Inferno

Listen to that! It's the sound of this planet screaming out its rage!--the Doctor

Evil Liz and Evil Brigadier

Episode one, 9 May 1970
Episode two, 16 May 1970
Episode three, 23 May 1970
Episode four, 30 May 1970
Episode five, 6 June 1970
Episode six, 13 June 1970
Episode seven, 20 June 1970

Written by Don Houghton
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Caroline John as Liz Shaw (last regular appearance)
John Levene as Sergeant Benton

Liz and the Brigadier, not evil

And now, finally, we have our first unambiguously mad-scientist story, making our alien invasion/mad scientist record 3-1-1.  The mad scientist in question this time is Professor Stahlman, who's heading a government project to drill through the Earth's crust.  He theorises that beneath the crust is a substance called Stahlman's gas, and by releasing it, he'll be able to provide Britain with an inexhaustible energy reserve.

Stahlman's not evil; he doesn't want to take over the world, or destroy it.  He's just arrogant: he's convinced of the rightness of his theory regarding the existence of Stahlman's gas, and he's so eager to get to it that he keeps speeding up the rate of drilling, regardless of any concerns for safety.  He refuses to listen to any warnings--from his assistant, Petra Williams (played by Sheila Dunn, wife of the story's director, Douglas Camfield); from the project's administrator, the civil servant Sir Keith Gold; from Greg Sutton, an oil-drilling expert the government has brought in from a drillsite in Kuwait; or from the Doctor, who's hanging around the project because he's hooked up the TARDIS to its nuclear reactor for some experiments he's running in his continuing quest to overcome the exile imposed upon him by the Time Lords.  UNIT are also hanging around, in order to ... well, actually, I'm not sure why UNIT are there, but they're there.

(A casting note: Derek Newark, who plays Greg Sutton, played Za in the Doctor's very first adventure in 1963, while Christopher Benjamin, here making his first entry into the programme, as Sir Keith, most recently appeared in Doctor Who in 2009, opposite David Tennant and Catherine Tate.  So in "Inferno", we've got 46 years of Who history playing opposite each other.)

But there are problems besetting the project.  Something is happening to a few of its technicians, and to a few of the UNIT soldiers: they're turning into hairy green monsters who are burning hot to the touch, and who are horribly strong and manically homicidal.  Unbeknownst to the main characters, this metamorphosis is caused because the unfortunate individuals are coming into contact with a strange green slime that's been oozing up from the drill head deep beneath the Earth's surface--the drilling is unleashing dark forces from the Earth's core.

The story takes a sudden, unexpected swerve when one of the Doctor's experiments with the TARDIS goes awry.  The TARDIS dematerialises, but it takes the Doctor neither forward nor backward in time.  Instead, he rematerialises in the same place and time, but in a parallel reality--an alternate history.  He soon discovers that he's somehow transported himself to a world where Britain abolished the monarchy in 1943 and turned into a brutal, right-wing fascist dictatorship.

Everything is present in the alternate world that was present in the real world, but it's been twisted.  The Stahlman's gas drilling project is still going on, headed by Professor Stahlman, but now the project is at a "scientific labour camp"--meaning slave labour.  The UNIT team are still providing security, but not as UNIT--they're now members of the Republic Security Forces.  They're led by the Brigadier, who has lost his moustache and gained an eyepatch and now goes by the rank of Brigade Leader.  His second in command is the stern, no-nonsense Section Leader Elizabeth Shaw, who's a far cry from being any sort of scientist.

(The "leader" ranks are a nice touch--even Benton is ranked "Platoon Under Leader".  It's an echo of Gestapo ranks, which all ended with -führer, from Reichsführer, the unique rank held by Heinrich Himmler, all the way down to Unterscharführer, or Squad Under Leader, the equivalent to lance-corporal or PFC.)

Of course, the Doctor is quickly apprehended by the dark, brutal counterparts to his friends from UNIT, who conclude that he's a spy for a foreign power.  So he has to avoid getting put in front of a firing squad, but he's also got another concern--figuring out what's going on with the drilling.

The alternate-world drilling project is further along than its real-world counterpart, and the Doctor is present when it penetrates to the Earth's core.  And it might surprise you to learn, but the result isn't the discovery of a new, inexhaustible energy source--it's the end of the world.  Tremors begin all across the country, and spontaneous volcanoes form.  The Doctor realises it's only a matter of a short time until the Earth's entire crust breaks up.

