We've been slaves for a thousand years; do you think you can free us in one day?--Beta
Episode one, 28 December 1968
Episode two, 4 January 1969
Episode three, 11 January 1969
Episode four, 18 January 1969
Written by Robert Holmes
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Herriot
A thousand years ago, the Krotons' spaceship landed in the midst of the humanoid Gorns' settlement. The Gorns were a primitive people, and apparently stereotypically so; without understanding what was going on, they immediately attacked the spaceship. The Krotons retaliated by making a dark rain fall, which turned the land surrounding the Gorns' settlement into a wasteland where nothing would grow.
The Krotons remained in the Gorn settlement after this brief war as their overlords and protectors, though the Gorns never saw them--they always remain in their spaceship. In fact, using knowledge the Krotons gave them, the Gorns built a learning centre around the spaceship, with computerised learning machines on which all Gorns are educated. Periodically, when a Gorn scores highly enough on the learning machines, they're called to be a "companion of the Krotons", meaning that they get to enter the Krotons' spaceship--and are never seen again.
The Gorns have become much more advanced under the Krotons' tutelage, but there are gaps in their knowledge--the Krotons forbid the Gorns, for instance, from studying anything to do with chemistry. And no Gorn ever ventures into the wastelands, for according to the Krotons, anyone who visits them will die.
The TARDIS arrives, causing a great flurry of consternation amongst the Gorns. Almost straight away, the Doctor makes two discoveries that completely shake the foundation of Gorn society: first, that the wasteland isn't poisoned at all. Maybe it was once, but it has recovered a long time ago. And second, those who are selected as companions of the Krotons--the best and brightest of the Gorns--are secretly murdered.
The story therefore depicts a moment in Gorn history, the moment when the Gorns, in shock over learning their entire culture is based on a lie, take up arms and throw off their technologically advanced Kroton overlords.
And of course, predictably, that's exactly what happens. The plotline isn't the interesting part of "The Krotons". The interesting party, besides Zoe's costume (a very nice miniskirt and go-go boots combination), is the people for whom this story marks their first involvement in Doctor Who.
This is the first Doctor Who written by Robert Holmes, who's generally seen as the greatest script writer the programme has ever had. He's produced a fairly standard, unmemorable effort for his first attempt, but it does have a few interesting ideas. The Krotons, for instance, turn out to be a sort of cross between living organisms and machinery; they don't die, but rather "cease to function", in just the same way their ship does. And they've been killing the cleverest Gorns because their spaceship runs by extracting mental energy; the Gorns' death is just a side effect.
The other significant first-timer here is Philip Madoc, playing the Gorn villain, Eelek. This is his first appearance in the television series, but not in the Doctor Who franchise--he had previously played the black marketeer in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD, the 1965 big-screen adaptation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Both then and as Eelek, he plays exactly the sort of role he'll become such a virtuoso of during the next decade.
He's ruthless, ambitious, consummately self-serving and thoroughly amoral, interested only in accumulating power to himself. Even when he's being friendly, he exudes menace--there are precious few smiles more chilling than his--but, whenever his aims are frustrated, he can burst on a moment's notice into a thoroughly intimidating fury. For me, only Jon Simm rivals him as the best villainous actor the programme's ever had--yes, that means he even surpasses Roger Delgado.
Here as Eelek, he demonstrates all those qualities that make him so great. He's the assistant to Selris, the Gorns' headman. When the Gorns learn the truth about the Krotons, he uses it as an opportunity to make a bid for power, overthrowing Selris, by positioning himself as rabidly anti-Kroton, ready to lead a crusade against them. But when the Krotons offer to leave the Gorn planet if only Eelek will turn the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie over to them, he agrees unhesitatingly, happily abandoning the very allies who are the ones who showed the Gorns the truth in the first place.
What Lisa thought
She liked three of the four parts, essentially--she felt part two really dragged. Part two, incidentally, is the only episode that doesn't feature Philip Madoc.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
The Invasion
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Episode Two, 9 November 1968
Episode Three, 16 November 1968
Episode Four, 23 November 1968
Episode Five, 30 November 1968
Episode Six, 7 December 1968
Episode Seven, 14 December 1968
Episode Eight, 21 December 1968
Story by Kit Pedler
Written by Derrick Sherwin
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (earliest extant appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot
John Levene as Corporal Benton (first appearance)
We can essentially divide "The Invasion" into two halves, though that division is done pretty seamlessly during the actual story. In the first four episodes, the TARDIS lands in a near-future Britain. Dialogue places this story five years after "The Web of Fear", which was forty years after "The Abominable Snowmen", which took place in 1935, so that would seem to indicate "The Invasion" takes place in 1980--but such a date would give us problems when we try to reconcile it into the dates for other, later UNIT stories. (Both "Web" and "Snowmen" are amongst the missing stories.) So we'll go with "sometime in the 1970s" for the story's setting.
Anyway. The TARDIS lands in near-future Britain, where it discovers a corporation named
(Professor Watkins and Isobel are pretty obvious stand-ins for Professor Travers and his daughter Anne from "The Web of Fear", who have "gone off to America", presumably because their actors were unavailable to reprise their roles in "The Invasion".)
In the process, they fall in with UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a global secret police. UNIT are headed by Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, a British Army officer who knows the Doctor and Jamie from "The Web of Fear", when the Yeti invaded the London Underground. (Lethbridge-Stewart was a colonel in "Web"; he's now been promoted to brigadier.) UNIT are also investigating International Electromatics and its CEO, Tobias Vaughn, though for something far more sinister than the kidnapping of a single professor.
The second four episodes deal with Vaughn putting his nefarious plot into action: he's allied with the Cybermen, and together they stage an attempt to take over the Earth. Vaughn and his minions sneak a Cyber army into the sewers beneath London, and then the Cybermen transmit a signal through all the International Electromatics products that renders every human on Earth unconscious. The plan is that the Cybermen will then emerge from the sewers and take control of London long enough to land the full Cyber invasion force from "the dark side of the Moon", and humanity will regain consciousness to find their whole planet under Cyber control.
(The Cybermen marching through the streets of London produces the famous image of a platoon of them marching down the steps with the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral behind them.)
But the Doctor has figured out Vaughn's plan, and he's able to shield himself and UNIT from the hypnotic transmission's effects--leaving UNIT (and Jamie, Zoe, Isobel and Professor Watkins) the only waking human beings on Earth. A UNIT contingent flies to Moscow, where the Russians were about to launch a manned mission to the Moon; the UNIT troop replace the life pod on the rocket with a nuclear warhead, and are able to destroy the Cyber fleet while it's still in orbit. Meanwhile, the Doctor leads a separate UNIT contingent in an assault on International Electromatics' tightly controlled corporate countryside compound, defeating those Cybermen who have already reached Earth. Vaughn is, of course, killed in the process.
There's a whole lot to talk about with "The Invasion". The most apparent is the way this story functions as a pilot episode for the way Doctor Who is going to get reformatted at the start of next season. (We still have two more stories before we get there.) No longer will the Doctor be a carefree wanderer in time and space; instead, he'll be partnered with UNIT on a near-future Earth, investigating, in Malcolm Hulke's immortal phrase, "mad scientists and alien invasions"--James Bond meets Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.
