Colony in Space

I want to see the universe, not rule it.--the Doctor

Not Doctor Who's finest moment in monster making

Episode One, 10 April 1971
Episode Two, 17 April 1971
Episode Three, 24 April 1971
Episode Four, 1 May 1971
Episode Five, 8 May 1971
Episode Six, 15 May 1971

Written by Malcolm Hulke
Directed by Michael Briant
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

And at last, two years after the Doctor last travelled in time and space, he's doing so again--though it's somewhat against his will.  The Time Lords send him and Jo to the desert planet Uxarieus in the twenty-fifth century, where a small group of hardy human colonists are attempting to build a new life in the arid soil.

But all is not well in the colony.  Some colonists see giant, dinosaur-like monsters roaming the plains at night, and a pair of homesteaders are killed, their bodies scarred with giant claw marks on their body.  And a bedraggled hermit shows up (played by Roy Skelton, the voice of the Daleks), claiming to be the sole survivor of a former colony that was first attacked by these monsters, then destroyed by the planet's primitive humanoid inhabitants, who live in the ruins of a stone city some way to the south.

And then to top everything else off, a heavily-armed ship arrives from the Interstellar Mining Corporation, looking to exploit the planet's vast duralinium deposits for the voracious market on Earth.  But to do so would destroy the planet as a livable habitat.  The colonists claim that the miners are trespassing, and that the Earth government has allocated the planet for colonisation.  But the miners' story is that a faulty computer on Earth must have allocated the planet both for colonisation and for exploitation; the only solution is to call in a legal official called an Adjudicator to settle the dispute.

What's really going on is that the mining ship know full well that it's the colonists who have rights to the planet, but they're trying to scare them away so that they can exploit its resources.  They're manufacturing the monster sightings (there are no such monsters); they're killing the colonists and making it look like monster attacks; and the "survivor from a previous colony" is actually a spy from the mining ship's crew.

But things get more complicated when the Adjudicator arrives--because he turns out to be the Master, in disguise.  The Master's interest is in the ruined city where the native primitives live.  He has learnt that the extinct advanced civilisation from which the primitives descend created a doomsday weapon but never used it--a weapon that can turn any star nova in the blink of an eye, destroying any worlds that orbit it.  The weapon still exists, somewhere beneath the city, and the Master wants to find it so he can hold the universe to ransom and make himself ruler of the cosmos.  (That's, ruler of the cosmos, as in ruler of the universe, not ruler of the Cosmos, as in ruler of the New York team in the 60s/70s-era North American Soccer League.)

Open violence has now broken out between the miners and the colonists, with the miners eventually defeating and capturing the colonists.  The captain of the mining ship convenes a kangaroo court and convicts the colony leader of treason, but he agrees to commute the death sentence on condition that the colonists depart the planet immediately.  The colonists object--their ship was never intended to be flown again, and its engines are in such poor repair that they could well break up in flight.  But the mining captain has no pity for them, and they have no choice.  They depart, and their spaceship does indeed blow up moments after liftoff.

But it turns out there was only one person aboard--the colony leader, who sacrificed himself so that his colonists could live.  The colonists themselves were in hiding, and once the miners think they've all died, they sneak back, mount an ambush and defeat the miners.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and the Master have headed to the primitives' city to find the doomsday weapon.  But the ruler of the primitives turns out to be a tiny little being whose brain has expanded so much that he has developed powers of telepathy and telekinesis.  He sees the evil in the Master and instructs the Doctor that, for the good of the galaxy, he must operate the self-destruct mechanism on the doomsday weapon.  This also has the effect of destroying the ruined city, and the primitives themselves die when they refuse to leave their doomed home.

But the Doctor and the Master, of course, get out alive, and the Master escapes in his TARDIS.  Their errand complete, the Doctor and Jo are returned to UNIT HQ by the Time Lords.

What Lisa thought

I think this is a pretty good story, and one whose main theme--the common man being screwed over by a powerful corporation surreptitiously aided by a government in thrall to the elite--resonates just as strongly in 2012 as it did in 1971.  I was surprised that Lisa wasn't terribly impressed by it, especially since it's a jaunt into space opera after a season and a half of exclusively earthbound stories.  But she found the plot structure offputting, with the colonist v miner conflict running in parallel with the mystery of what was in the primitives' city for much of the serial.  She did, though, like episode six a lot, in which the two plot lines were neatly tied together at their resolution.

The next story will be "The Daemons".

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 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 Seeds of Death

The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie peruse the rocketry museum

Episode One, 25 January 1969
Episode Two, 1 February 1969
Episode Three, 8 February 1969
Episode Four, 15 February 1969
Episode Five, 22 February 1969
Episode Six, 1 March 1969

Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

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

It's the end of the twenty-first century.  Travel on Earth has been revolutionised by the invention of T-Mat, a teleportation device able to transport people and goods instantly from anywhere with a T-Mat terminal to anywhere else with a T-Mat terminal.  Life on Earth is now fully integrated with T-Mat; food and medical supplies are teleported across the globe all day long, such that a sudden breakdown in T-Mat would lead to massive food shortages in Earth's major cities within just a few hours, and to complete societal breakdown shortly after that.