As the situation deteriorates, people's true characters come out.  The Brigade Leader becomes even more militant, more shrill, more megalomaniacal, convinced his vaunted Republic will save everyone.  (Nicholas Courtney is clearly relishing playing a shrill, paranoid villain.)  But Section Leader Shaw is gradually coming around to the Doctor's story of where he comes from, and she's showing a willingness to help the Doctor get back to the real world so he can save our own reality from suffering the same fate as hers.

Which is, of course, what happens.  The Brigade Leader hatches a plan to force the Doctor to take him back with him to our reality at gunpoint, but of course it doesn't work.  The Doctor makes it back alone, and he's able to stop the drill just before it penetrates the Earth's mantle.  One world has died, but the other has survived.

What Lisa thought

She really didn't like it.  She found it slow and turgid, and she's finding the UNIT format really repetitive.  When I told her "Inferno" is one of the most highly regarded Whos of all time, she asked, "... But why?"

She did like Evil Liz's look--she thinks Carolina John looks good as a brunette.

It's a shame, because I, like most of Who fandom, is really neat--the opportunity to see Britain as a fascist state, the opportunity to see UNIT turned to evil, and the opportunity to see Benton metamorphose into a green, hairy monster.

The next story is "Terror of the Autons".

The Ambassadors of Death

The Doctor: You're convinced their intentions are hostile, then?
General Carrington: Why else should they invade the galaxy?  They were on Mars before we were.

The Doctor greets Death's diplomatic representatives.

Episode one, 21 March 1970
Episode two, 28 March 1970
Episode three, 4 April 1970
Episode four, 11 April 1970
Episode five, 18 April 1970
Episode six, 25 April 1970
Episode seven, 2 May 1970

Written by David Whitaker
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Carolina John as Liz Shaw
John Levene as Sergeant Benton

Another UNIT story, so is this one an alien invasion or a mad scientist?  Well, it has aliens, but they're not invading.  And it has a madman, but he's not a scientist.  So I guess maybe this one ends up as a wash, bringing our alien invasion/mad scientist standings to 3-0-1.

Really, for all that Terrance Dicks (rightly) complains about the constraints imposed on Doctor Who with the reformatting at the end of "The War Games", this first season under the new regime is doing a nice job of varying it.  We started off with a straight alien invasion story; this was then followed by an alien invasion story, except the aliens are actually from Earth.  And now we get an alien invasion story, except the aliens aren't actually invading--their intentions are peaceful.

The story opens with the Recovery 7 space probe docking with the returning Mars Probe 7.  The astronaut manning Recovery 7, Van Lyden, is investigating to see what's happened to Mars Probe 7's crew, who cut radio contact seven months ago.  A piercing noise is then heard over Van Lyden's radio, after which Van Lyden, too, cuts contact.  But evidently he, or the Mars Probe astronauts, are still alive, because their landing pod begins re-entry procedure.

UNIT and the Doctor head out into the English countryside to recovery the pod once it lands, but they're attacked--by military special forces, disguised as civilians, who make off with the pod themselves.  At this point, another dimension gets added to the story--in addition to the usual Who sci-fi-cum-horror plot of What Did Those Astronauts Encounter in Space?, we've also got a government-conspiracy-thriller, as UNIT have to deal with a clandestine organisation trying to undermine them at every turn, headed by the enigmatic General Carrington, himself an astronaut aboard the previous Mars Probe, Mars Probe 6.  In that respect, we can liken "The Ambassadors of Death" to the Torchwood series "Children of Earth".

(Speaking of Torchwood--I've heard a very credible theory that Carrington and his men are, in fact, Torchwood agents.  After all, from Earth's perspective, this story falls between "Tooth and Claw" (1879) and "Doomsday" (2007), so Carrington and Torchwood would view the Doctor as just as much a hostile alien invader as they do the Ambassadors.)

So basically, what happened is that Mars Probe 6, with Carrington on board, encountered an alien race on Mars.  Carrington became convinced that the aliens were hostile, because they accidentally killed his crewmate Jim.  (The aliens didn't know that their very touch would be fatal to humans.)  Carrington therefore told the aliens that he would return to Earth and prepare the way for them; when Mars Probe 7 arrived, they should replace its human crew with their own ambassadors.

