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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".
