreams.”
The Doctor thinks Leadworth might be the dream because “this village is SO DULL.” Rory is very attached to this vision of bucolic bliss with a settled life and pregnant Amy and Rory’s ponytail. “I want the other life,” he says, as the TARDIS starts to freeze. Amy is incredibly flippant, as all companions are, about reality in the face of a lifetime of wonders with the Doctor. She can’t imagine a better life than the one she’s got in the TARDIS. Leadworth: attack of the old people, who improbably have creatures in their mouths that turn other people into dust. (There’s a cool castle.) I think whoever noted the prevailing eye imagery has yet one more feather to add to their cap. Mary Whitehouse would be foaming at the mouth if she saw Rory hit an old lady with a 4 x 4 (though he did gibber beforehand, “I can’t hit her!”).
The Dream Lord’s darts are very well-aimed, so much so that the Doctor realizes a lot sooner than we do who he is—someone who knows him very well—“only one person hates me as much as he does.” In the TARDIS, the Doctor asks the three to come to a consensus on which is the dream and which is the reality. Rory votes for Leadworth: “Are we disagreeing or competing?” shouts the Doctor. There are some clever dialogue moments from Simon Nye, including Rory apologizing to Amy each time he bumps her (sleeping) up some stairs in their house in Leadworth. The Dream Lord confronts Amy—“he always leaves you alone . . . anything could happen.” The Doctor does let Amy down, by allowing Rory to die. More from blind grief than anything else, I take it, Amy decides Leadworth is the dream and she and the Doctor drive a van into a house.
She seems to be right, as they wake up in the TARDIS—but the Doctor reveals that this, too, is a dream. They all wake up exactly as we left them at the end of the previous story. A fleck of some kind of dream dust got into the TARDIS rotor, which is how they all dreamed the same thing—because it was the Doctor’s consciousness, it assumed a life-or-death outcome, which Rory brings up. The Dream Lord was none other than a facet of the Doctor—I thought this was where the Valeyard must come from—which is incredibly poignant when you think about it. No one hates the Doctor as much as he hates himself? Under his bravado he even thinks his methods are silly, his flaws all-too-visible, a vein of competition over Amy just possible.
“If we visions have offended / think but this and all is mended / that we have but slumbered here / while these visions did appear.”
the silurians
11/5/10 “The Silurians”
“The Doctor’s qualified to do almost anything.” --The Brigadier
We’re back to the rambling multi-part stories that this era is known for, and while “The Silurians” could be reined in an episode or two—the red herring of the plague in episode six—overall it’s not a bad story. A lot of the ideas are very interesting, though I think their effectiveness is diluted by all the running around. The Doctor, as ever, and the Third Doctor in particular, begins his long-suffering battle against violence, his weariness over not being to get through to people palpable. Much of what I remember of the Third Doctor’s era is exasperation, which comes to a head in “Inferno.”
Caves make a very good setting for science fiction, almost as good as quarries. The caves, like the descent underground in stories like “Vampires of Venice,” symbolize the descent into the subconscious, and where better to find the monsters that populate our nightmares? The cave set here is primitive but effective. All of this is taking place under Wenley Moor (in Derbyshire, I’m told), which made me wistfully wonder how great it would be if the Doctor ever visited Carlsbad Caverns or Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. Also under Wenley Moor is a research center, headed by the irascible Dr. Lawrence. Attempts to characterize Dr. Lawrence only go so far: when asked to comment on his singlemindedness and uptight attitude, the Brigadier suggests, “He slipped up badly several years ago and is very very careful.” But in the caves, the researchers are prone to getting killed—or worse.
The beginning of this serial sees the Doctor working on his new car, the ebullient yellow Bessie. (Jamie rightly pointed out that it might be insulting to Liz to have a car named after her!) Liz continues to get her dress sense from another planet. She and the Doctor are summoned to Wenley Moor by the Brigadier. “I never report anywhere and certainly not forthwith!” The research center reminds me a bit of the interior of “Tomb of the Cybermen.” Its claim to fame is a proton accelerator, the aim to provide “cheap, safe atomic energy” (an aim, I think, that is echoed in “Inferno,” emblematic of the time in which the programme was made but also, certainly for the writers, something the forward-thinking 1980s of their imaginations would be concerned with). Although the Doctor starts his visit with nonchalance—“I can’t find my sonic screwdriver”—he quickly turns serious. “Your nuclear reactor could be a giant atomic bomb.”
What UNIT, and by extension, the Doctor, are investigating are a series of energy problems with the reactor as well as problems with some of the personnel. As the Doctor and Liz begin questioning people, it becomes apparent that Dr. Quinn, one of Dr. Lawrence’s top scientists, is hiding something. In the log book, the Doctor finds pages missing. One of the researchers, though, has a lot more missing than pages—his marbles! In the medical quarters, the Doctor finds him alternating between psychosis and drawing on the walls. “Stress turned him into a wonderful Paleolithic artist?”
The Doctor, as ever, has to investigate this himself, so he gets kitted out in the 1970s version of “The Satan Pit”’s jumpsuit. Wandering around, the Doctor is surprised to find himself warded off but not killed by a rather unconvincing dinosaur. Expert guesses suggest this is an allosaurus or a megladon, but even by the end of the serial I was still trying to figure out why there was a dinosaur in the caves at all. Is it just because Malcolm Hulke loved dinosaurs?
