Spearhead From Space

I deal with facts, not science fiction ideas.--Liz Shaw

When Autons attack

Episode one, 3 January 1970
Episode two, 10 January 1970
Episode three, 17 January 1970
Episode four, 24 January 1970

Written by Robert Holmes
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Derrick Sherwin

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor (first appearance)
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Caroline John as Dr Liz Shaw (first appearance)

Doctor Who was coming back to the air after its longest-ever layoff, with a brand new producer, a brand new Doctor and a brand new companion.  The show had changed drastically since it was last on the air.  Technological standards had advanced, giving the programme a more modern look, but also necessitating a shift in emphasis from dialogue-based storytelling to visual spectacle.

But narratively the show was reorienting itself as well, focusing now solely on Earth and humanity rather than the depths of outer space.  To accommodate that, for the first time Doctor Who would have a continuing cast of supporting characters, individuals besides just the Doctor and his companion who would appear from story to story and be regular players in events.  This also meant that the model of the Doctor's companions changed, adopting for the first time the idea of an attractive twentysomething companion as the sole companion--throughout the 60s, the model had been two companions: an action-oriented adult male and an intelligent but undeniably childlike adolescent girl.  From now on, the Doctor would take over the action scenes himself, making him more of a super hero.

To introduce this brave new day in Doctor Who storytelling, the new production team opened with a creepy tale of an alien intelligence landing on Earth and effecting a takeover of the planet by possessing plastic and bringing it to life, turning shop dummies into walking, murderous zombies ...

Fans of New Who who are unfamiliar with the classic programme know this very well, of course, because that's a perfect description of the programme's resurrection with "Rose" in 2005.  But I'm not talking about "Rose"--I'm talking about "Spearhead From Space".

We've talked before about how Doctor Who has done many pilots; Spearhead, its second (and the first Doctor Who story produced in colour), is arguably its most successful, since it led to the longest uninterrupted run the programme has ever had, sixteen consecutive seasons.  It has three things to do: it has to introduce us to the new Doctor, introduce us to the UNIT setup, and tell us an example of the sort of story we can expect from the retooled Who.

It opts to concentrate on the new characters first; the plotline of the Nestene invasion takes a back seat throughout part one and much of part two.  The story opens with Dr Elizabeth (Liz) Shaw, a brilliant Cambridge polymath, being conscripted against her will into the service of UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, under the command of Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart.  UNIT is an international military organisation charged with secretly defending the Earth from alien invasions; they've already defeated a landing by the Cybermen a few years ago.

Meanwhile the Doctor has landed on Earth to begin the sentence imposed upon him by the Time Lords: exile to the twentieth century, and a change of his appearance.  He's still unwell from his regeneration, so he spends the first two episodes in a hospital; UNIT get called in when it's discovered he arrived in a police box.  By the end of part two, though, he's fully recovered, had a nude shower scene (yes), convinced the Brigadier that he actually is the Doctor despite having a completely different appearance, and is hard at work with Liz trying to figure out exactly what's going on with what turns out to be the Nestene invasion.

The Nestene is an alien consciousness that has landed on Earth and taken over a plastics factory outside London.  Their Special Alien Superpower is that they can possess plastic, bringing it to life.  They therefore construct themselves a plastic army, divided into two sorts of soldier.  The first are the Autons, which are shop window mannequins that come to life and start killing anyone in sight.  The second are copies or real humans, which the Nestene use to replace political and military leaders.

(The replicas are well done--the thin sheen of Vaseline applied to the actors' faces and hands effectively conveys the idea of their plasticity while still leaving them looking like convincing human beings.)

One chilly morning, the final Nestene assault begins, with the famous scene of the dummies coming to life, breaking out of their shop windows and trudging inexorably down the street, shooting down terrified pedestrians.  This scene is copied directly in "Rose", though considering how proud the 2005 production team are of the improvements they made to it, I've got to say that Lisa actually found the 1970 iteration by far the creepier.