It's to that end that the Brigadier is brought back from "The Web of Fear", giving the programme what's probably its best-loved character, at least amongst its fandom, and an actor who'd remain actively associated with it for the rest of his life. (I'm writing this 44 years after the first broadcast of "The Web of Fear", and right now, the most recent episode of Doctor Who ever aired--three or four months ago--contained a wonderful scene dedicated to the Brig, as a commemoration of Nicholas Courtney's death earlier this year.) The Brigadier will function as Captain Scarlet to the Third Doctor's James Bond--in fact, the Third Doctor is closer in characterisation to Bond or Simon Templar than he is to pretty much any of the other ten Doctors who've headlined the programme throughout its history.
(Given that the parts of the Watkinses were clearly originally written for the Traverses, one has to wonder if the original plan was also to have them on the UNIT staff for season seven, as well.)
The next thing that's so interesting about "The Invasion" is its depiction of near-future Earth--a depiction that's exceptionally prescient, even if it did till longer than 1980 to get here. Over its eight episodes, we see a number of things that are commonplace today but weren't present in 1968:
1. A computerised, automated telephone-answering system at a corporate headquarters, that specifies to the caller what sort of input it needs and then responds to simple voice commands;
2. A device that looks and acts a whole lot like a cell phone;
3. Microchips! Referred to as "micro monolithic circuitry";
4. Disposable electronic devices (in this case, a transistor radio), like the disposable cameras that have permeated our society;
5. Webcams! Tobias Vaughn maintains a visual surveillance system throughout International Electromatics's headquarters, and this system takes the form of cameras that are small, white spheres about the size of a tennis ball, which can be placed unobtrusively at points in rooms where they won't be noticed, like on cluttered shelves. And they really do look just like webcams.
And the last (and to me, coolest) thing about the story is the fact that we can now watch it in its entirety. Episodes one and four are missing, but about five years ago, the story was released on DVD with those two episodes reconstructed as Flash animation, set to the original episodes' soundtracks. The first episode in particular is effective--it has a noirish feel that matches the spooky soundtrack and not-quite-sure-what's-going-on quality of the storyline at that point.
What Lisa thought
She thought the opening four episodes--the Tobias Vaughn and International Electromatics portion of the story--didn't work. It simply wasn't credible to her, once she knew it was the Cybermen who were Vaughn's unseen allies, that these allies had been willing to put up with him for so long. Vaughn keeps demanding more control and authority over the invasion than the Cybermen want to give, and the Cybermen keep caving in to his demands, because they need him. The thing is, though, they don't need him--not once things have reached the stage that they've already positioned their commando force in the London sewers.
Her other reaction was that she thought the two animated episodes were a pretty weird experience--which is fair enough, I suppose, though when I went back and checked my original reaction post to this DVD release back in 2007, she agreed with me that part one was very effective.
The next story in our rewatch is "The Krotons".
Friday, November 18, 2011
The Mind Robber
Zoe: Doctor, we're not actually in flight, are we?
Doctor: No, why?
Zoe: Well then, presumably we've landed, so why isn't the scanner showing anything?
Doctor: Well, because, well, we're nowhere. It's as simple as that.
Episode 1, 14 September 1968
Episode 2, 21 September 1968
Episode 3, 28 September 1968
Episode 4, 5 October 1968
Episode 5, 12 October 1968
Written by Peter Ling
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Produced by Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines and Hamish Wilson as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot
During its hurried departure from Dulcis, the TARDIS blows a fluid link, forcing the Doctor to activate the emergency unit to escape. This transports the TARDIS into a void beyond time and space--they've left the universe as we know it entirely. The Doctor withdraws into the TARDIS's innards to make the repairs necessary to get them up and running again
But something strange is going on. Both Jamie and Zoe are lured outside into the void when they see images of their homes on the scanner--the Scottish Highlands for Jamie, and a futuristic conurbation called "the City" for Zoe. But outside they find only a white, featureless nowhere, where they soon fall into a strange, hypnotic trance.
The Doctor realises what's happened when he returns to the TARDIS control room and finds the doors wide open. He's able to sense that some sort of malevolent presence has entered the TARDIS through the open doors, and he engages in a telepathic battle with it. Through this battle, he's able to free Jamie and Zoe of the influence that's controlling them, but in the process, the TARDIS flies apart, and Jamie and Zoe are left clinging to the control console as it floats through black emptiness.
(Zoe in her sparkly catsuit, clinging to the console, is possibly the single greatest frame in all of Doctor Who.)
Eventually, the TARDIS team wake up to find themselves in a dark, spooky forest. They're in some sort of strange Land of Fiction, where riddles and wordplay take on physical reality. For instance, the Doctor and Jamie find Zoe trapped behind a painting of a door, but they can't open it because it's not a real door. When is a door not a door? When it's ajar, of course--as soon as the Doctor figures out the answer to that riddle, the door transforms into a giant jar, with Zoe trapped inside it, and the Doctor and Jamie are able to rescue her by removing the lid.
There's a neat little trick where the Doctor finds a cardboard standee of Jamie, with a blank face. Next to it are several different facial elements--for instance, three pairs of eyes, three noses, three mouths. The Doctor has to reconstruct Jamie's face onto the standee. Of course, he gets it wrong, and Jamie comes to life with the wrong face, allowing Frazer Hines to have a week off while Hamish Wilson takes his place.
The TARDIS team also encounter several figures from literature and mythology: Gulliver (played by Bernard Horsfall, in the first of several appearances on the programme), Medusa, Rapunzel and the Karkus, a superhero from a comic strip popular in Zoe's native time, the far future known as "the year 2000". But any of these characters who attempt to obstruct our heroes--like Medusa or the Karkus--remain real only so long as the TARDIS team think of them as real. For instance, Zoe is able to defeat the Karkus by convincing himself that he's just a work of fiction; this then allows her to overcome his super-strength and defeat him in a wrestling match.
Eventually the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe reach a castle on a mountaintop, and at its centre they find the Master of the Land of Fiction, an old man hooked up to a massive computer. He is a writer of boys' fiction from 1920s England who fell asleep at his desk one day and was kidnapped to serve as the brain for this massive computer. The computer is what generates the Land of Fiction, but it needs an imaginative human to serve as its creative impetus.
Now, though, the Master is growing old, and he needs to be replaced--by the Doctor. The Doctor, of course, refuses, so the Master traps Jamie and Zoe inside a giant book, turning them into fictional characters. The Master himself won't release them, so they can only escape if the Doctor agrees to take the Master's place; this will allow the Doctor himself to free them, as his first act of office.
The Doctor still refuses, but the Master is able to use Jamie and Zoe--who, as works of fiction, are now under his control--to entrap him and hook him up directly to the central computer. With both the Doctor and the Master now in control of the Land of Fiction, a write-off ensues, with the two of them summoning up various literary characters to battle each other, though the Doctor is hampered in that he cannot write about himself, or he will turn himself into a work of fiction.
The Doctor is able to free Jamie and Zoe, who then sneak into the control centre and override the central computer. This sends the white robots that serve the Master haywire, and they destroy the computer and therefore the Land of Fiction. The TARDIS team are able to free the Master--who, disconnected from the computer, has no memory of anything since his kidnap in the 1920s--and the four of them depart in the TARDIS.