Unfortunately, any power from the episode one ending is dispelled by the Doctor discovering dinosaur footprints after the big reveal of the dinosaur. When he tells the others what he saw, he’s sure to add, “It could have been prehistoric.” Liz Shaw, relegated by the Brigadier into going through personnel files, shoots back, “Haven’t you ever heard of female emancipation?” Alas, the Brigadier, between his sexism and pro-militarianism, doesn’t escape unscathed in this story. “Present them with a new problem and they shoot at it,” ruminates the Doctor after UNIT suggests sending armed men down the caves to deal with “whatever.” The soldiers do find something, which manages to escape up to the surface, leaving “traces of blood.” Making up for the dinosaur gaffe, the rest of the serial masterfully hides the true prehistoric protagonists until the end of episode three. This is the bona fide beginning of Monster-Vision, which has never been better used: the monster’s vision is in triplicate.
Against the Doctor’s assertion that Dr. Quinn might be involved in the personnel problems, his assistant Miss Dawson passionately defends him: “Dr. Quinn works harder than anyone at this center!” The Doctor is quick to humor her, but the whole Quinn/Dawson thing argues for a lot going on at the subtextual level. A well-directed sequence follows the prehistoric creature to a nearby village where it takes refuge in a barn. A bumbling and frightened farmer attacks it with a pitch fork; his wife reacts in terror, giving us this immortal line from the Doctor: “She was found in the barn, paralyzed with fear. She may have seen something.” Off on a wild goose chase, the Doctor leaves Liz in the barn—when the monster attacks!
Liz is spared, of course, and by the time the Doctor and the Brigadier et al get back, the creature has escaped. Meanwhile, Dr. Quinn has been doing mysterious things in his country cottage. A worried Miss Dawson had followed him, “I wanted to know if you were all right.” He is dismissive of her, just as he is dismissive of the Silurians with whom he has done a deed: he just wants easy fame with the secrets of their scientists. Persuaded by the Silurian Leader to take a homing device to the cottage to retrace the steps of the injured Silurian, Dr. Quinn is deaf to Miss Dawson’s pleas—“People are being killed and it’s your fault!”
A UNIT helicopter (!) is called in as they search for the wounded creature; Quinn manages to bluff his way out into the moors to rescue the Silurian and take it back to his cottage. What follows is a very amusing sequence of the Doctor being annoying as he invites himself into the cottage and comments on the heating and offers to fix it for Quinn. “You’d save yourself a lot of trouble if you let me help you.” At last defeated, the Doctor goes away. In Quinn’s office in the research center, the Doctor and Liz find a globe that’s purporting to show continental drift ; I think it’s supposed to be Pangaea. Then again, as we all know, Dr. Quinn’s paleontology is pretty sketchy—trying to make sense of when exactly the Silurians (a misnomer? we never really know what they call themselves) lived and whether it was during the Silurian, Eocene, or another age is as impossible as sorting out the chronology of the UNIT years. When the Doctor returns to Quinn’s cottage, he finds him dead (why did the Silurian kill him?), and we have the big reveal. Surely the image of the Silurians contributed a lot to the enduring image of Doctor Who monsters as men in rubber suits—they are wonderfully easy to poke fun at, but I think you quickly get used to them and let the story move on.
“Hello, are you a Silurian?” asks the Doctor of the creature as it moves toward him. This is a wonderfully Doctor-ish thing to do. “How can we help you?” The Doctor’s attempts to communicate with the creature come to nothing as it runs off. A UNIT soldier named Baker, who was responsible for shooting the Silurian back in episode two, gets captured by the Silurians after he returns to the caves despite being warned not to—“Not an invasion of big-booted soldiers,” the Doctor derides. “They’re not necessarily hostile!” The Doctor and Liz, in their miner gear, follow Baker’s route using the device the Doctor picked up from the unfortunate Quinn. (When Baker got stuck in quicksand, I couldn’t help think of the Fire Swamp from The Princess Bride.) When Liz catches a glimpse of the Silurians, she says, “Those creatures died out millions of years ago!” “Apparently not.”
In the research center, Permanent Under Secretary Masters (!) comes to deal with Dr. Lawrence’s grievances against UNIT’s interference in his nuclear program (“it’s so ridiculous to have all these search parties running around the caves!”). Everyone’s feeling the pressure; the Doctor doesn’t make it better when he arrives and explains what he’s seen. “We should kill them all!” exclaims the homicidal Miss Dawson, who is turning out—as one of the only two women in the story—to be quite the opposite of a role model for girls. When the Doctor’s pleas for peace fail to move the humans, he returns to the caves to try to reason with the Silurians. For his pains, they lock him up in the cage with Baker, and Pertwee gets to indulge in some fabulous drunken eye acting as “the Silurians attack him psychically with their third eye.”
When the Brigadier and his task force of soldiers bent on bloodshed pursue, they get stuck in a section of the cave and start to run out of air. Liz confesses that the Doctor has preemptively gone to assay for peace. “He wanted to prevent bloodshed.” Unfortunately, neither side seems to want to listen to the Doctor. The Silurians explain that they’ve been using the power from the reactor to revive their race, which was put into hibernation when it looked like the Moon was going to hit the Earth (um . . . what?). The Silurian Leader is sympathetic to the Doctor’s bid for peace, but his younger brethren want the Earth for themselves, not for the “apes.” “There is not room for two civilizations.” The Younger Silurian infects Baker with a virus before setting him free; one of the Silurian Leader’s last acts before he’s killed is to give the Doctor the virus in canister form so he can develop an antidote.