By now the Doctor and Liz have constructed a device that will block the Nestene's control signals to its plastic army, but only if it can get close enough to the Nestene's central consciousness.  So while the Brigadier leads a team of UNIT commandos in an attack on the plastic factory, the Doctor and Liz slip round the back, get to the Nestene command centre and render the Nestene's central brain inert.  At the story's conclusion, the Doctor agrees to come aboard as UNIT's scientific advisor permanently.

Doctor in the shower!

What Lisa thought

She took to Jon Pertwee's Doctor instantly.  She really liked him.  She especially found his shower scene in part two amusing.  And she thought the switch to colour made a nice change of pace.  She didn't like Liz, though--I'm wondering if she just doesn't like confident, competent adult women.

Part four was a big hit.  There was the effectiveness of General Scobie's double, as mentioned above.  There was the creepy scene where the shop dummies suddenly come to life and break out of their windows.  And there was the Doctor and Liz's confrontation with the Nestene, which is presented as a wonderful sort of pulsing, giant membrane behind a glass wall--though when it grows a tentacle that snakes out and strangles the Doctor, that's decidedly less effectively, since Pertwee clearly has to wrap the tentacle around his own neck while (badly) acting like he's being strangled.  But the confrontation scene is heightened by cuts to the UNIT commandos outside, who are being steadily cut down in their firefight with the inexorable Autons.

So a bright start to the new era.  She's looking forward to more.

The next story will be "Doctor Who and the Silurians".

The War Games

The War Chief: If we hold the only space-time travel machine, we can rule our galaxy without fear of opposition.
The Doctor: Yes, but without me and my TARDIS, your ambitions are going to be rather hard to realise, aren't they?
The War Chief: That's right. And without my influence, these aliens will surely kill you.

Jamie and Zoe ally with a Mexican revolutionary, a German officer, a British officer from 1917 and a British sergeant from the 1890s.

Episode one, 19 April 1969
Episode two, 26 April 1969
Episode three, 3 May 1969
Episode four, 10 May 1969
Episode five, 17 May 1969
Episode six, 24 May 1969
Episode seven, 31 May 1969
Episode eight, 7 June 1969
Episode nine, 14 June 1969
Episode ten, 21 June 1969

Written by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks
Directed by David Maloney
Produced by Derrick Sherwin

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor (last regular appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon (last regular appearance)
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot (last regular appearance)

This is exciting.  This is one of the great moments in Doctor Who, a moment that recaptures that sense of mystery--that sense of the sinister--that surrounded the Doctor as a character in "An Unearthly Child", "The Time Meddler" and "The Power of the Daleks".  It builds up on you--at first, you think it's a straight historical adventure.  Then you realise it's more complicated than that--there are aliens involved.  And time travel.  And then you start to suspect that it's going to be even bigger than that--because we're about learn the grand secret of the Doctor's origins.

But all that is unfortunately lost on the modernday viewer, because we already know all about the Doctor's people.  There's no tension about them for us.  In fact, we probably go into it already knowing that this is the story that's notable exactly because it's the first time we ever heard of the Doctor's origins.  Certainly I think most viewers nowadays don't even consider that up until this moment, it hadn't even been definitively established that the Doctor isn't human.

Which means that "The War Games" has a reputation nowadays as a flaccid, bloated, boring story, and that's wholly unfair.  It could stand a bit of trimming, to be sure--I don't think you'd have a hard time reducing it to only six or seven episodes.  But really, the reason most people nowadays find it dragging are because it spends its second half depending for its tension upon a mystery that is no longer any mystery at all, and as a consequence the modern Doctor Who fan basically spends the first nine entire episodes waiting for revelations that don't arrive until part ten, and that don't tell him anything he hasn't already known for forty years.

The TARDIS arrives in the hell on Earth that is No Man's Land, the desolate, lethal wasteland between the Allied and German trenches during the First World War.  They're soon apprehended by British troops, and it's shortly after that that we realise all is not as it seems: the general commanding the British troops has a pair of odd-looking glasses that, when he dons them, allow him to give hypnotic commands to his troops, altering their memories and telling them how they should perceive certain people and events.