It is these ambassadors that Carrington has now kidnapped.  The alien ambassadors require constant access to radiation to remain alive; Carrington therefore rations their radiation, and forces them to perform missions for him--raiding nuclear reactors, murdering soldiers, stealing secret plans.  He hopes thereby to convince the world that an alien invasion is imminent, so that when the alien spaceship arrives in orbit over Earth, he can convince every country in the world to launch all their missiles at it and destroy it.

Of course, the Doctor and UNIT figure out what's going on, and they liberate the aliens and stop Carrington immediately before he makes a worldwide telecast to reveal the alien "threat" to the world.

What Lisa thought

This one was too slow and plodding for her--I think she's starting to feel the press of the other part of the show's new format, the longer story lengths.  She was also disappointed in how dressed the Doctor remained this time--for the third story out of his three so far, Jon Pertwee finds a reason to take his clothes off again, but we only see him once he's already been fully covered by a bathrobe.

It's the thriller element of the storyline that, I think, gives Ambassadors what success it does have.  We've got Liz being kidnapped and forced to work for Carrington's crew as they try to keep the ambassadors alive.  We've got Carrington's chief scientist, who defects to UNIT to tell them what's going on, and insists on being held in a prison cell for his own safety until he can talk to the Brigadier--but then, he discovers one of Carrrington's operatives has left a radioactive isotope in the cell with him, assassinating him by radiation poisoning.  And we've got Carrington going slowly more paranoid and insane, using the ambassadors to assassinate his own superior when that superior prepares to tell the Doctor what's going on, and then in the final episode going so far as to have the Brigadier and all of UNIT placed under military arrest in case they're collaborating with the aliens.

Though the most watchable thing about this story is the cast.  Several of the guest actors, as opposed to characters, are exceedingly engaging.  Chief amongst them are Ronald Allen, playing Professor Cornish (head of mission control for the apparently thriving British space programme), and William Dysart as Regan, the thug who's looking after the imprisoned Ambassadors (and the imprisoned Liz) for General Carrington.  Ronald Allen (who had previously appeared as a Dominator) has a very understated, clipped delivery, while Dysart has an odd Scottish accent, and both of them have great screen presence--Lisa told me she thought Allen came across as a man who should be a leading man, but just never got the opportunity.  Cheryl Molineux also grabs your attention as a technician at mission control, even though her total screentime is a series of about ten three-second closeups over the seven episodes, as she reads a countdown aloud.

Lisa also came up with an interesting theory about Carrington, to complement the one about his Torchwood origins: she wonders if he and Jim, during their months alone together on Mars Probe 6, found the love that dare not speak its name blossoming between them, and that's why his accidental death at the hands of the Ambassadors pushed him into insanity. Come on, people--of such stuff is fanfic born.

So definitely a hit-and-miss story--mostly miss, but what hits it does have are pretty strong ones.

The next story will be "Inferno".

Doctor Who and the Silurians

This is our planet.  We were here before man.  We ruled this world millions of years ago.--Old Silurian

"Hello. Are you a Silurian?"

Episode one, 31 January 1970
Episode two, 7 February 1970
Episode three, 14 February 1970
Episode four, 21 February 1970
Episode five, 28 February 1970
Episode six, 7 March 1970
Episode seven, 14 March 1970

Written by Malcolm Hulke
Directed by Timothy Combe
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

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

Malcolm Hulke, the writer for "Doctor Who and the Silurians", was a mentor figure for Terrance Dicks, who had taken over as script editor midway through Patrick Troughton's final season.  Dicks, of course, arrived at a time when the outgoing production partnership were planning a radical redesign of Doctor Who, for which "The Invasion" had been something of a test case.

That redesign was basically aimed at reducing the costs associated with producing Doctor Who.  Time and space travel would be reduced from the programme, with the Doctor permanently anchored to present-day Earth.  Stories would be extended in length, since it's easier and cheaper to produce a single eight-parter rather than two four-parters.  And, with an eye on the upcoming switch to colour, the action component of the programme would be upped, to accomplish which a permanent supporting cast of military characters would be added.

When Dicks explained these format changes, Hulke summed them up instantly: "So you've got two possible plotlines to alternate between from now on.  Mad scientists and alien invasions."  Dicks thought about this for a minute, then realised, "Fuck me, you're right."

"The Silurians" is Hulke's first credit for the Pertwee Doctor, and, with the arrival of new producer Barry Letts, the start of the partnership between Letts and Dicks that would run the programme for all five years of Pertwee's tenure in the title role.