When the Doctor returns to the chaos at the research center, he tells everyone to stay back from the contagious Baker, going so far as to jump up onto a table and shout, “Look at your wrist—look at it!” The disease is indeed ugly and debilitating. The episode ends as Baker dies, having unfortunately spread the disease higgledy-piggedly. We next start the part of this story that, while rather gripping, doesn’t seem to belong with the rest of it! There’s some great location work as Masters takes the disease to London, spreading contagion across England and to France, as the Doctor and Liz work on the antidote. “I am a scientist, not an office boy,” Liz says, quite rightly, to the Brigadier when he tries to get her to admin work. (I feel like shouting that at temp agencies sometimes, “I am a writer, not an office boy!”)
This story teems with actors who will later be seen in other Doctor Who serials. Paul Darrow, as a young UNIT soldier, who of course later played Tekker in “Timelash.” Geoffrey Palmer, who, as Jamie pointed out, is going to crash into Earth later with the Titanic. And Peter Miles, one of the stand out actors of “Genesis of the Daleks,” is in a much less restrained villain role as Dr. Lawrence, who really turns out to be insanely oblivious to anything but his own work. “An imaginary epidemic!” he says when Liz tries to inoculate him against the disease. He ends the episode with what could be the performance of his career, barking mad psychosis before he ends violently from the disease, still citing UNIT for ruining his career. With an antidote eventually found, the Doctor is kidnapped by the new Silurian Leader, who had identified him as the most prevalent threat.
The Silurians next come up with a rather impressive and again, as they say, “game-changing” plot to destroy the Van Allen belt and make the Earth uninhabitable by all except themselves. (It occurred to me then that it was worth asking what the Silurians ate, as perhaps that destruction could have left them without a food source.) A tense confrontation between the new Silurian Leader and the Doctor occurs, but the Doctor and Liz are able to dupe the Silurians into going back into hibernation for 50 years. The new Leader is about to kill the Doctor for this trickery, but the Brigadier steps in and pumps him full of lead. “Well-done,” says the Doctor, and I go WHAA? Well-done for shooting someone in the back? It seems inconsistent with the end of the story—obviously something had to be done, and the Brig is qualified to wield the gun when the Doctor’s morals prevent it. But, still. In any case, the Doctor is angered and saddened when the Brigadier gives the order to blow up the Silurians’ base. “They just couldn’t take the risk,” says Liz. “He’s just wiped them out.”
There should have been another way!
“The Doctor’s qualified to do almost anything.” --The Brigadier
We’re back to the rambling multi-part stories that this era is known for, and while “The Silurians” could be reined in an episode or two—the red herring of the plague in episode six—overall it’s not a bad story. A lot of the ideas are very interesting, though I think their effectiveness is diluted by all the running around. The Doctor, as ever, and the Third Doctor in particular, begins his long-suffering battle against violence, his weariness over not being to get through to people palpable. Much of what I remember of the Third Doctor’s era is exasperation, which comes to a head in “Inferno.”
Caves make a very good setting for science fiction, almost as good as quarries. The caves, like the descent underground in stories like “Vampires of Venice,” symbolize the descent into the subconscious, and where better to find the monsters that populate our nightmares? The cave set here is primitive but effective. All of this is taking place under Wenley Moor (in Derbyshire, I’m told), which made me wistfully wonder how great it would be if the Doctor ever visited Carlsbad Caverns or Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. Also under Wenley Moor is a research center, headed by the irascible Dr. Lawrence. Attempts to characterize Dr. Lawrence only go so far: when asked to comment on his singlemindedness and uptight attitude, the Brigadier suggests, “He slipped up badly several years ago and is very very careful.” But in the caves, the researchers are prone to getting killed—or worse.
The beginning of this serial sees the Doctor working on his new car, the ebullient yellow Bessie. (Jamie rightly pointed out that it might be insulting to Liz to have a car named after her!) Liz continues to get her dress sense from another planet. She and the Doctor are summoned to Wenley Moor by the Brigadier. “I never report anywhere and certainly not forthwith!” The research center reminds me a bit of the interior of “Tomb of the Cybermen.” Its claim to fame is a proton accelerator, the aim to provide “cheap, safe atomic energy” (an aim, I think, that is echoed in “Inferno,” emblematic of the time in which the programme was made but also, certainly for the writers, something the forward-thinking 1980s of their imaginations would be concerned with). Although the Doctor starts his visit with nonchalance—“I can’t find my sonic screwdriver”—he quickly turns serious. “Your nuclear reactor could be a giant atomic bomb.”
What UNIT, and by extension, the Doctor, are investigating are a series of energy problems with the reactor as well as problems with some of the personnel. As the Doctor and Liz begin questioning people, it becomes apparent that Dr. Quinn, one of Dr. Lawrence’s top scientists, is hiding something. In the log book, the Doctor finds pages missing. One of the researchers, though, has a lot more missing than pages—his marbles! In the medical quarters, the Doctor finds him alternating between psychosis and drawing on the walls. “Stress turned him into a wonderful Paleolithic artist?”