The Doctor, of course, quickly realises that the general is either an alien or a time traveller.  He, Jamie and Zoe managed to break a pair of British personnel--a lieutenant named Carstairs and an ambulance driver called Lady Jennifer--of the conditioning that makes them obey the general's hypnotic commands, and together the five of them escape the British base.

Pursued both by British troops and Germans, they pass through a strange mist, and come out on its far side to find a completely changed landscape--the churned mud of concussion of artillery from No Man's Land has been replaced by a beautiful, breezy virgin hillside--and a Roman legion bearing down upon them, led by distinctly unfriendly-looking charioteers.

So the Doctor and his friends turn and charge back into the mist, only this time, when they get to the other side, they find themselves caught between Union and Confederate troops from the American Civil War.

It takes a while for the team to figure out what's going on.  None of these wars are actually real; when they pass through the mist, they're actually moving from one zone of an alien planet to another.  Human soldiers from each of the various wars in Earth's history are being removed from their proper time and space by an alien race, and transported here to re-enact these wars as training so that they can be used as soldiers in the aliens' war of conquest to take over the entire galaxy.

And to kidnap these human soldiers, they're using TARDISes.

(Actually, they're using scaled-down versions of TARDISes called SIDRATs.  No prizes for guessing how they came up with that name.)

Eventually, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe escape from the war zones and sneak into the aliens' command centre.  There, they find a political power struggle in progress, between the Security Chief and the War Chief.  The Security Chief is responsible for the operation of the command center; the War Chief oversees the abduction of human soldiers and the conduct of the war games.

And there's something else about the War Chief--he's not a member of the same species as the rest of the aliens.  Rather, he comes from a time-travelling race; he's the one who brought time travel technology to the aliens, so that they could implement their plan of building a brainwashed human army.

Which time-travelling race is he from?  Well, when he catches sight of the Doctor, the two of them instantly recognise each other.  (It's a nice moment, because the implications of that aren't explained for a little while.)

The Security Chief therefore concludes that the Doctor is from "the War Chief's people--the Time Lords!" and that the War Chief is betraying the aliens.  He has two hypotheses: either the War Chief and the Doctor are working for the Time Lords, or else they are both renegade Time Lords intent on subverting the aliens' plan so that they can take over the galaxy themselves.

Again, the revelation over the Doctor's and War Chief's people is very nicely done.  "Time Lords" gets mentioned very infrequently, and when it does, it's only in passing.  It's not until episode nine that they're discussed at length.  Up through episode eight, you learn about the Doctor's background so gradually that you don't realise just how much you've learnt.

There's a theory, by the war, that the War Chief actually constitutes the first appearance of the Master.  It's a theory I'm not unsympathetic to, though there's nothing direct to indicate that--besides the fact that the War Chief matches the Master in temperament and ambition, and even has a Mediterranean complexion and a goatee.

It's in episode nine that matters come to a head.  The Doctor realises that matters are simply beyond him; he cannot return the human abductees to their own time on his own.  He therefore sends a message to the Time Lords (using a mentally-constructed box that was harkened back to in 2011's "The Doctor's Wife") explaining the situation to them.

And it's now, for the first time, that we become aware how terrified the War Chief and the Doctor are of being recaptured by the Time Lords.  The Doctor is desperate to get back to the TARDIS before he arrives, and it's his fear that does such an effective job of conveying their power and their ... amorality.  We then have that power demonstrated, as the humans simply vanish into nothingness as they're returned to their own times, and time itself slows down to prevent the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe from getting back to the TARDIS.

Eventually, of course, the TARDIS team are captured by the Time Lords--or rather, they choose to surrender themselves when it becomes clear they can't escape.  And the Doctor is placed on trial for having violated his people's cardinal law (their prime directive, if you like)--he interfered.  Time Lords only observe history; they do not become involved in it.  Yet the Doctor has become involved time and gain.