(Spoiler: Earth is about to have to endure a total shutdown of the T-Mat network.)

Humanity's reliance on T-Mat has become so total, and so second-nature, that they don't even have a backup transport system for if T-Mat fails--no rockets or other forms of physical transport.  This also means exploration into the solar system has stopped; T-Mat can't send you anywhere that doesn't already have a T-Mat terminal at the far end, and no one is interested in travelling by rocket to set T-Mat terminals up in outer space.  So humanity has only ever got as far as the Moon, where we've set up the most important T-Mat terminal of all--a relay station whose good operation is essential for keeping Earth's T-Mat network running.

So there's a lot of consternation when the T-Mat moon base suddenly shuts down totally.  T-Mat stops working all over the world, and those vital food and medical shipments stop flowing.  And communications with moon base have also been cut off--T-Mat Control in London can't raise them on the radio.  Without a backup fleet of rockets, there's no way for technicians from Earth to get up to the Moon to find out what's wrong.

Luckily, and in a spectacular piece of plot-helping good luck, the TARDIS materliases on Earth at just this time, and it actually lands in a museum dedicated to the lost art of space rocketry, run by a cantankerous old man who just happens to be the respected former colleague of Commander Radnor, who's now in charge of the T-Mat system.

And but so, in short order we've got Jamie, Zoe and the Doctor piloting Earth's one working rocket up to moon base to see what's up.  I don't know about you, but if I were responsible for restoring Earth's teleport network and alleviating an imminent global societal collapse that's entirely down to my own failure to keep a backup rocket in reserve, I'd certainly be sending in three strangers who conveniently showed up right when the teleport system collapsed, and not any of my own expert technicians.

Anyway.  Our heroes get up to moon base, and discover it's been taken over by Ice Warriors, the spearhead of an invasion force from Mars.  They've killed everyone on the base except for two men, one who escaped into its labyrinthine corridors and another who agreed to help the Ice Warriors rather than be executed.

(Fewsham, the technician who collaborates with the Ice Warriors, is probably the most interesting character in the whole serial.  He really looks like a moral coward for the first four episodes--"I don't want to die like that!  I want to live!"--but then saves Zoe's life from an Ice Warrior at the start of episode five.  When everyone else T-Mats back down to Earth, however, he tricks them into letting him stay behind, and goes back to working for the Ice Warriors.  But he secretly opens a direct video link to Earth, so that T-Mat Control hear everything the Ice Warriors say to each other and thereby learn their invasion plan; when the Ice Warriors discover this, Fewsham faces his execution defiantly and bravely.)

The Ice Warriors' full plan is to take control of T-Mat, then teleport some special seeds to major cities throughout Earth's cold-weather regions.  These seeds release spores, and the spores quickly grow into a fungus that covers much of the planet, sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere at a rate that will reduce Earth's atmosphere to a level comparable to Mars's (and kill most human life in the process).  One Ice Warrior will teleport down to Earth's weather control building to stop the weather control bureau from making any rain over the affected parts of Earth, as water (in a rather comic-book development) is the fungus's one weakness.  A radio signal from moon base will then guide the rest of the Ice Warrior invasion fleet into Earth orbit, and the Ice Warrior army will land on the depopulated planet and take it over.

The TARDIS team and the Ice Warriors spend a couple of episodes chasing each other around the corridors of moon base, until the Doctor defeats them by using their own comic-book weakness, turning up the heat.  (Moon base turns out to have both the most baroque and fastest-acting thermostat in the solar system.)

By that time, however, the fungus has already been released and is threatening the Earth, so next the TARDIS team have to head to weather-control in London, where they get to spend another episode chasing the last Ice Warrior around corridors that look remarkably like the moon base corridors.  After that's taken care of, the Doctor then sends a satellite into orbit broadcasting a signal that mimics the guidance signal for the Ice Warrior invasion fleet, so that instead of entering Earth orbit, the signal leads the fleet into plunging straight into the Sun.

All done and dusted in time for tea.

What Lisa thought

She really liked this one, which was a big pickup from "The Invasion", which she hadn't liked.  She found Fewsham's character arc a compelling one, and she was also fascinated with the idea of T-Mat.  It's a concept that had had a degree of thought put into it, with side-effects like the idea that Earth had completely abandoned space exploration beyond the Moon.

The next story is "The Space Pirates", an effort from Robert Holmes.  It's also the very last Doctor Who story with missing episodes, so we'll be missing it and heading on to "The War Games".