The Doctor, as ever, has to investigate this himself, so he gets kitted out in the 1970s version of “The Satan Pit”’s jumpsuit. Wandering around, the Doctor is surprised to find himself warded off but not killed by a rather unconvincing dinosaur. Expert guesses suggest this is an allosaurus or a megladon, but even by the end of the serial I was still trying to figure out why there was a dinosaur in the caves at all. Is it just because Malcolm Hulke loved dinosaurs?
Unfortunately, any power from the episode one ending is dispelled by the Doctor discovering dinosaur footprints after the big reveal of the dinosaur. When he tells the others what he saw, he’s sure to add, “It could have been prehistoric.” Liz Shaw, relegated by the Brigadier into going through personnel files, shoots back, “Haven’t you ever heard of female emancipation?” Alas, the Brigadier, between his sexism and pro-militarianism, doesn’t escape unscathed in this story. “Present them with a new problem and they shoot at it,” ruminates the Doctor after UNIT suggests sending armed men down the caves to deal with “whatever.” The soldiers do find something, which manages to escape up to the surface, leaving “traces of blood.” Making up for the dinosaur gaffe, the rest of the serial masterfully hides the true prehistoric protagonists until the end of episode three. This is the bona fide beginning of Monster-Vision, which has never been better used: the monster’s vision is in triplicate.
Against the Doctor’s assertion that Dr. Quinn might be involved in the personnel problems, his assistant Miss Dawson passionately defends him: “Dr. Quinn works harder than anyone at this center!” The Doctor is quick to humor her, but the whole Quinn/Dawson thing argues for a lot going on at the subtextual level. A well-directed sequence follows the prehistoric creature to a nearby village where it takes refuge in a barn. A bumbling and frightened farmer attacks it with a pitch fork; his wife reacts in terror, giving us this immortal line from the Doctor: “She was found in the barn, paralyzed with fear. She may have seen something.” Off on a wild goose chase, the Doctor leaves Liz in the barn—when the monster attacks!
Liz is spared, of course, and by the time the Doctor and the Brigadier et al get back, the creature has escaped. Meanwhile, Dr. Quinn has been doing mysterious things in his country cottage. A worried Miss Dawson had followed him, “I wanted to know if you were all right.” He is dismissive of her, just as he is dismissive of the Silurians with whom he has done a deed: he just wants easy fame with the secrets of their scientists. Persuaded by the Silurian Leader to take a homing device to the cottage to retrace the steps of the injured Silurian, Dr. Quinn is deaf to Miss Dawson’s pleas—“People are being killed and it’s your fault!”
A UNIT helicopter (!) is called in as they search for the wounded creature; Quinn manages to bluff his way out into the moors to rescue the Silurian and take it back to his cottage. What follows is a very amusing sequence of the Doctor being annoying as he invites himself into the cottage and comments on the heating and offers to fix it for Quinn. “You’d save yourself a lot of trouble if you let me help you.” At last defeated, the Doctor goes away. In Quinn’s office in the research center, the Doctor and Liz find a globe that’s purporting to show continental drift ; I think it’s supposed to be Pangaea. Then again, as we all know, Dr. Quinn’s paleontology is pretty sketchy—trying to make sense of when exactly the Silurians (a misnomer? we never really know what they call themselves) lived and whether it was during the Silurian, Eocene, or another age is as impossible as sorting out the chronology of the UNIT years. When the Doctor returns to Quinn’s cottage, he finds him dead (why did the Silurian kill him?), and we have the big reveal. Surely the image of the Silurians contributed a lot to the enduring image of Doctor Who monsters as men in rubber suits—they are wonderfully easy to poke fun at, but I think you quickly get used to them and let the story move on.
“Hello, are you a Silurian?” asks the Doctor of the creature as it moves toward him. This is a wonderfully Doctor-ish thing to do. “How can we help you?” The Doctor’s attempts to communicate with the creature come to nothing as it runs off. A UNIT soldier named Baker, who was responsible for shooting the Silurian back in episode two, gets captured by the Silurians after he returns to the caves despite being warned not to—“Not an invasion of big-booted soldiers,” the Doctor derides. “They’re not necessarily hostile!” The Doctor and Liz, in their miner gear, follow Baker’s route using the device the Doctor picked up from the unfortunate Quinn. (When Baker got stuck in quicksand, I couldn’t help think of the Fire Swamp from The Princess Bride.) When Liz catches a glimpse of the Silurians, she says, “Those creatures died out millions of years ago!” “Apparently not.”
In the research center, Permanent Under Secretary Masters (!) comes to deal with Dr. Lawrence’s grievances against UNIT’s interference in his nuclear program (“it’s so ridiculous to have all these search parties running around the caves!”). Everyone’s feeling the pressure; the Doctor doesn’t make it better when he arrives and explains what he’s seen. “We should kill them all!” exclaims the homicidal Miss Dawson, who is turning out—as one of the only two women in the story—to be quite the opposite of a role model for girls. When the Doctor’s pleas for peace fail to move the humans, he returns to the caves to try to reason with the Silurians. For his pains, they lock him up in the cage with Baker, and Pertwee gets to indulge in some fabulous drunken eye acting as “the Silurians attack him psychically with their third eye.”