What Lisa thought
She really liked this one--a whole lot. She thought it was a fun romp, and she really liked the post-modern air to a story in which the regular characters are explicitly attempting to preserve their reality in the face of attempts to turn them into works of fiction. She also felt like she was getting a peek into British schoolyard culture (at least, of the 1960s), as with the schoolchildren who kept asking the Doctor riddles. ("What can you make of a sword?" "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "Where was Moses when the lights went out?" "Adam and Eve and Pinch-me went down to the river.") She gives "The Mind Robber" a wholehearted seal of approval.
Me? I like the sparkly catsuit.
The next story in our rewatch will be "The Krotons".
Doctor: No, why?
Zoe: Well then, presumably we've landed, so why isn't the scanner showing anything?
Doctor: Well, because, well, we're nowhere. It's as simple as that.
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Episode 2, 21 September 1968
Episode 3, 28 September 1968
Episode 4, 5 October 1968
Episode 5, 12 October 1968
Written by Peter Ling
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Produced by Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines and Hamish Wilson as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot
During its hurried departure from Dulcis, the TARDIS blows a fluid link, forcing the Doctor to activate the emergency unit to escape. This transports the TARDIS into a void beyond time and space--they've left the universe as we know it entirely. The Doctor withdraws into the TARDIS's innards to make the repairs necessary to get them up and running again
But something strange is going on. Both Jamie and Zoe are lured outside into the void when they see images of their homes on the scanner--the Scottish Highlands for Jamie, and a futuristic conurbation called "the City" for Zoe. But outside they find only a white, featureless nowhere, where they soon fall into a strange, hypnotic trance.
The Doctor realises what's happened when he returns to the TARDIS control room and finds the doors wide open. He's able to sense that some sort of malevolent presence has entered the TARDIS through the open doors, and he engages in a telepathic battle with it. Through this battle, he's able to free Jamie and Zoe of the influence that's controlling them, but in the process, the TARDIS flies apart, and Jamie and Zoe are left clinging to the control console as it floats through black emptiness.
(Zoe in her sparkly catsuit, clinging to the console, is possibly the single greatest frame in all of Doctor Who.)
Eventually, the TARDIS team wake up to find themselves in a dark, spooky forest. They're in some sort of strange Land of Fiction, where riddles and wordplay take on physical reality. For instance, the Doctor and Jamie find Zoe trapped behind a painting of a door, but they can't open it because it's not a real door. When is a door not a door? When it's ajar, of course--as soon as the Doctor figures out the answer to that riddle, the door transforms into a giant jar, with Zoe trapped inside it, and the Doctor and Jamie are able to rescue her by removing the lid.
There's a neat little trick where the Doctor finds a cardboard standee of Jamie, with a blank face. Next to it are several different facial elements--for instance, three pairs of eyes, three noses, three mouths. The Doctor has to reconstruct Jamie's face onto the standee. Of course, he gets it wrong, and Jamie comes to life with the wrong face, allowing Frazer Hines to have a week off while Hamish Wilson takes his place.
The TARDIS team also encounter several figures from literature and mythology: Gulliver (played by Bernard Horsfall, in the first of several appearances on the programme), Medusa, Rapunzel and the Karkus, a superhero from a comic strip popular in Zoe's native time, the far future known as "the year 2000". But any of these characters who attempt to obstruct our heroes--like Medusa or the Karkus--remain real only so long as the TARDIS team think of them as real. For instance, Zoe is able to defeat the Karkus by convincing himself that he's just a work of fiction; this then allows her to overcome his super-strength and defeat him in a wrestling match.
Eventually the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe reach a castle on a mountaintop, and at its centre they find the Master of the Land of Fiction, an old man hooked up to a massive computer. He is a writer of boys' fiction from 1920s England who fell asleep at his desk one day and was kidnapped to serve as the brain for this massive computer. The computer is what generates the Land of Fiction, but it needs an imaginative human to serve as its creative impetus.
Now, though, the Master is growing old, and he needs to be replaced--by the Doctor. The Doctor, of course, refuses, so the Master traps Jamie and Zoe inside a giant book, turning them into fictional characters. The Master himself won't release them, so they can only escape if the Doctor agrees to take the Master's place; this will allow the Doctor himself to free them, as his first act of office.
The Doctor still refuses, but the Master is able to use Jamie and Zoe--who, as works of fiction, are now under his control--to entrap him and hook him up directly to the central computer. With both the Doctor and the Master now in control of the Land of Fiction, a write-off ensues, with the two of them summoning up various literary characters to battle each other, though the Doctor is hampered in that he cannot write about himself, or he will turn himself into a work of fiction.
The Doctor is able to free Jamie and Zoe, who then sneak into the control centre and override the central computer. This sends the white robots that serve the Master haywire, and they destroy the computer and therefore the Land of Fiction. The TARDIS team are able to free the Master--who, disconnected from the computer, has no memory of anything since his kidnap in the 1920s--and the four of them depart in the TARDIS.
What Lisa thought
She really liked this one--a whole lot. She thought it was a fun romp, and she really liked the post-modern air to a story in which the regular characters are explicitly attempting to preserve their reality in the face of attempts to turn them into works of fiction. She also felt like she was getting a peek into British schoolyard culture (at least, of the 1960s), as with the schoolchildren who kept asking the Doctor riddles. ("What can you make of a sword?" "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "Where was Moses when the lights went out?" "Adam and Eve and Pinch-me went down to the river.") She gives "The Mind Robber" a wholehearted seal of approval.
Me? I like the sparkly catsuit.
The next story in our rewatch will be "The Krotons".
Monday, October 24, 2011
The Dominators
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Episode 1, 10 August 1968
Episode 2, 17 August 1968
Episode 3, 24 August 1968
Episode 4, 31 August 1968
Episode 5, 7 September 1968
Written by Norman Ashby
Directed by Morris Barry
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Producer Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot (earliest extant appearance)
On the planet Dulcis, war and strife are unknown. Also unknown is basic scientific curiosity--172 years ago, Dulcian scientists detonated an atomic bomb on an isolated island, so that they could study how long it took for radiation levels to subside. But when all the radiation levels suddenly drop to zero, the Dulcians don't respond with, "Holy crap, that must mean the advance force from a race of merciless alien invaders must have landed on the island and used that radiation for fuel as they prepare to destroy our planet!" or even the perhaps more reasonable, "Hmm, that's weird. Maybe we should head over to the island and try to figure out why the radiation suddenly vanished." No, instead they say, "Well, now we know--radiation from an atomic blast lasts 172 years, then vanishes completely."
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The formerly-radioactive island. Four groups have arrived there at roughly the same time: a trio from a Dulcian university, studying radiation; a party of adolescent adventurers, visiting the island without passes as a way to spice up prosperous-yet-monotonous life on Dulcis; the TARDIS team; and a spaceship carrying two Dominators.
The Dominators are a race of merciless alien conquerors, "rulers of the Ten Galaxies". Their spaceships are powered by radiation, but this particular ship is almost out of power. Detecting the radioactive island, they've come to Dulcis, where they immediately suck up all the radiation to refuel. But this replenishes their power levels only enough to give them the energy for a full refuel, which involves drilling to the molten core of Dulcis and dropping an atomic bomb down the shaft, to irradiate the whole core--which incidentally will also turn all of Dulcis into a radioactive cinder, destroying all life on the surface.
