The Claws of Axos

"In case things should go wrong, I am making this recording as a record of what not to do."--the Doctor

Axons!

Episode One, 13 March 1971
Episode Two, 20 March 1971
Episode Three, 27 March 1971
Episode Four, 3 April 1971

Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Roger Delgado as the Master
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Katy Manning as Jo Grant
Richard Franklin as Captain Yates
John Levene as Sergeant Benton

Axos crashes in southern England.  Axos turns out to be a spaceship, but not as we'd think of one--a carefully crafted hulk of metal and technology.  Instead, the science of the Axons--the crew of Axos--has followed a biological path, and Axos is a living, organic being.

The Axons aboard Axos are the last of their kind, and now they're dying.  In order to survive they need to replenish their energy supplies by drawing from the Earth's, and they're willing to pay for the privilege by sharing with humanity the secret of axonite, "the chameleon of the elements".  Axonite is the basis for Axon science--it mimics whatever organism it comes into contact with, instantly becoming a perfect copy of them.  If Earth had access to axonite, it would eliminate at a stroke all organic scarcity, and therefore all world hunger.

The Brigadier, as an official of the United Nations, attempts to accept on behalf of all humanity, but xenophobic government minister named Mr Chin steps in, arresting the Brig and the UNIT personnel and instead securing exclusive rights to axonite for the British government.  But what neither the Doctor, Mr Chin nor the Brigadier know is that the Master is aboard Axos.  The Axons captured him as he was fleeing the Earth following "The Mind of Evil", and he led them back to the planet, promising it to them in exchange for them allowing him his freedom.

Whatever the Axons' real plan is, it requires worldwide distribution of axonite.  So the Master leaves Axos and contacts the United Nations, to let them know of the secret deal Mr Chin has struck for Britain.  When news of that becomes public, the uproar causes the British government to agree to immediately distribute axonite to every country in the world.

It turns out that Axos, the Axons and axonite are all a single living organism.  Once that organism has been distributed around the world, it will activate itself, feeding on the Earth--and leaving nothing behind but a dry, lifeless hulk.  The Doctor concludes that now the situation is hopeless, so he joins forces with the Master and takes his TARDIS aboard Axos, offering to show the Axons the secret of time travel if they'll let him escape from the doomed Earth.

Of course, that's a trick, and when the Axons allow him to link Axos to the TARDIS, he traps them in a time loop, forcing them to live the same ten seconds over and over for eternity, thereby freeing the Earth from the axonite.  The TARDIS then returns him to Earth, rather against his will--the Time Lords have set its controls so that it will always take him back to the place of his exile.  "It seems," he says, "that I am some sort of galactic yo yo!"

What Lisa thought

It's unfair, I think, to dismiss "The Claws of Axos" out of hand as just another UNIT story.  There are a couple of really neat ideas here.  For instance, there's the way we automatically side with UNIT and against Mr Chin.  Of course axonite should be distributed freely to the whole world, and of course Chin is despicable for wanting to horde it all for Britain.  But then it turns out that hording it all in Britain would have foiled the Axons' whole plan, and it's the distribution of axonite all over the world that puts the whole planet in mortal danger.

And then there's the parallel of the Axons' plan to destroy the Earth alongside how the Doctor defeats the Axons in the end.  In both instances, the party with knowledge of a spectacular technology got access to the lesser party's resources by appealing to their greed, and then once they had that access, they betrayed the other party for their own gain.

But it's undeniable that this has been our seventh consecutive story set in Cold War Britain, and it's starting to wear.  Certainly it's wearing on Lisa, who could summon up no real reaction to this story at all.  A good thing, then, that the next story in our rewatch is "Colony in Space".

The Mind of Evil

Episode One, 30 January 1971
Episode Two, 6 February 1971
Episode Three, 13 February 1971
Episode Four, 20 February 1971
Episode Five, 27 February 1971
Episode Six, 6 March 1971

Written by Don Houghton
Directed by Timothy Combe
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Roger Delgado as the Master
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Katy Manning as Jo Grant
Richard Franklin as Captain Yates
John Levene as Sergeant Benton

The Doctor and Jo visit HM Prison Stangmoor to see firsthand the Keller Machine, a new device that reportedly removes all negative impulses from a subject's brain. The plan is for this to be used on prisoners who've been sentenced to life in prison--with their negative impulses removed, they become pliable wimps, able to live out their lives performing menial services rather than draining state resources.

(I know it was around this time that Britain abolished the death penalty, but I don't know exactly when that was.  So I don't know if the reference in the episode to the recent abolition of the death penalty is an indicator that this episode was somewhat topical, or if it's another one of the little touches--like the Prime Minister being referred to as "she"--that was intended to remind us that the UNIT stories are set a few years in the future, and which later turned out to be mildly prophetic.)

Of course, all isn't well.  The Keller Machine works well enough for its designed purpose, but people keep on dying when it's left unattended--the professor in charge of its operation, manages to drown in a completely dry room (and coincidentally, he had a morbid fear of drowning); another fellow, who was terrified of rats, turns up dead with his face and arms covered in dozens of tiny bites and scratches.

While the Doctor's investigating this, UNIT have their own problems to deal with.  London is hosting a major peace conference between the United States and China, and UNIT are handling security.  But they're not doing a good job of it--first the Chinese delegate is murdered, then the American.

(The DVD release of "The Mutants" has a documentary on race in Doctor Who, narrated by Noel Clarke, who plays Mickey Smith in the New Series.  That documentary stresses that in the 70s, the parts available to non-white actors in the programme in the 60s dried up, replaced by white actors in yellowface.  But I'm surprised the documentary didn't mention this story, which has several East Asian performers both as extras and in speaking parts, including the major female guest role, Pik-Sen Lim as Captain Chin Lee, head of Chinese security.)