When the Brigadier and his task force of soldiers bent on bloodshed pursue, they get stuck in a section of the cave and start to run out of air. Liz confesses that the Doctor has preemptively gone to assay for peace. “He wanted to prevent bloodshed.” Unfortunately, neither side seems to want to listen to the Doctor. The Silurians explain that they’ve been using the power from the reactor to revive their race, which was put into hibernation when it looked like the Moon was going to hit the Earth (um . . . what?). The Silurian Leader is sympathetic to the Doctor’s bid for peace, but his younger brethren want the Earth for themselves, not for the “apes.” “There is not room for two civilizations.” The Younger Silurian infects Baker with a virus before setting him free; one of the Silurian Leader’s last acts before he’s killed is to give the Doctor the virus in canister form so he can develop an antidote.
When the Doctor returns to the chaos at the research center, he tells everyone to stay back from the contagious Baker, going so far as to jump up onto a table and shout, “Look at your wrist—look at it!” The disease is indeed ugly and debilitating. The episode ends as Baker dies, having unfortunately spread the disease higgledy-piggedly. We next start the part of this story that, while rather gripping, doesn’t seem to belong with the rest of it! There’s some great location work as Masters takes the disease to London, spreading contagion across England and to France, as the Doctor and Liz work on the antidote. “I am a scientist, not an office boy,” Liz says, quite rightly, to the Brigadier when he tries to get her to admin work. (I feel like shouting that at temp agencies sometimes, “I am a writer, not an office boy!”)
This story teems with actors who will later be seen in other Doctor Who serials. Paul Darrow, as a young UNIT soldier, who of course later played Tekker in “Timelash.” Geoffrey Palmer, who, as Jamie pointed out, is going to crash into Earth later with the Titanic. And Peter Miles, one of the stand out actors of “Genesis of the Daleks,” is in a much less restrained villain role as Dr. Lawrence, who really turns out to be insanely oblivious to anything but his own work. “An imaginary epidemic!” he says when Liz tries to inoculate him against the disease. He ends the episode with what could be the performance of his career, barking mad psychosis before he ends violently from the disease, still citing UNIT for ruining his career. With an antidote eventually found, the Doctor is kidnapped by the new Silurian Leader, who had identified him as the most prevalent threat.
The Silurians next come up with a rather impressive and again, as they say, “game-changing” plot to destroy the Van Allen belt and make the Earth uninhabitable by all except themselves. (It occurred to me then that it was worth asking what the Silurians ate, as perhaps that destruction could have left them without a food source.) A tense confrontation between the new Silurian Leader and the Doctor occurs, but the Doctor and Liz are able to dupe the Silurians into going back into hibernation for 50 years. The new Leader is about to kill the Doctor for this trickery, but the Brigadier steps in and pumps him full of lead. “Well-done,” says the Doctor, and I go WHAA? Well-done for shooting someone in the back? It seems inconsistent with the end of the story—obviously something had to be done, and the Brig is qualified to wield the gun when the Doctor’s morals prevent it. But, still. In any case, the Doctor is angered and saddened when the Brigadier gives the order to blow up the Silurians’ base. “They just couldn’t take the risk,” says Liz. “He’s just wiped them out.”
There should have been another way!
spearhead from space
10/5/10 “Spearhead from Space”
“On this planet, there’s a saying: it’s never too late.” --The Doctor
I’ve gone on record many times as saying that the UNIT years really don’t do much for me, but slowly watching Pertwee from the beginning and going (as much as possible) in chronological order has done a lot to dispel my prejudices. In particular, this first story is tightly crafted, suspenseful, and gives us a charming, slightly barmy Doctor, a prickly scientist who still wears mini-skirts, and a strange bridge between 1960s and 1970s Doctor Who. I actually found very little with which to fault it; though undeniably “of its time,” it also has the timelessness that marks the best Doctor Who. Certainly both the TV Movie and “Rose” owe it a large debt as a good example of how to press the reset button with verve and narrative.
Jamie in fact notes that the very first shot, of Earth from space, is echoed in “Rose.” A meteorite shower, characterized by the recent heat wave, sees the newly regenerated Doctor falling out of the TARDIS and into the woods; I say this every time, but new Doctors look so strange in their predecessors’ clothes. Not realizing the Doctor has left it, the Brigadier orders the TARDIS guarded by UNIT men. A predecessor of Pigbin Josh encounters the corn puffs of doom (that must be the spearhead from space, I guess?). Bizarre muzak (or “special sounds”) are provided by Brian Hodgson as UNIT scientist Liz Shaw arrives. One of the biggest questions of the 1970 season of Doctor Who is where is Liz Shaw getting her fashion sense? Is it from the past, ie 1969 when this story was filmed? Or is the future, since the UNIT years are contentiously set in the 1980s? One could argue for both as her short skirts defy belief and link her more closely with Polly than Jo Grant, and yet in this story her hair definitely seems to be post-Princess Leia.
Received wisdom (and Barry Letts’ autobiography, for that matter) dictates that Liz Shaw was replaced because, as a scientist, she was the Doctor’s equal and made explanation through the plot difficult. Jamie has also suggested, with some accuracy, that Caroline John, despite the short skirts, was maybe not the most attractive of all the actresses to play a companion, and it is, alas, a requirement for the companions to be somehow attractive. Her character is a shock in this first story: her sarcasm and skepticism with the Brigadier and later the Doctor verge on the acidic. Being briefed on the function of UNIT, Liz remarks wryly, “you produce invisible ink and that sort of thing.” When the Brig explains that the function of UNIT is to “deal with the odd, the unexplained. Anything on Earth . . . or even beyond . . .” Liz makes a very good point. “Why is Earth any more likely to be invaded now than in the previous 55 million years?” The Brig counters this by adding the recent probe activity into space. When Liz’s harshness becomes too much, he says, “It’s not my habit to tell lies, Miss Shaw.”