The Doctor defends himself by saying that every time he becomes involved, he prevents evil.  But the Time Lords reject that--whether he worked for good or evil, he still interfered.  Eventually, though, they concede that perhaps his working for goodness does mitigate his crime, and they tailor an appropriate sentence for him.

Jamie and Zoe are forcibly returned to their own times, with their memories wiped.  They remember only their first adventures with the Doctor, and completely forget having gone away with him in the TARDIS afterwards.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is sentenced to exile on twentieth-century Earth--shackled to one time, one planet.  Furthermore, he will have his appearance changed, as it has changed before.  The story ends with the Doctor falling into the time vortex, his appearance in flux ...

Renegades from their people: the War Chief and the Doctor

What Lisa thought

Lisa, who didn't have the benefit of knowing fandom's low opinion of episodes one through nine, had a lot of fun with this one--and she didn't pick up until very late on just how important, from a continuity standpoint, the last episode and a half were.  (She even needed me to point out this is the first time we've heard "Time Lord".)

She certainly felt it could stand some tightening, which it definitely could.  The general plot movement of "The War Games" is that we start off in the First World War, where our heroes learn is not as it seems; move to the American Civil War, where they first encounter the Resistance, human soldiers on whom the aliens' conditioning hasn't worked; move to the alien command centre, where we find out what's really going on; go back to the First World War, to meet a new group of resistance fighters; then back to the alien command centre before the Time Lords get introduced.  That whole "back to the First World War to be introduced a redundant group of the Resistance" could easily stand to be culled, cutting two episodes from the story instantly.

But still, "The War Games" is great--all it requires is putting yourself in the shoes of a 1969 viewer, who'd never heard the words "Time Lords" or "Gallifrey" or "regeneration".

The next story in our rewatch is "Spearhead From Space".

The Invasion

Animated Cyberman!

Episode One, 2 November 1968
Episode Two, 9 November 1968
Episode Three, 16 November 1968
Episode Four, 23 November 1968
Episode Five, 30 November 1968
Episode Six, 7 December 1968
Episode Seven, 14 December 1968
Episode Eight, 21 December 1968

Story by Kit Pedler
Written by Derrick Sherwin
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (earliest extant appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot
John Levene as Corporal Benton (first appearance)

We can essentially divide "The Invasion" into two halves, though that division is done pretty seamlessly during the actual story.  In the first four episodes, the TARDIS lands in a near-future Britain.  Dialogue places this story five years after "The Web of Fear", which was forty years after "The Abominable Snowmen", which took place in 1935, so that would seem to indicate "The Invasion" takes place in 1980--but such a date would give us problems when we try to reconcile it into the dates for other, later UNIT stories.  (Both "Web" and "Snowmen" are amongst the missing stories.)  So we'll go with "sometime in the 1970s" for the story's setting.

Anyway.  The TARDIS lands in near-future Britain, where it discovers a corporation named AppleInternational Electromatics has become the world's dominant company through the production of copious amounts of personal, portable-sized, affordable consumer electronics.  But all is not as it seems with International Electromatics--the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe soon end up investigating the corporation when they discover that it's holding prisoner Professor Watkins, a brilliant scientist who's also the uncle of their friend Isobel.

(Professor Watkins and Isobel are pretty obvious stand-ins for Professor Travers and his daughter Anne from "The Web of Fear", who have "gone off to America", presumably because their actors were unavailable to reprise their roles in "The Invasion".)

In the process, they fall in with UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a global secret police.  UNIT are headed by Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, a British Army officer who knows the Doctor and Jamie from "The Web of Fear", when the Yeti invaded the London Underground.  (Lethbridge-Stewart was a colonel in "Web"; he's now been promoted to brigadier.)  UNIT are also investigating International Electromatics and its CEO, Tobias Vaughn, though for something far more sinister than the kidnapping of a single professor.

The second four episodes deal with Vaughn putting his nefarious plot into action: he's allied with the Cybermen, and together they stage an attempt to take over the Earth.  Vaughn and his minions sneak a Cyber army into the sewers beneath London, and then the Cybermen transmit a signal through all the International Electromatics products that renders every human on Earth unconscious.  The plan is that the Cybermen will then emerge from the sewers and take control of London long enough to land the full Cyber invasion force from "the dark side of the Moon", and humanity will regain consciousness to find their whole planet under Cyber control.