Of course, the TARDIS team and the Dulcians soon discover this. The story's what-makes-this-story-different-from-others quality comes in the difficulty our heroes have in getting the Dulcians to fight back, because of the ethos of nonviolence and incuriosity that permeates society on Dulcis. First, the Dulcians flat out don't believe that aliens have landed on their planet, because they don't believe in aliens. Then, they refuse to accept the threat the Dominators pose, and continue to maintain that if only they treat the invaders with friendliness and obedience, they'll be able to bring out the Dominators' peaceful side. And then when they do finally realise what danger they're in, they don't even know how to fight back.
(This is illustrated very well in a meeting of the High Council of Dulcis: "The way I see it, there are only three courses of action: fight, flight or submission."
"Flight is out of the question!"
"And we have means with which to fight."
"Then that leaves only ... submission.")
Eventually, the Doctor and a small group of Dulcians are able to foil the Dominators' plan by tunneling beneath the radioactive island so that they gain access to the Dominators' drill-bore from the side. This way, when the invaders drop their atomic bomb down the shaft, the Doctor catches it, then stows it aboard the Dominators' spaceship. The spaceship lifts off so that the Dominators can get away from the planet before it explodes, but of course, the only thing they end up destroying is their own ship.
But none of all that is really what sticks with me about "The Dominators". The most memorable thing about this story is that it's our first chance to get a look at the Doctor's new companion, Zoe, the girl genius from the year 2000. (In 1968 terms, "from the year 2000" means "lives in a space station".)
Zoe is a chipper, undeterable character, utterly guileless, completely selfless, friendly, and entirely comfortable with the fact that she's a scientific and mathematical genius. And actress Wendy Padbury is one of the most adorably sexy women ever to make it onto a television screen.
That sexiness and the mores of 1968 combine to ensure that, over the course of her one season on the TARDIS, Zoe is clad a succession of wonderfully enticing costumes, and the one in "The Dominators" is one of the best. The people of Dulcis all walk about in short gowns. For men, this means dresses of a curtain-like material that come down to mid-thigh (longer for figures of authority). But for women, it means a choker and a revealingly short babydoll negligee, easily transparent enough to show off the bikini bottoms being worn underneath. It's glorious.
What Lisa thought
She enjoyed it fine. She did complain about the broad strokes with which the story was told--the utterly good Dulcians contrasted with the utterly ruthless Dominators; the simplicity of, "Well, we'll just burrow in from the side and catch the bomb when they drop it."
This sort of block-colour approach to storytelling even extends to interpersonal dynamics. The two Dominators have a running conflict throughout the story: the first officer wants to destroy everything in sight, murdering any Dulcians he sees, while his commander insists that the natives pose no threat, and they should be spared as killing them will dangerously deplete the spaceships' already dangerously-low levels of power.
In fact, all four cliffhangers in this story involve the first officer ordering the Quarks (diminutive robots that the Dominators use as both a labour force and their footsoldiers) to kill a character, which is then resolved by the commander appearing out of nowhere and countermanding the order. The cliffhangers at the end of part two and part three are in fact identical, with the first officer deciding to destroy a house standing on an opposite hill just to have some fun, unaware that some of our main characters are hiding in the house, and the image fades out as debris falls around our heroes from the blasts of the Quarks' molecular cannon.
(It's interesting that we're supposed to see the first officer as a bloodthirsty fool, while the commander is the voice of intelligence and reason, considering that in the end, it's the first officer who was right the whole time--the natives do pose a threat, and the Dominators' best course of action would have been to slaughter them.)
There is a wonderful example of the comic chemistry between Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton, when the Dominators (thinking they have captured native Dulcians) subject the two of them to intelligence tests, to evaluate the native populations. The Doctor and Jamie quickly conclude that they should do their best to appear stupid, so as to present less of a threat.
The same scene also illustrates Troughton's nimbleness as an actor, when he convinces the Dominators that there are two species on Dulcis: the stupid ones, represented by him and Jamie, and the smart ones. "There aren't very many of them left. We don't like them very much--they tell us what to do, you see," he says, and all of a sudden his demeanor has changed completely, and with it, the whole tone of the scene. It's not that he's suddenly become threatening, because he hasn't--but with those two sentences and his sudden change in tone, he's managed to summon forth an entire picture in the viewer's mind, and one that's much, much darker than any actual images that appear onscreen in "The Dominators".
But essentially, "The Dominators" is a story where Doctor Who definitely comes across more as a children's programme than a family programme.
But whatever. Zoe, man. In a see-through microdress.
The next story in the rewatch is "The Mind Robber".
Monday, October 10, 2011
The Ice Warriors
Miss Garrett: That's not a weapon. It's a scientific instrument.
Varga: I see things differently.
One, 11 November 1967
Two, 18 November 1967
Three, 25 November 1967
Four, 2 December 1967
Five, 9 December 1967
Six, 16 December 1967
Episodes in italics have been lost.
Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Peter Bryant
Producer: Innes Lloyd
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (later extant appearance)
In the distant future, Earth has entered a Second Ice Age. We have brought this upon ourselves: as our population expanded in the late twentieth century, we deforested the planet in order to create enough space in which to house our increasing numbers. This vastly reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (!), thereby initiating a period of massive global cooling (!!).
Most of the population has been relocated to temperate Africa. The glaciers are swallowing much of the northern hemisphere, held back only by a series of undermanned bases that use a technology called the ioniser to raise the temperature at the glaciers' perimeter, thereby preventing them from expanding.
In the ice, a survey team from one of the bases has found a frozen prehistoric man. Only it's not a man--it's an alien. When defrosted, he reveals himself to be Varga, an Ice Warrior from the planet Mars, who has been frozen beneath the ice for millennia. He kidnaps Victoria and has her help him find his ship, also buried in the ice, and revive three more members of his crew, so that he will then have the resources to decide whether to go back to Mars or stay and conquer the Earth.
The Doctor and the staff of the base realise that they can use the ioniser either to free the Ice Warriors' ship from the ice, or destroy it, but there's an issue--they don't know what sort of drive the ship has. If it has an atomic drive, the ioniser could well cause an explosion, destroying the base along with the spaceship. The Doctor sets off for the ship to try and find out what the situation is.
But while he's gone, the Ice Warriors stage a takeover of the base and proceed to steal the ioniser's fuel cells to replenish their ship's power supply--though of course, that will result in the destruction of the ioniser and the overrunning of Europe by the glaciers. Before they can make their getaway, though, the Doctor--now at their spaceship--is able to reconfigure the cannon they have pointing at the base, restructuring it the beam it projects so that it is destructive to Ice Warriors but not to humans. The Ice Warriors therefore have to flee the base, abandoning the fuel cells.
It's now been determined that directing the ioniser at the spaceship could indeed result in an atomic explosion. The staff's human crew have been accustomed to turning all decisions over to their control computer, but the risks here are so finely balanced--directing the ioniser at the glacier, leading to atomic explosion, or not doing so, leading to the base being swallowed by the glacier--that it refuses to make a decision. The base's staff are paralysed by fear, until ultimately their rogue lead scientist, Penley, chooses to risk attacking the Ice Warriors. Their spaceship explodes--killing the aliens--but the explosion is contained within the glacier and does not harm the base. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria slip away while the base staff celebrate.