Meanwhile, the poor collapsed Doctor has been found and brought to hospital. The perturbed medic thinks “someone in the x ray department is having a game!” when the Doctor’s x rays are revealed: “two hearts!” Anyone with the TV Movie burned into her consciousness (me) can’t help but react: it’s very similar to what Matthew Jacobs ended up with—“double exposure.” (Fortunately the Doctor doesn’t seem to feel like kissing Dr Beavis.) Sensitive to the Doctor’s strange physiology, the poor medic cries, “I don’t know if it makes me a doctor or a vet!” While the Doctor languishes in the hospital, nameless and amnesiac, a guy is randomly hoovering in a corridor. Actually, he isn’t: he’s about to alert the press to the UNIT investigation (and he’s Welsh!). When the press scent blood, the Brig gives them the silent treatment. This sequence, surprisingly effective with handheld film, combined with the new title sequence and, oh my gosh, color, really gives a new feel to this era of Who.
When the Doctor’s blood can’t be identified, the Brig comes to see the extraordinary patient. “He’s a complete stranger.” The Doctor then wakes up and asks for a mirror. “Oh no! That’s not me at all,” he says. It’s the first time we get the now-familiar routine of the new Doctor coming to terms with his (disappointing?) new appearance. “I don’t know,” he decides, “I think it’s [his nose] rather distinctive.” In another parallel with the TV Movie, the Doctor exclaims, “I must find my shoes!” “We don’t know what’s normal for him, do we?” The Doctor is acting both manic and Troughton-esque while at the same time displaying some of the deviousness of the First Doctor. The episode ends with him escaping from the hospital in a wheelchair!
With the Doctor recaptured, a plastics-worker named Ransome has returned from the US to find his place usurped at a factory that produces, shudder, baby dolls. The whole sequence in the factory reminded me of some Twilight Zone stories and, if anything, felt more ‘60s than ever. As Ransome gets the sense that his old partner is being controlled, he becomes less interested in getting his job back: “If there’s anything wrong, perhaps I can help you.” In the end, he is turned away and is not allowed into his storeroom where all his equipment is; Channing, the new star of the plastics factory, ensures his departure. Between this, the meteorite, and Liz Shaw, the Brig is at his wit’s end: “I deal with fact, not science fiction,” she says coolly, refusing to investigate the strange properties of the meteorites. “I’m not a fool, I don’t follow shadows,” says the exasperated Brig. Liz is frustrated because “I didn’t ask to come here.” It does make me wonder about Liz’s backstory, something that isn’t really addressed in her brief time on Doctor Who and in what scraps in other forms of Who media I’ve read, is only hinted at.
The Doctor makes another escape into the changing area of the hospital, where he takes the infamous shower and picks an outfit: a rather flamboyant cape from a visiting official (my favorite Pertwee costume) and a stylish Phantom-y fedora that he later discards. Looking at his face, he decides “It rather grows on you.” Barging back in on Liz and the Brig, he examines the fragment of plastic meteorite. Meanwhile an official visit to the plastics factory has revealed nothing out of the ordinary for the Brig’s superior, Major General Scobie, but when the disgruntled and curious Ransome returns to investigate, he’s in for a nasty shock: Autons! Now iconic, and indeed what RTD chose to reboot the scare factor in “Rose,” I have once again gone on record many times in saying that I had a hard time walking by mannequins in the mall when I was little because I feared them coming to life just as in Doctor Who (which means I must have seen “Spearhead” or “Terror of the Autons” when I was very small but I have no memory of the stories themselves).
Ransome manages to escape and finds his way to UNIT, trying to persuade them to investigate the plastics factory’s dark deeds. The jumpy soldiers guarding the TARDIS (and who accidentally shot the Doctor!) have brought the TARDIS back to UNIT HQ; the Pigbin Josh counterpart from the beginning has taken a meteorite home with him and hidden it in a trunk. When he considers going to UNIT for a reward, he leaves his wife at the mercy of the Autons. Being a good country woman, she naturally has a shotgun to defend herself. However, the Auton doesn’t seem to be affected by bullets—the first of the Brig’s alien menaces immune to bullets? Fortunately, she isn’t killed. But when Channing, who is in charge of whole Auton operation, orders “total destruction,” he means it.
The Doctor and Liz have “tried a dozen different tests” on the meteorite material, but when they pick up the one from the farm, the Doctor exclaims, “There’s some form of intelligence in that globe.” While the Doctor has agreed to help in this investigation (having proved that he is the Doctor), he does take advantage of Liz Shaw’s gullibility to try to run off in the TARDIS the first chance he gets. She is understandably annoyed at his having set her up, but he fails because, of course, the Time Lords have taken away his ability to pilot the TARDIS. “I’m sorry. The temptation was too strong, my dear.” The episode ends on an unerringly creepy note: General Scobie, deemed to be the easiest way into UNIT who Channing fears are investigating too deeply into the plastics factory, is greeted at his door by his own doppelganger. This is straight out of the annals of Gothic horror everywhere and makes a very effective episode ending.