(The Cybermen marching through the streets of London produces the famous image of a platoon of them marching down the steps with the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral behind them.)

But the Doctor has figured out Vaughn's plan, and he's able to shield himself and UNIT from the hypnotic transmission's effects--leaving UNIT (and Jamie, Zoe, Isobel and Professor Watkins) the only waking human beings on Earth.  A UNIT contingent flies to Moscow, where the Russians were about to launch a manned mission to the Moon; the UNIT troop replace the life pod on the rocket with a nuclear warhead, and are able to destroy the Cyber fleet while it's still in orbit.  Meanwhile, the Doctor leads a separate UNIT contingent in an assault on International Electromatics' tightly controlled corporate countryside compound, defeating those Cybermen who have already reached Earth.  Vaughn is, of course, killed in the process.

There's a whole lot to talk about with "The Invasion".  The most apparent is the way this story functions as a pilot episode for the way Doctor Who is going to get reformatted at the start of next season.  (We still have two more stories before we get there.)  No longer will the Doctor be a carefree wanderer in time and space; instead, he'll be partnered with UNIT on a near-future Earth, investigating, in Malcolm Hulke's immortal phrase, "mad scientists and alien invasions"--James Bond meets Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

It's to that end that the Brigadier is brought back from "The Web of Fear", giving the programme what's probably its best-loved character, at least amongst its fandom, and an actor who'd remain actively associated with it for the rest of his life.  (I'm writing this 44 years after the first broadcast of "The Web of Fear", and right now, the most recent episode of Doctor Who ever aired--three or four months ago--contained a wonderful scene dedicated to the Brig, as a commemoration of Nicholas Courtney's death earlier this year.)  The Brigadier will function as Captain Scarlet to the Third Doctor's James Bond--in fact, the Third Doctor is closer in characterisation to Bond or Simon Templar than he is to pretty much any of the other ten Doctors who've headlined the programme throughout its history.

(Given that the parts of the Watkinses were clearly originally written for the Traverses, one has to wonder if the original plan was also to have them on the UNIT staff for season seven, as well.)

The next thing that's so interesting about "The Invasion" is its depiction of near-future Earth--a depiction that's exceptionally prescient, even if it did till longer than 1980 to get here.  Over its eight episodes, we see a number of things that are commonplace today but weren't present in 1968:

1. A computerised, automated telephone-answering system at a corporate headquarters, that specifies to the caller what sort of input it needs and then responds to simple voice commands;

2. A device that looks and acts a whole lot like a cell phone;

3. Microchips! Referred to as "micro monolithic circuitry";

4. Disposable electronic devices (in this case, a transistor radio), like the disposable cameras that have permeated our society;

5. Webcams! Tobias Vaughn maintains a visual surveillance system throughout International Electromatics's headquarters, and this system takes the form of cameras that are small, white spheres about the size of a tennis ball, which can be placed unobtrusively at points in rooms where they won't be noticed, like on cluttered shelves. And they really do look just like webcams.

And the last (and to me, coolest) thing about the story is the fact that we can now watch it in its entirety.  Episodes one and four are missing, but about five years ago, the story was released on DVD with those two episodes reconstructed as Flash animation, set to the original episodes' soundtracks.  The first episode in particular is effective--it has a noirish feel that matches the spooky soundtrack and not-quite-sure-what's-going-on quality of the storyline at that point.

What Lisa thought

She thought the opening four episodes--the Tobias Vaughn and International Electromatics portion of the story--didn't work.  It simply wasn't credible to her, once she knew it was the Cybermen who were Vaughn's unseen allies, that these allies had been willing to put up with him for so long.  Vaughn keeps demanding more control and authority over the invasion than the Cybermen want to give, and the Cybermen keep caving in to his demands, because they need him.  The thing is, though, they don't need him--not once things have reached the stage that they've already positioned their commando force in the London sewers.