So far, the new format had produced two alien invasion stories and zero mad scientist stories.  "The Silurians" is a third alien invasion story, but with a twist--the "aliens" are actually from Earth.  They're a race of intelligent, technologically advanced reptile-men who ruled the planet during the time of the dinosaurs.  Their scientists detected a large planetoid approaching the planet, the near miss of which would cause Earth to lose its atmosphere.  In order to preserve their society, the Silurians put themselves into suspended animation, programming their computers to wake them up once Earth's atmosphere had returned.  Except the computer never woke them up, because the atmosphere never "returned"--it was never wiped away in the first place.  Instead of narrowly missing us, the planetoid got caught in Earth's gravity well and became our Moon.

Now, though, a colony of Silurians have been awakened, disturbed by the construction of a secret underground nuclear reactor in the Yorkshire moorland.  Secretly aided by the construction project's chief scientist, they're drawing power from the nuclear reactor to aid in the resurrection of their race.

And you remember the other part of the reformatting, about the need to draw the stories out more?  You know how the most traditional cliffhanger for the end of episode one of a Doctor Who story is a sudden, menacing reveal of what the monster looks like?  "The Silurians" has that cliffhanger--at the end of part three. The story manages to go three full weeks before we get a good look at the alien race.  For three weeks, there are rumours of monsters lurking in the cave systems--rumours of a monster roaming the moors--someone thinks they shot it, and it's wounded--people are turning up dead in barns and isolated cottages!  It is, in fact, the middle of episode five before everyone is aware of the presence of the Silurians and on board with the threat they pose.

Those four and a half episodes are probably the story's strongest period.  They're moody and creepy.  It's only after that has all been milked for all it can give us that we move on to the direct confrontation between humans and Silurians, and this part of the story suffers from the fact that it's no longer possible to avoid putting the Silurians on the screen.

When the Silurians returned in New Who, opposite Matt Smith in 2010, their costuming was rightly criticised because it depicted anthropoid reptiles as having eyelashes, and anthropoid reptile females as having breasts.  It's true that that sort of design choice is distracting, but trust me, it's not nearly as distracting as anthropoids where the rubber hood that's supposed to be their head is clearly waving and flapping around where it's supposed to be joined to the rest of their body.

Fortunately, this segment of the story proves much less amenable to elongation than the earlier portion.  First, the Silurians release a virus into the human population, designed to cull the primate population.  But it takes the Doctor only an episode and a half to find a cure, so the action returns to the nuclear reactor, where the Silurians take over the facility, inducing the Doctor to send the reactor into meltdown to keep it out of their hands.  The Silurians flee the disaster by going back into hibernation, setting their machines to wake them again in fifty years; of course, as soon as they're safely gone, the Doctor averts the meltdown.

Which brings us to what's probably the most famous moment in "Doctor Who and the Silurians" (apart from when its title appears on the opening credits), the ending.  The Doctor intends to reawaken the Silurians in a controlled environment, so he can reason with them and convince them they can cohabit with Earth's new inhabitants.  The Brigadier consents to this plan.  The Doctor and Liz leave to gather a team of scientists to study the Silurians, but as soon as they're gone, the Brigadier has the cave where they're hibernating blown up--he considers the threat they pose to humanity too great to take a risk on peace negotiations.  This is, of course, the moment that's generally cited as when Doctor Who transitioned from a programme made for an audience of children to one made for an audience of young adults.

What Lisa thought

She has really taken to the Pertwee era so far--she finds it fun and a nice change of tone from the black and white era.

Of the two Jon Pertwee stories so far, this is the second one where Pertwee has found a reason to take his shirt off.  This time, he strips down to what would now be called a muscle shirt (except that prior to Arnold Schwarzenegger, men didn't really have muscles), to demonstrate the extreme tension of the reactor meltdown sequence in episode seven.

And Lisa is ... impressed.  We're talking about a fifty-year-old man from an era a whole decade before standards of male attractiveness had any sort of chiselledness to them at all, but Lisa still finds him rather fit.

She also liked seeing Geoffrey Palmer, whom she knows well as Lionel from As Time Goes By. Yup, he's here, experiencing the first in the series of violent, painful deaths he's going to undergo opposite Doctors ranging from Jon Pertwee to David Tennant.

So on we go.  The next story will be "The Ambassadors of Death".

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".