In the final act, Channing reveals that the manifestation of the Nestene Consciousness—a rather horrific pulsating eye/brain in a box, which later has tentacles (!)—is nearly ready and that they are going to take over the world with their plastic replicas of important world figures. “Humans are difficult to predict.” This is one of my favorite moments of Doctor Who ever as the Doctor and Liz make a detour to Madame Tussaud’s! Total creepiness. I mean, that’s the great thing about wax: it’s almost lifelike, but it’s more akin to death-like. That’s why it’s fun but slightly unnerving to be a dark room full of wax dummies. The thought that they could come to life preys upon even the dullest imaginations.
The Doctor, in an attempt to stop the Autons, has Liz working around the clock. When the Autons make their iconic escape from shop windows and assault the unknowing populace with their hand guns, the production team pulls out all the stops. Of course, in contrast to the 2005 Autons, these look rather obviously like people in plastic masks. Still, their lurching, not-quite-human movements are the same and carry the same menace. The sequence doesn’t hold back in terms of carnage. The finale teems with explosions, the Doctor getting strangled by tentacles, Channing dissolving into plastic, and the Nestene being repelled back into space. As a coda, the Doctor is loathe to return to the old skool car he stole and feels a little guilty about the clothes he “borrowed.” He agrees to help the Brigadier and UNIT with Liz Shaw.
If Robert Holmes could read Autonomy, the Tenth Doctor book about the Autons, I wonder what he would think. Other than masterstroke for creating fear out of ordinary objects—for which Holmes and Steven Moffat both have an affinity—I wonder if Holmes intended any social critique upon monsters made of plastic. This being 1970, I think that could well be the case.
“On this planet, there’s a saying: it’s never too late.” --The Doctor
I’ve gone on record many times as saying that the UNIT years really don’t do much for me, but slowly watching Pertwee from the beginning and going (as much as possible) in chronological order has done a lot to dispel my prejudices. In particular, this first story is tightly crafted, suspenseful, and gives us a charming, slightly barmy Doctor, a prickly scientist who still wears mini-skirts, and a strange bridge between 1960s and 1970s Doctor Who. I actually found very little with which to fault it; though undeniably “of its time,” it also has the timelessness that marks the best Doctor Who. Certainly both the TV Movie and “Rose” owe it a large debt as a good example of how to press the reset button with verve and narrative.
Jamie in fact notes that the very first shot, of Earth from space, is echoed in “Rose.” A meteorite shower, characterized by the recent heat wave, sees the newly regenerated Doctor falling out of the TARDIS and into the woods; I say this every time, but new Doctors look so strange in their predecessors’ clothes. Not realizing the Doctor has left it, the Brigadier orders the TARDIS guarded by UNIT men. A predecessor of Pigbin Josh encounters the corn puffs of doom (that must be the spearhead from space, I guess?). Bizarre muzak (or “special sounds”) are provided by Brian Hodgson as UNIT scientist Liz Shaw arrives. One of the biggest questions of the 1970 season of Doctor Who is where is Liz Shaw getting her fashion sense? Is it from the past, ie 1969 when this story was filmed? Or is the future, since the UNIT years are contentiously set in the 1980s? One could argue for both as her short skirts defy belief and link her more closely with Polly than Jo Grant, and yet in this story her hair definitely seems to be post-Princess Leia.
Received wisdom (and Barry Letts’ autobiography, for that matter) dictates that Liz Shaw was replaced because, as a scientist, she was the Doctor’s equal and made explanation through the plot difficult. Jamie has also suggested, with some accuracy, that Caroline John, despite the short skirts, was maybe not the most attractive of all the actresses to play a companion, and it is, alas, a requirement for the companions to be somehow attractive. Her character is a shock in this first story: her sarcasm and skepticism with the Brigadier and later the Doctor verge on the acidic. Being briefed on the function of UNIT, Liz remarks wryly, “you produce invisible ink and that sort of thing.” When the Brig explains that the function of UNIT is to “deal with the odd, the unexplained. Anything on Earth . . . or even beyond . . .” Liz makes a very good point. “Why is Earth any more likely to be invaded now than in the previous 55 million years?” The Brig counters this by adding the recent probe activity into space. When Liz’s harshness becomes too much, he says, “It’s not my habit to tell lies, Miss Shaw.”
Meanwhile, the poor collapsed Doctor has been found and brought to hospital. The perturbed medic thinks “someone in the x ray department is having a game!” when the Doctor’s x rays are revealed: “two hearts!” Anyone with the TV Movie burned into her consciousness (me) can’t help but react: it’s very similar to what Matthew Jacobs ended up with—“double exposure.” (Fortunately the Doctor doesn’t seem to feel like kissing Dr Beavis.) Sensitive to the Doctor’s strange physiology, the poor medic cries, “I don’t know if it makes me a doctor or a vet!” While the Doctor languishes in the hospital, nameless and amnesiac, a guy is randomly hoovering in a corridor. Actually, he isn’t: he’s about to alert the press to the UNIT investigation (and he’s Welsh!). When the press scent blood, the Brig gives them the silent treatment. This sequence, surprisingly effective with handheld film, combined with the new title sequence and, oh my gosh, color, really gives a new feel to this era of Who.
When the Doctor’s blood can’t be identified, the Brig comes to see the extraordinary patient. “He’s a complete stranger.” The Doctor then wakes up and asks for a mirror. “Oh no! That’s not me at all,” he says. It’s the first time we get the now-familiar routine of the new Doctor coming to terms with his (disappointing?) new appearance. “I don’t know,” he decides, “I think it’s [his nose] rather distinctive.” In another parallel with the TV Movie, the Doctor exclaims, “I must find my shoes!” “We don’t know what’s normal for him, do we?” The Doctor is acting both manic and Troughton-esque while at the same time displaying some of the deviousness of the First Doctor. The episode ends with him escaping from the hospital in a wheelchair!