These two storylines don't look connected, but of course, they are, so what's the connection?  It's the Master.  He's the Keller for whom the Keller Machine is named (and apparently he's taken the time to get it adopted in the Swiss prison system, so that he could then get it tried out at Stangmoor Prison--something which Stangmoor agreed to a year ago--so I'm not sure how that messes with the Master having just arrived on Earth a few weeks ago).  Using the access to the prison this gives him, he allies with its violent inmates and stages a takeover, taking the Doctor and Jo hostage (and also the prison doctor, played by Michael Sheard in the second of several appearances on the programme).  The Master and the prisoners then steal a British Armed Forces missile with a nerve gas warhead; they plan to hold the British government to ransom, threatening to launch the missile at the London peace conference and start a Third World War.

The prisoners get recaptured when the Brigadier (disguised as a delivery man with a Cockney accent) leads a UNIT strike force through an underground tunnel to retake the prison, freeing the Doctor, Jo and Michael Sheard, but that still leaves the problem of the Keller Machine (which by now has developed a mind of its own and is teleporting around the prison, killing people by making them live out their phobiae) and the missile, which the Master still has the capability to launch.  The Doctor solves those two problems by taking the Keller Machine to the missile and triggering the missile's self-destruct while it's still on the ground, destroying the Machine.

The Master, of course, escapes.

What Lisa thought

There are two plotlines to "The Mind of Evil"--the peace conference/nerve gas missile and Stangmoor prison/the Keller Machine.  Lisa thought either one might have made a solid core for a Doctor Who story (though the peace conference would specifically have to be a UNIT story), but that they rubbed uneasily together when forced to cohabitate.  For instance, if the Master's goal is to threaten the peace conference with destruction via the missile, why does he spend episodes one through three using his hypnotised agent to murder the heads of the American and Chinese delegations?  Hasn't he already destroyed the peace conference by that point?

The story also has two extended firefight sequences--when the Master's escaped prisoners hijack the UNIT party escorting the missile, and when UNIT infiltrate and recapture the prison.  For Lisa, these were distinctly un-Who-like moments.

There are some nice character moments, though.  Both the Doctor and the Master get tortured by the Keller Machine, so we get to see their greatest fears.  For the Doctor, it's fire, since he once saw a whole world consumed by flame.  (Of course, we don't yet know that in the future, he's going to see another one, dear to his heart, suffer the same fate.)  For the Master, interestingly enough, his greatest fear is the Doctor--laughing at him.

The next story will be "The Claws of Axos".

Terror of the Autons

I came to warn you. An old acquaintance has arrived on this planet. The Master.--Time Lord

"I am known as the Master, universally."

Episode One, 2 January 1971
Episode Two, 9 January 1971
Episode Three, 16 January 1971
Episode Four, 23 January 1971

Written by Robert Holmes
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Roger Delgado as the Master (first appearance)
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Katy Manning as Jo Grant (first appearance)
Richard Franklin as Captain Yates (first appearance)
John Levene as Sergeant Benton

What we've got here for the season eight opener is pretty much a remake of the season seven opener, "Spearhead From Space": the Nestene Consciousness, a disembodied species who take on corporeal form by possessing and animating objects made of plastic, plan to land in force on Earth and wipe out humanity, aided by an ally who runs a plastics factory, and the Doctor must stop them by jamming the radio signals by which they transmit themselves across space and inhabit our plastic goods.  In fact, it's not even an exact remake, plotwise, as the Nestene Autons (human-shaped warriors) have been made less interesting: there's now only one type of them, the drones that are essentially lethal, walking shop dummies.  The second, fascinating type from "Spearhead From Space" has disappeared: the replicas of real human beings that were so convincingly done with such a simple special effect.

But it's not the plot of "Terror" that matters, because that's not the purpose of the story--rather, "Terror" is here to serve as a platform, introducing us for the first time to the Doctor's nemesis.

The Master.

He's portrayed here by his originator, Roger Delgado, and from the first time he appears onscreen--in the first episode's first scene--he's the most compulsively watchable character from amongst the entire very large cast who were a part of the programme during the Pertwee years.  (The Pertwee era had the largest regular cast of any period of Classic Who.)  He's charming, urbane, always already aware of whatever new gambit his opponents will try, a scientific genius and a complete psychopath of an individual, without any care for the life or death of any other being in the universe except himself--and the Doctor.

What Lisa thought

Lisa is of the opinion shared by most Who fans, that the Delgado Master is by far the most successful Master.  As such, she enjoyed this one, though she did notice it was a rehash of "Spearhead From Space".   Myself, I find it difficult to choose between Delgado and Simm, but in a pinch I would probably plump for Delgado.  But I think the reason that the Delgado and Simm Masters both work better than, say, the Ainley or Roberts incarnations of the role is that the Master works best, as a character, when he's a dark mirror of the Doctor.

And Delgado manages that consummately.  Pertwee's interpretation of the Doctor is a distinctive one--he's an aristocrat, instantly at home hobnobbing with royalty and government ministers; he even has a membership (as this story establishes) in a London gentlemen's club.  (It's the third Doctor's adulation of the privileged that's the biggest reason he's my least favourite Doctor.)  And the Delgado Master complements that perfectly--their conversations together* are what scenes would look like in Downton Abbey if Downton Abbey ever dealt with a madman bent on enslaving the whole world.

It's a good thing Delgado's so good, too--since we're going to be seeing so much of him.

The next story in our rewatch will be "The Mind of Evil".

*And that's another thing--Pertwee and Delgado actually talk to each other, in a way Ainley never does with Davison, Colin Baker or McCoy.

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".

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".