Her other reaction was that she thought the two animated episodes were a pretty weird experience--which is fair enough, I suppose, though when I went back and checked my original reaction post to this DVD release back in 2007, she agreed with me that part one was very effective.

The next story in our rewatch is "The Krotons".

The Mind Robber

Zoe: Doctor, we're not actually in flight, are we?
Doctor: No, why?
Zoe: Well then, presumably we've landed, so why isn't the scanner showing anything?
Doctor: Well, because, well, we're nowhere.  It's as simple as that.

Zoe clings to the TARDIS console as it floats through nothingness.

Episode 1, 14 September 1968
Episode 2, 21 September 1968
Episode 3, 28 September 1968
Episode 4, 5 October 1968
Episode 5, 12 October 1968

Written by Peter Ling
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines and Hamish Wilson as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot

During its hurried departure from Dulcis, the TARDIS blows a fluid link, forcing the Doctor to activate the emergency unit to escape.  This transports the TARDIS into a void beyond time and space--they've left the universe as we know it entirely.  The Doctor withdraws into the TARDIS's innards to make the repairs necessary to get them up and running again

But something strange is going on.  Both Jamie and Zoe are lured outside into the void when they see images of their homes on the scanner--the Scottish Highlands for Jamie, and a futuristic conurbation called "the City" for Zoe.  But outside they find only a white, featureless nowhere, where they soon fall into a strange, hypnotic trance.

The Doctor realises what's happened when he returns to the TARDIS control room and finds the doors wide open.  He's able to sense that some sort of malevolent presence has entered the TARDIS through the open doors, and he engages in a telepathic battle with it.  Through this battle, he's able to free Jamie and Zoe of the influence that's controlling them, but in the process, the TARDIS flies apart, and Jamie and Zoe are left clinging to the control console as it floats through black emptiness.

(Zoe in her sparkly catsuit, clinging to the console, is possibly the single greatest frame in all of Doctor Who.)

Eventually, the TARDIS team wake up to find themselves in a dark, spooky forest.  They're in some sort of strange Land of Fiction, where riddles and wordplay take on physical reality.  For instance, the Doctor and Jamie find Zoe trapped behind a painting of a door, but they can't open it because it's not a real door.  When is a door not a door?  When it's ajar, of course--as soon as the Doctor figures out the answer to that riddle, the door transforms into a giant jar, with Zoe trapped inside it, and the Doctor and Jamie are able to rescue her by removing the lid.

There's a neat little trick where the Doctor finds a cardboard standee of Jamie, with a blank face.  Next to it are several different facial elements--for instance, three pairs of eyes, three noses, three mouths.  The Doctor has to reconstruct Jamie's face onto the standee.  Of course, he gets it wrong, and Jamie comes to life with the wrong face, allowing Frazer Hines to have a week off while Hamish Wilson takes his place.

The TARDIS team also encounter several figures from literature and mythology: Gulliver (played by Bernard Horsfall, in the first of several appearances on the programme), Medusa, Rapunzel and the Karkus, a superhero from a comic strip popular in Zoe's native time, the far future known as "the year 2000".  But any of these characters who attempt to obstruct our heroes--like Medusa or the Karkus--remain real only so long as the TARDIS team think of them as real.  For instance, Zoe is able to defeat the Karkus by convincing himself that he's just a work of fiction; this then allows her to overcome his super-strength and defeat him in a wrestling match.

Eventually the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe reach a castle on a mountaintop, and at its centre they find the Master of the Land of Fiction, an old man hooked up to a massive computer.  He is a writer of boys' fiction from 1920s England who fell asleep at his desk one day and was kidnapped to serve as the brain for this massive computer.  The computer is what generates the Land of Fiction, but it needs an imaginative human to serve as its creative impetus.

Now, though, the Master is growing old, and he needs to be replaced--by the Doctor.  The Doctor, of course, refuses, so the Master traps Jamie and Zoe inside a giant book, turning them into fictional characters.  The Master himself won't release them, so they can only escape if the Doctor agrees to take the Master's place; this will allow the Doctor himself to free them, as his first act of office.