What Lisa thought
She wasn't too impressed with this one. It's pretty thin on plot--I managed to detail the entire six-episode storyline in six paragraphs, after all, and even that was stretching it. Essentially, the plot of "The Ice Warriors" is Ice Age, aliens pulled from glacier, aliens threaten the Earth, the ioniser can stop them, the ioniser does stop them. To draw this out, seriously four episodes are devoted to debating whether or not to use the ioniser.
Besides the first appearance of the Ice Warriors, there are a couple of noteworthy elements here. The first is the appearance of a young Peter Sallis ("young" being a very relative term for an actor whose main claim to fame is forty years as the star of Last of the Summer Wine) as the renegade scientist Penley. Then there's also the quaint expectation that the Earth's rising population would actually lead to a loss of carbon dioxide, triggering another Ice Age
And finally there's the prediction of us growing to rely on computers so much that we need their assessments to make all our decisions for us, and are paralysed by indecision when they prove incapable of doing so. It's easy to dismiss that as being just as incorrect as the idea of global cooling, but I'm not so sure--I think that might really be a pretty solid extrapolation of where we're going, with our drive to renounce responsibility as much as possible and our reliance upon computers to make determinations in situations where variables change too quickly for the human mind to keep track of them.
The next serial after this is "The Enemy of the World", in which the TARDIS team fight Salamander, dictator of much of the world in the early twenty-first century--and the physical double of the Doctor.
Then comes "The Web of Fear", in which the Yeti that the Doctor fought in "The Abominable Snowmen" invade the London Underground. The Doctor is assisted in combatting them by the British Army, led by a mysterious colonel by the name of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, making his first appearance on the programme.
Then is "Fury From the Deep", in which hypnotic evil seaweed attempts to take over a North Sea oil rig. The Doctor realises the seaweed is susceptible to high-pitched sound, so he defeats it by amplifying the sound of Victoria's screams of terror, in what must undoubtedly be Doctor Who's most metatextual climax until 2011's "The Wedding of River Song". (How, how can this story by missing and unavailable to us?) Victoria leaves at the end of this one, staying behind with the family of one of the rig workers, Harris.
And then there's "The Wheel in Space", in which the Doctor and Jamie defeat an attempt by Cybermen to take over a human space station, the Wheel. When they depart at the story's end, the Doctor and Jamie take with them one of the station's crew, a young mathematical genius named Zoe Heriot.
All these stories are, sadly, lost, so we'll pick up our rewatch with the next story after "The Wheel in Space", "The Dominators".
I
Varga: I see things differently.
 |
Two, 18 November 1967
Three, 25 November 1967
Four, 2 December 1967
Five, 9 December 1967
Six, 16 December 1967
Episodes in italics have been lost.
Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Peter Bryant
Producer: Innes Lloyd
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (later extant appearance)
In the distant future, Earth has entered a Second Ice Age. We have brought this upon ourselves: as our population expanded in the late twentieth century, we deforested the planet in order to create enough space in which to house our increasing numbers. This vastly reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (!), thereby initiating a period of massive global cooling (!!).
Most of the population has been relocated to temperate Africa. The glaciers are swallowing much of the northern hemisphere, held back only by a series of undermanned bases that use a technology called the ioniser to raise the temperature at the glaciers' perimeter, thereby preventing them from expanding.
In the ice, a survey team from one of the bases has found a frozen prehistoric man. Only it's not a man--it's an alien. When defrosted, he reveals himself to be Varga, an Ice Warrior from the planet Mars, who has been frozen beneath the ice for millennia. He kidnaps Victoria and has her help him find his ship, also buried in the ice, and revive three more members of his crew, so that he will then have the resources to decide whether to go back to Mars or stay and conquer the Earth.
The Doctor and the staff of the base realise that they can use the ioniser either to free the Ice Warriors' ship from the ice, or destroy it, but there's an issue--they don't know what sort of drive the ship has. If it has an atomic drive, the ioniser could well cause an explosion, destroying the base along with the spaceship. The Doctor sets off for the ship to try and find out what the situation is.
But while he's gone, the Ice Warriors stage a takeover of the base and proceed to steal the ioniser's fuel cells to replenish their ship's power supply--though of course, that will result in the destruction of the ioniser and the overrunning of Europe by the glaciers. Before they can make their getaway, though, the Doctor--now at their spaceship--is able to reconfigure the cannon they have pointing at the base, restructuring it the beam it projects so that it is destructive to Ice Warriors but not to humans. The Ice Warriors therefore have to flee the base, abandoning the fuel cells.
It's now been determined that directing the ioniser at the spaceship could indeed result in an atomic explosion. The staff's human crew have been accustomed to turning all decisions over to their control computer, but the risks here are so finely balanced--directing the ioniser at the glacier, leading to atomic explosion, or not doing so, leading to the base being swallowed by the glacier--that it refuses to make a decision. The base's staff are paralysed by fear, until ultimately their rogue lead scientist, Penley, chooses to risk attacking the Ice Warriors. Their spaceship explodes--killing the aliens--but the explosion is contained within the glacier and does not harm the base. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria slip away while the base staff celebrate.
What Lisa thought
She wasn't too impressed with this one. It's pretty thin on plot--I managed to detail the entire six-episode storyline in six paragraphs, after all, and even that was stretching it. Essentially, the plot of "The Ice Warriors" is Ice Age, aliens pulled from glacier, aliens threaten the Earth, the ioniser can stop them, the ioniser does stop them. To draw this out, seriously four episodes are devoted to debating whether or not to use the ioniser.
Besides the first appearance of the Ice Warriors, there are a couple of noteworthy elements here. The first is the appearance of a young Peter Sallis ("young" being a very relative term for an actor whose main claim to fame is forty years as the star of Last of the Summer Wine) as the renegade scientist Penley. Then there's also the quaint expectation that the Earth's rising population would actually lead to a loss of carbon dioxide, triggering another Ice Age
And finally there's the prediction of us growing to rely on computers so much that we need their assessments to make all our decisions for us, and are paralysed by indecision when they prove incapable of doing so. It's easy to dismiss that as being just as incorrect as the idea of global cooling, but I'm not so sure--I think that might really be a pretty solid extrapolation of where we're going, with our drive to renounce responsibility as much as possible and our reliance upon computers to make determinations in situations where variables change too quickly for the human mind to keep track of them.
The next serial after this is "The Enemy of the World", in which the TARDIS team fight Salamander, dictator of much of the world in the early twenty-first century--and the physical double of the Doctor.
Then comes "The Web of Fear", in which the Yeti that the Doctor fought in "The Abominable Snowmen" invade the London Underground. The Doctor is assisted in combatting them by the British Army, led by a mysterious colonel by the name of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, making his first appearance on the programme.
Then is "Fury From the Deep", in which hypnotic evil seaweed attempts to take over a North Sea oil rig. The Doctor realises the seaweed is susceptible to high-pitched sound, so he defeats it by amplifying the sound of Victoria's screams of terror, in what must undoubtedly be Doctor Who's most metatextual climax until 2011's "The Wedding of River Song". (How, how can this story by missing and unavailable to us?) Victoria leaves at the end of this one, staying behind with the family of one of the rig workers, Harris.
And then there's "The Wheel in Space", in which the Doctor and Jamie defeat an attempt by Cybermen to take over a human space station, the Wheel. When they depart at the story's end, the Doctor and Jamie take with them one of the station's crew, a young mathematical genius named Zoe Heriot.
