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".

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".

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".