With the Doctor recaptured, a plastics-worker named Ransome has returned from the US to find his place usurped at a factory that produces, shudder, baby dolls. The whole sequence in the factory reminded me of some Twilight Zone stories and, if anything, felt more ‘60s than ever. As Ransome gets the sense that his old partner is being controlled, he becomes less interested in getting his job back: “If there’s anything wrong, perhaps I can help you.” In the end, he is turned away and is not allowed into his storeroom where all his equipment is; Channing, the new star of the plastics factory, ensures his departure. Between this, the meteorite, and Liz Shaw, the Brig is at his wit’s end: “I deal with fact, not science fiction,” she says coolly, refusing to investigate the strange properties of the meteorites. “I’m not a fool, I don’t follow shadows,” says the exasperated Brig. Liz is frustrated because “I didn’t ask to come here.” It does make me wonder about Liz’s backstory, something that isn’t really addressed in her brief time on Doctor Who and in what scraps in other forms of Who media I’ve read, is only hinted at.
The Doctor makes another escape into the changing area of the hospital, where he takes the infamous shower and picks an outfit: a rather flamboyant cape from a visiting official (my favorite Pertwee costume) and a stylish Phantom-y fedora that he later discards. Looking at his face, he decides “It rather grows on you.” Barging back in on Liz and the Brig, he examines the fragment of plastic meteorite. Meanwhile an official visit to the plastics factory has revealed nothing out of the ordinary for the Brig’s superior, Major General Scobie, but when the disgruntled and curious Ransome returns to investigate, he’s in for a nasty shock: Autons! Now iconic, and indeed what RTD chose to reboot the scare factor in “Rose,” I have once again gone on record many times in saying that I had a hard time walking by mannequins in the mall when I was little because I feared them coming to life just as in Doctor Who (which means I must have seen “Spearhead” or “Terror of the Autons” when I was very small but I have no memory of the stories themselves).
Ransome manages to escape and finds his way to UNIT, trying to persuade them to investigate the plastics factory’s dark deeds. The jumpy soldiers guarding the TARDIS (and who accidentally shot the Doctor!) have brought the TARDIS back to UNIT HQ; the Pigbin Josh counterpart from the beginning has taken a meteorite home with him and hidden it in a trunk. When he considers going to UNIT for a reward, he leaves his wife at the mercy of the Autons. Being a good country woman, she naturally has a shotgun to defend herself. However, the Auton doesn’t seem to be affected by bullets—the first of the Brig’s alien menaces immune to bullets? Fortunately, she isn’t killed. But when Channing, who is in charge of whole Auton operation, orders “total destruction,” he means it.
The Doctor and Liz have “tried a dozen different tests” on the meteorite material, but when they pick up the one from the farm, the Doctor exclaims, “There’s some form of intelligence in that globe.” While the Doctor has agreed to help in this investigation (having proved that he is the Doctor), he does take advantage of Liz Shaw’s gullibility to try to run off in the TARDIS the first chance he gets. She is understandably annoyed at his having set her up, but he fails because, of course, the Time Lords have taken away his ability to pilot the TARDIS. “I’m sorry. The temptation was too strong, my dear.” The episode ends on an unerringly creepy note: General Scobie, deemed to be the easiest way into UNIT who Channing fears are investigating too deeply into the plastics factory, is greeted at his door by his own doppelganger. This is straight out of the annals of Gothic horror everywhere and makes a very effective episode ending.
In the final act, Channing reveals that the manifestation of the Nestene Consciousness—a rather horrific pulsating eye/brain in a box, which later has tentacles (!)—is nearly ready and that they are going to take over the world with their plastic replicas of important world figures. “Humans are difficult to predict.” This is one of my favorite moments of Doctor Who ever as the Doctor and Liz make a detour to Madame Tussaud’s! Total creepiness. I mean, that’s the great thing about wax: it’s almost lifelike, but it’s more akin to death-like. That’s why it’s fun but slightly unnerving to be a dark room full of wax dummies. The thought that they could come to life preys upon even the dullest imaginations.
The Doctor, in an attempt to stop the Autons, has Liz working around the clock. When the Autons make their iconic escape from shop windows and assault the unknowing populace with their hand guns, the production team pulls out all the stops. Of course, in contrast to the 2005 Autons, these look rather obviously like people in plastic masks. Still, their lurching, not-quite-human movements are the same and carry the same menace. The sequence doesn’t hold back in terms of carnage. The finale teems with explosions, the Doctor getting strangled by tentacles, Channing dissolving into plastic, and the Nestene being repelled back into space. As a coda, the Doctor is loathe to return to the old skool car he stole and feels a little guilty about the clothes he “borrowed.” He agrees to help the Brigadier and UNIT with Liz Shaw.
If Robert Holmes could read Autonomy, the Tenth Doctor book about the Autons, I wonder what he would think. Other than masterstroke for creating fear out of ordinary objects—for which Holmes and Steven Moffat both have an affinity—I wonder if Holmes intended any social critique upon monsters made of plastic. This being 1970, I think that could well be the case.
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