All these stories are, sadly, lost, so we'll pick up our rewatch with the next story after "The Wheel in Space", "The Dominators".
I
Saturday, September 24, 2011
The Tomb of the Cybermen
No. I have a better idea. I'll leave you to the Cybermen. I'm sure they'll have a use for you. Or parts of you.--Klieg
Episode 1, 2 September 1967
Episode 2, 9 September 1967
Episode 3, 16 September 1967
Episode 4, 23 September 1967
Written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis
Directed by Morris Barry
Script editor: Victor Pemberton
Produced by Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor (earliest extant appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon (earliest extant appearance)
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (earlier extant appearance)
The TARDIS has just acquired a new crew member: nineteenth-century gentleman's daughter Victoria Waterfield, whose father was murdered by the Daleks at the end of the last (lost) story, "The Evil of the Daleks". For Victoria's first trip, the TARDIS lands on a rocky, desolate landscape. Soon after arrival, our heroes make contact with an archaeological expedition from Earth, from whom they learn that they are on the planet Telos, home world of the Cybermen.
It has been five hundred years since the Cybermen vanished from history, and the expedition are here in search of the legendary Tombs of the Cybermen, the hidden catacombs where stories say that the last of the Cybermen sleep in waiting. (The Doctor is genre savvy enough to realise what a bad idea this is.) The expedition can be divided into three groups: there are the archaeologists themselves, British and with a healthy respect for how archaeology is supposed to be done. There's the crew of the expedition's rocket ship, American, brash and brusque, but not very bright. And then there are Mr. Klieg and his associates. Klieg is funding the expedition, and he's brought along with him a woman, Kaftan, and her servant, the lumbering, silent hulk, Toberman. (Toberman has quite rightly been criticised over the years for being a rather racist depiction; it's unfortunate he's Doctor Who's first major black character.)
Klieg and Kaftan are indeterminately foreign, probably Arabic. Kaftan's relationship to Klieg is unclear, but while she doesn't have any clear authority over him, she's definitely able to manipulate him fairly easily. And she, Klieg and Toberman clearly have another, more sinister agenda that they're keeping secret for a moment.
When the Doctor and team arrive, the expedition have just found the entrance to the Tomb of the Cybermen--and they've just lost their first life, a crew member from the rocket who was electrocuted when he grasped hold of the doors of the tomb in order to open them. The Doctor works out that the door will now have been drained of the electricity with which it was charged, and the doors are safe to open.
Inside they find a labyrinth of corridors and control rooms. They're deserted, but the computer terminals are still in working order--if only someone can figure out their operating system, which appears to be based on a symbolic logic puzzle. It's not entirely free of menace, though--Victoria gets briefly trapped inside a "revitalising chamber" for the Cybermen when its door closes on top of her (no one realises it was Kaftan who sealed her inside, flipping its closing mechanism in order to see what effect the chamber would have on a human being), and one of the archaeologists is killed when he and Jamie accidentally trigger a Cyber gun in a weapons testing room.
And there's a massive steel hatchway, leading down into the belly of the facility, where Klieg is certain the Cybermen's actual tombs lie, but at first, no one can figure out how to open the hatch.
And there's something sinister afoot, too--someone has sabotaged the expedition's rocket. (Toberman, acting on Kaftan's orders.) It's going to take at least three days to fix, and during the repairs, the ship's captain, Hopper, is unwilling to allow any of the expedition aboard, because he doesn't know who it was that sabotaged the ship. That means they'll have to spend their nights (when the temperature on the surface drops dangerously) inside the ominous warren of the tombs.
Klieg manages to decipher the controls that open the big hatchway. There's an amusing sequence where the Doctor follows behind him as he flips switches, surreptitiously flipping them back again in an attempt to stop the hatchway from opening--only it turns out that the Doctor's subterfuge puts the switches in exactly the pattern that they really need to be in to open the hatch.
The expedition descends to the lower level of the tombs, leaving behind only Kaftan and Victoria. Victoria initially balks at staying behind just because she's a woman, until the Doctor explains that really, he wants her to stay behind to keep an eye on Kaftan. As soon as they're alone, however, Kaftan drugs Victoria by slipping a mickey into her coffee, and once Victoria has fallen asleep, she closes the hatch again, declaring that she'll only open it upon receiving a prearranged signal from Klieg.
Down below, the expedition come upon the actual Tombs of the Cybermen, a massive steel honeycomb crusted over with frost. Great, manlike shapes are visible through the tombs' doorways: Cybermen, dormant and sleeping. There's a control panel next to the tombs, and Klieg immediately sets about trying to decipher it, declaring that it must be an opening mechanism for the hatch that has closed above them. (The expedition realise the door has closed over them, but they don't know it was because of Kaftan's treachery.) Of course, both he and the Doctor realise what the control panel is really for--awakening the Cybermen in their tombs.
And this Klieg soon manages to do, and an army of Cybermen emerge from their dormancy and advance on the expedition. It's at this point that Klieg reveals his true plan: he is a representative of the Brotherhood of Logicians, an association of Earthmen dedicated to the supreme power of rationality and the intellect. The Logicians wish to make contact with the Cybermen--who are also, of course, dedicated to logic--and ally with them, using Cyber might to help them take over the Earth.
Of course, the Cybermen are having none of this. Now that they're awake again, they see no reason why they'd need the help from any human group to conquer humanity. The Cyber Leader makes clear with its first words what their plans are: "You belong to us. You will be like us."--In other words, the humans are going to be converted into Cybermen.
Back up at the tomb's entrance, Victoria has woken from her drug to find the hatch closed and Kaftan holding a gun on her. But the day is saved when Kaftan is attached by a Cybermat--basically, the Cyberman version of a mouse; like the Cybermen themselves, lethal and made of steel (though Kaftan survives this particular attack). This allows Victoria to open the hatch, and just in time, too. A struggle has broken out down below between the expedition and the Cybermen, and the hatch opens just in time for the expedition to escape--though the Doctor is almost dragged back down into the tombs when a Cyberman grasps him by the ankle as he climbs out. Only Toberman doesn't make it; he's been captured by the Cybermen.
Safe upstairs, the expedition are able to seal the Cybermen down below by closing the hatchway again. But they still can't escape--Captain Hopper hasn't finished his repairs on the rocket yet, and he still refuses to let anyone else aboard. The expedition imprison Kaftan and Klieg in the weapons testing room, because it has only one exit, but--rather unsurprisingly, considering the room's name--once they're in there, Klieg is able to find a Cyber gun, capable of killing both humans and (unlike the handguns a few of the humans are carrying) Cybermen.
Klieg and Kaftan therefore emerge from the weapons testing room and take the other expedition members captive at gunpoint. Klieg is still intent on forging an alliance with the Cybermen, and he thinks that possession of a Cybergun will give him the leverage to do that, so he opens the hatch.
Down in the tombs, the Cybermen have been on the verge of collapse from a lack of energy; the Cyber Leader has therefore ordered them back into stasis to conserve energy. It is therefore only the Leader who emerges from the hatchway, accompanied by Toberman. The Leader now agrees to Klieg's proposal in exchange for being allowed access to the revitalising chamber (where Victoria was trapped back in episode one), to restore his dangerously low levels of energy. The Doctor helps the Cyber Leader into the revitalising chamber in hopes of trapping it there, but once revitalised, the Leader is too strong for the ropes Jamie ties over the door and easily breaks free.