The Doctor still refuses, but the Master is able to use Jamie and Zoe--who, as works of fiction, are now under his control--to entrap him and hook him up directly to the central computer.  With both the Doctor and the Master now in control of the Land of Fiction, a write-off ensues, with the two of them summoning up various literary characters to battle each other, though the Doctor is hampered in that he cannot write about himself, or he will turn himself into a work of fiction.

The Doctor is able to free Jamie and Zoe, who then sneak into the control centre and override the central computer.  This sends the white robots that serve the Master haywire, and they destroy the computer and therefore the Land of Fiction.  The TARDIS team are able to free the Master--who, disconnected from the computer, has no memory of anything since his kidnap in the 1920s--and the four of them depart in the TARDIS.

What Lisa thought

She really liked this one--a whole lot.  She thought it was a fun romp, and she really liked the post-modern air to a story in which the regular characters are explicitly attempting to preserve their reality in the face of attempts to turn them into works of fiction.  She also felt like she was getting a peek into British schoolyard culture (at least, of the 1960s), as with the schoolchildren who kept asking the Doctor riddles. ("What can you make of a sword?" "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "Where was Moses when the lights went out?" "Adam and Eve and Pinch-me went down to the river.")  She gives "The Mind Robber" a wholehearted seal of approval.

Me?  I like the sparkly catsuit.

The next story in our rewatch will be "The Krotons".

The Dominators

Cully admires Zoe disguising herself in Dulcian costume.

Episode 1, 10 August 1968
Episode 2, 17 August 1968
Episode 3, 24 August 1968
Episode 4, 31 August 1968
Episode 5, 7 September 1968

Written by Norman Ashby
Directed by Morris Barry
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Producer Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot (earliest extant appearance)

On the planet Dulcis, war and strife are unknown.  Also unknown is basic scientific curiosity--172 years ago, Dulcian scientists detonated an atomic bomb on an isolated island, so that they could study how long it took for radiation levels to subside.  But when all the radiation levels suddenly drop to zero, the Dulcians don't respond with, "Holy crap, that must mean the advance force from a race of merciless alien invaders must have landed on the island and used that radiation for fuel as they prepare to destroy our planet!" or even the perhaps more reasonable, "Hmm, that's weird.  Maybe we should head over to the island and try to figure out why the radiation suddenly vanished."  No, instead they say, "Well, now we know--radiation from an atomic blast lasts 172 years, then vanishes completely."

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The formerly-radioactive island.  Four groups have arrived there at roughly the same time: a trio from a Dulcian university, studying radiation; a party of adolescent adventurers, visiting the island without passes as a way to spice up prosperous-yet-monotonous life on Dulcis; the TARDIS team; and a spaceship carrying two Dominators.

The Dominators are a race of merciless alien conquerors, "rulers of the Ten Galaxies".  Their spaceships are powered by radiation, but this particular ship is almost out of power.  Detecting the radioactive island, they've come to Dulcis, where they immediately suck up all the radiation to refuel.  But this replenishes their power levels only enough to give them the energy for a full refuel, which involves drilling to the molten core of Dulcis and dropping an atomic bomb down the shaft, to irradiate the whole core--which incidentally will also turn all of Dulcis into a radioactive cinder, destroying all life on the surface.

Of course, the TARDIS team and the Dulcians soon discover this.  The story's what-makes-this-story-different-from-others quality comes in the difficulty our heroes have in getting the Dulcians to fight back, because of the ethos of nonviolence and incuriosity that permeates society on Dulcis.  First, the Dulcians flat out don't believe that aliens have landed on their planet, because they don't believe in aliens.  Then, they refuse to accept the threat the Dominators pose, and continue to maintain that if only they treat the invaders with friendliness and obedience, they'll be able to bring out the Dominators' peaceful side.  And then when they do finally realise what danger they're in, they don't even know how to fight back.

