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".