Another fight breaks out, between the Cyber Leader and the humans, and at this point Klieg and Kaftan discovers Toberman is now under Cyberman control--he has been partially Cyberised, with his right arm replaced with a steel limb. He knocks Klieg unconscious, and the Cyber Leader picks up Klieg's Cybergun and shoots and kills Kaftan.
The Doctor is able to use Kaftan's death to get through to Toberman, exhorting him to break free of Cyber control. Toberman turns on the Cyber Leader, picking it up bodily and smashing it into the floor. It appears the expedition have won. The Doctor, Toberman and Jamie descend back into the tombs so that the Doctor can seal the Cybermen inside permanently--but they find Klieg, recovered from Toberman's blow, already there, waking the Cybermen up again. He's still fixated on his plan of an alliance.
But he's killed by the first of the Cybermen to revive, who then turns round to the controls so that it can wake up the rest of its brethren. Toberman sneaks up on it from behind and destroys it, and the Doctor ensures that the controls have been set to return the Cybermen to complete dormancy.
Back upstairs at the main entrance to the catacombs, the Doctor electrifies the doors, just as they were when they killed one of the rocket's crew when the expedition first arrived, so that no one else can ever release the Cybermen. But before he can then close the doors again, the Cyber Leader revives and starts to shuffle toward the humans. The Doctor can't close the doors, as they've been electrified. Toberman steps forward and slams the doors shut on the Cyber Leader (who is thereby electrocuted as well), sacrificing himself to save the others.
Captain Hopper and the expedition's only other survivor, Professor Parry, head back to the rocket, while the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria leave for the TARDIS. The story ends with the camera drawing in on a single Cybermat, which, unnoticed by the humans, has escaped from the tombs and is trundling off into the desert.
What Lisa thought
This was actually the very first Doctor Who Lisa saw, when I first started buying Doctor Who DVDs. She hadn't been interested in watching with me, but she was sitting next to me on the couch cross-stitching while I watched, and by midway through episode one, she was asking me to go back to the beginning so she could sit and watch it properly. So it's one she likes. Particularly, she likes Klieg, who she thinks is wonderfully portrayed by George Pastell.
She does complain about the Cyberman voices, and she's right to. They're lost in an electronic drone that makes them almost indecipherable--definitely the worst Cyberman voices, and possibly the worst alien voices full stop, in the history of the programme. Which is a shame, because besides that, the Cybermen are actually very well realised. They've evolved significantly since their first appearance, which came, let's remember, less than a year before this, and it's the Cybermen of "Tomb" who really serve as the template for all Cybermen that have followed--for those who would show up again in the 1960s and in 1975, for the ones that would return in the 1980s, and for the ones that would return in 2006.
No longer is there any visible flesh and blood to their appearance (which is a shame, because that was pretty neat in "The Tenth Planet"). They're now entirely steel men. Instead of the actor holding his mouth open while his lines are piped out, the Cyber Leader has been given a steel facemask, with a slot that slides open to serve as the mouth piece. When Toberman kills the Cyberman who has just murdered Klieg, he rips its chest piece off, and white foam Cyberman "blood" comes bubbling up out of its corpse in copious amounts. It's really cool. (Lisa said, "Ewww.") There's even some rudimentary visual effects--we see mental waves passing between the Cyber Leader and Toberman as it silently transmits instructions to him, and electric bolts shoot from the Cybermen's hands to kill the humans--an idea that would be subsequently abandoned before returning when the Cybermen made their first New Who appearance in 2006.
For a long time, "Tomb" was amongst the missing Doctor Who stories (meaning that Victoria was the only companion for whom not one full story existed), until a complete copy was unexpectedly discovered in Hong Kong in 1992. We did have the story's soundtrack during that period (as we having the soundtracks of all the missing episodes), and from that audio track "Tomb" developed a reputation as a missing masterpiece, a gem of tension and atmosphere.
One of the Doctor Who DVDs--it's probably Lost in Time, the DVD release of all the orphan episodes--has a documentary about missing episodes, in which Mark Gatiss talks about the disappointment everyone felt upon actually seeing the real product in 1992.
I think that's crap. It's true that I never listened to the "Tomb" audio track, so I never had the opportunity to build it up into The Perfect Who in my head (though anyone who does that should be intelligent enough to realise that the TV show we construct in our head is always going to be superior to the actual TV show that shows up on the screen). But speaking as someone who has only ever seen "Tomb" as an extant story (it was one of the first Who VHSes I bought, back in the mid-90s), it's an absolutely cracker--for my money, the best extant Patrick Troughton story.
It's a brilliant, claustrophobic science fiction horror story, in the tradition of Who Goes There? (the great John W. Campbell novella upon which the film The Thing is based) or Alien. Its first two episodes are, indeed, palpably tense and atmospheric, as the expedition explore the catacombs and we wonder just what Klieg and Kaftan's design is. The latter two episodes suffer a bit from the loss of that tension, but they're nevertheless good action storytelling, with the ever-dwindling human band trapped in the tombs with the Cyber menace.
Narratively, the real genius of "Tomb" lies with Kaftan, Klieg and Toberman. A small band of humans in a remote, inaccessible location is the basic template for five of the first six Cyberman stories (besides "Tomb", there's Polar Base in "The Tenth Planet" (1966), the Moonbase in "The Moonbase" (1966), the Wheel in "The Wheel in Space" (1968), Nerva Station in "Revenge of the Cybermen" (1975) and the cargo freighter in "Earthshock" (1982)), but it's the addition of the Brotherhood of Logicians that gives that premise a fresh spin. Instead of humans vs Cybermen, we now have three factions, making shifting allegiances with each other, and it means the story never lulls.
The next story after this is "The Abominable Snowmen", in which the Doctor fights the Yeti for the first time, in 1930s Tibet, but it no longer exists, so the next story on our rewatch will be "The Ice Warriors".
I
 |
Monday, September 12, 2011
The Tenth Planet
Our brains are just like yours, except that certain weaknesses have been removed. You call them emotions, do you not?--the Cyber Leader
Episode 1, 8 October 1966
Episode 2, 15 October 1966
Episode 3, 22 October 1966
Episode 4, 29 October 1966 (episode no longer exists)
Written by Kit Pedler
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd
William Hartnell as the Doctor (last regular appearance)
Anneke Wills as Polly (latest extant appearance)
Michael Craze as Ben Jackson (latest extant appearance)
Earth's far future. Space travel is routine, governed by an association of Earth's military and scientific associations called the International Space Command. People use weirdly but unmistakably phallic telephones.
The year is 1986.
The TARDIS materialises at the South Pole, where the crew are quickly captured by soldiers--because they've arrived at Polar Base, a command centre for the International Space Command. Currently, the base is coordinating a spaceflight by a pair of astronauts (one is American, the other is ... something else). But something is going wrong with the mission--unaccountably, the spaceship has started losing power at a dangerous rate.
Learning this information, the Doctor immediately grasps what's going on, but the base's commander, an American general named Cutler, won't listen to his theory. The Doctor therefore writes down his prediction and gives it to one of the base's scientists for safekeeping, like he's guessed the murderer on an episode of Morse or Poirot.