(This is illustrated very well in a meeting of the High Council of Dulcis: "The way I see it, there are only three courses of action: fight, flight or submission."

"Flight is out of the question!"

"And we have means with which to fight."

"Then that leaves only ... submission.")

Eventually, the Doctor and a small group of Dulcians are able to foil the Dominators' plan by tunneling beneath the radioactive island so that they gain access to the Dominators' drill-bore from the side.  This way, when the invaders drop their atomic bomb down the shaft, the Doctor catches it, then stows it aboard the Dominators' spaceship.  The spaceship lifts off so that the Dominators can get away from the planet before it explodes, but of course, the only thing they end up destroying is their own ship.

But none of all that is really what sticks with me about "The Dominators".  The most memorable thing about this story is that it's our first chance to get a look at the Doctor's new companion, Zoe, the girl genius from the year 2000.  (In 1968 terms, "from the year 2000" means "lives in a space station".)

Zoe is a chipper, undeterable character, utterly guileless, completely selfless, friendly, and entirely comfortable with the fact that she's a scientific and mathematical genius.  And actress Wendy Padbury is one of the most adorably sexy women ever to make it onto a television screen.

That sexiness and the mores of 1968 combine to ensure that, over the course of her one season on the TARDIS, Zoe is clad a succession of wonderfully enticing costumes, and the one in "The Dominators" is one of the best.  The people of Dulcis all walk about in short gowns.  For men, this means dresses of a curtain-like material that come down to mid-thigh (longer for figures of authority).  But for women, it means a choker and a revealingly short babydoll negligee, easily transparent enough to show off the bikini bottoms being worn underneath.  It's glorious.

What Lisa thought

She enjoyed it fine.  She did complain about the broad strokes with which the story was told--the utterly good Dulcians contrasted with the utterly ruthless Dominators; the simplicity of, "Well, we'll just burrow in from the side and catch the bomb when they drop it."

This sort of block-colour approach to storytelling even extends to interpersonal dynamics.  The two Dominators have a running conflict throughout the story: the first officer wants to destroy everything in sight, murdering any Dulcians he sees, while his commander insists that the natives pose no threat, and they should be spared as killing them will dangerously deplete the spaceships' already dangerously-low levels of power.

In fact, all four cliffhangers in this story involve the first officer ordering the Quarks (diminutive robots that the Dominators use as both a labour force and their footsoldiers) to kill a character, which is then resolved by the commander appearing out of nowhere and countermanding the order. The cliffhangers at the end of part two and part three are in fact identical, with the first officer deciding to destroy a house standing on an opposite hill just to have some fun, unaware that some of our main characters are hiding in the house, and the image fades out as debris falls around our heroes from the blasts of the Quarks' molecular cannon.

(It's interesting that we're supposed to see the first officer as a bloodthirsty fool, while the commander is the voice of intelligence and reason, considering that in the end, it's the first officer who was right the whole time--the natives do pose a threat, and the Dominators' best course of action would have been to slaughter them.)

There is a wonderful example of the comic chemistry between Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton, when the Dominators (thinking they have captured native Dulcians) subject the two of them to intelligence tests, to evaluate the native populations. The Doctor and Jamie quickly conclude that they should do their best to appear stupid, so as to present less of a threat.

The same scene also illustrates Troughton's nimbleness as an actor, when he convinces the Dominators that there are two species on Dulcis: the stupid ones, represented by him and Jamie, and the smart ones. "There aren't very many of them left. We don't like them very much--they tell us what to do, you see," he says, and all of a sudden his demeanor has changed completely, and with it, the whole tone of the scene. It's not that he's suddenly become threatening, because he hasn't--but with those two sentences and his sudden change in tone, he's managed to summon forth an entire picture in the viewer's mind, and one that's much, much darker than any actual images that appear onscreen in "The Dominators".

But essentially, "The Dominators" is a story where Doctor Who definitely comes across more as a children's programme than a family programme.

But whatever.  Zoe, man.  In a see-through microdress.

The next story in the rewatch is "The Mind Robber".