Soon, the base's astronomers become aware of something momentous indeed: a new, previously unknown planet is drawing close to Earth. As it gets nearer, the base's inhabitants get a better look at it. It is exactly Earthlike; even the land masses are identical to our own, with the exception that they're flipped upside down.
This, it's soon proven, is exactly the prediction the Doctor had made, but that's not enough to get General Cutler to trust him. It soon doesn't matter, anyway, as even more visitors arrive at Polar Base--from space.
A spaceship, undetected by the base's guards, lands a short distance away, and three metal men emerge. They surprise a patrol of the base's guards, kill them and steal their heavy coats. Thus disguised, they're able to sneak into the base and make their way to base's command centre, where they reveal themselves and take command of the base.
They are called Cybermen, and they come--unsurprisingly--from the new planet approaching Earth, called Mondas. Mondasians were originally identical to humans, but their scientists began replacing vulnerable, flesh-and-blood parts of their bodies with superior cybernetic implants. Eventually, very little was left of the Cybermen that was human; their scientists had even found a way to remove their greatest weakness--emotions--leaving them a cold, pragmatic race.
But Mondas has now begun to run out of energy. As it draws closer to the Earth, though, it will draw away the Earth's energy. This will renew Mondas's energy, but leave the Earth a darkened, lifeless husk. Humans need not fear, though; they will be transported to Mondas to save their lives--and to be converted into Cybermen.
(Planets stealing energy sound ridiculous to you? Then you, sir, have no sense of wonder.)
Ben and General Cutler are able to steal one of the Cybermen's Cyber-guns, which they use to shoot down the three invaders and free the base. Cutler immediately gets on the radio to the International Space Command's head office in Geneva to warn them about the coming invasion and the energy drain of the approaching planet.
That spaceship with the two astronauts aboard that was losing power? It's burnt up in the atmosphere by now, killing the crew, but before that happened, Geneva sent up an attempted rescue--piloted by General Cutler's son. Cutler now faces the task of trying to get his son back down to Earth as quickly as possible, or the young man will die.
But he's soon distracted by the news that a fleet of over a hundred spaceships has left Mondas, bound for Earth. Cutler knows that he won't be able to save his son so long as Mondas is in the sky, so he determines to launch a missile at the alien planet armed with something called a Z-bomb (pronounced "zee-bomb", because he's American), powerful enough to crack a planet right open.
(With Earth apparently not having expected to be literally attacked by another planet, one does have to wonder why they troubled to come up with a planet-destroying missile. We have for many decades had, say, fusion bombs in our arsenal, capable of irradiating the Earth's surface so that no life can survive. Yet even a complete bombardment with fusion bombs would do next to no damage to the physical rock that is planet Earth.)
The Doctor is horrified by Cutler's plan to use the Z-bomb. Doing so could well destroy the Earth as well, and at any rate, he says, Earth is in no danger from Mondas anyway: the planet is going to be so overwhelmed by the energy that it draws from Earth that it will be Mondas that gets destroyed in the process.
But Cutler dismisses the Doctor's concerns, and orders him and Ben confined. And the Doctor is growing strangely weaker, and soon passes out, leaving Ben and Polly to foil the general's plan on their own.
A second Cyberman task force arrives at the Pole, but base's guards, now armed with Cyber-guns, are able to fight it off; we witness Cybermen actually running away to escape being cut down.
Meanwhile, Ben and Polly have recruited an ally: Dr Barclay, the base's chief scientist, who's as horrified as the Doctor at the idea of using the Z-bomb. Barclay assists Ben in escaping from his cell, then distracts the engineer in the missile launch silo while Ben (acting on Barclay's instructions) sabotages the missile.
But Cutler discovers their plot and stops them, then orders the missiles launched. The episode three cliffhangers sees the launch about to commence.
Which is as far as I've seen of the story, because episode four has been lost. It's one of the most unfortunate of sixties Who's many losses, because it means we don't see the base once again invaded by Cybermen, who determine to use the Z-bomb to destroy the Earth. We don't see Ben discover the Cybermen are incredibly susceptible to radiation, and use this knowledge to defeat them.
And critically, we don't see the Doctor, Ben and Polly head back to the TARDIS at the episode's conclusion, where the Doctor, complaining of feeling tired, collapses. The TARDIS whirs into flight, and the Doctor changes, his whole body transforming into a completely different person--Doctor Who's first ever regeneration sequence, with William Hartnell leaving the title role to be replaced by Patrick Troughton. And the programme would never be the same.
What Lisa thought
The Cybermen are fascinating in their first ever appearance. Soon enough, they'd assume their familiar nature of being, essentially, scaled-down Daleks: a human brain inside an anthropoid robot body. But not yet. In "The Tenth Planet", they're recognisably mutilated humans, with human hands and, behind their masks, visible human eyes--blinking human eyes.
There's an interesting approach taken to their speech. The Cyberman actor opens his mouth and holds it, open but perfectly still, while another actor recites his lines off camera. It's a really good idea, though two things let down its execution. The first is the unfortunate fact that the Cyberman actor doesn't seem terribly in sync with his off-camera counterpart, so several times he has to hurriedly open his mouth after he's already started "speaking", while at others his mouth remains open several moments after his dialogue has finished. The other problem is that the actor delivering the Cyberman lines--presumably attempting to sound emotionless--delivers his lines in a far too quick-paced drone, and actually sounds rather friendly.
Lisa thought the first episode, in which no Cybermen appear until the cliffhanger, perceptibly dragged, but the story really picked up for her once we moved on to episodes two and three. Like me, she's frustrated that episode four is missing--but I think we have to keep in mind that, as awesome as it would be to have the first ever regeneration, at least the story isn't completely missing. We still have the first three episodes of the Cybermen's first ever appearance.
And those phones. Man. Those phones are phallic.
Following "The Tenth Planet", no less than Patrick Troughton's first seven stories as the Doctor are missing.
First, "The Power of the Daleks", which eschews the epic scale of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and "The Dalek Master Plan" to tell the story of the struggle between the crew of a crashed Dalek capsule and the population of a single human colony world, spiced up by Ben and Polly debating with each other over whether this strange little clown of a man is really the Doctor or not.
Then "The Highlanders", in which the Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive in the Scottish Highlands just after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and end up imprisoned as suspected rebels by the redcoats mopping up the area. At the story's end, they leave with a new companion, Jamie McCrimmon, a young piper in the rebellious Jacobite army.
In "The Underwater Menace", the TARDIS materialises on a deserted volcanic island in the South Atlantic sometime shortly after 1968. But the crew soon discover that beneath the island lies the continent of Atlantis, its civilisation still thriving after centuries. (This is the first of three completely contradictory explanations for the destruction of Atlantis that Doctor Who will offer us.)
Then "The Moonbase", in which the TARDIS team and the crew of an Earth outpost on the Moon must save the Earth from being destroyed by the Cybermen.
"The Macra Terror" sees the Doctor and his companions arrive on a distant Earth colony world whose population are being subtly and insidiously manipulated by the Macra, a hideous race of giant crabs.
"The Faceless Ones" features Doctor Who's first attempted alien invasion of modernday or historical Earth, when a race of identity-stealing aliens infiltrate Gatwick Airport. The major female guest star, Samantha, is played by Pauline Collins, who would later appear as Queen Victoria in 2006's "Tooth and Claw". Ben and Polly leave at the end of the story, when they realise that the TARDIS has landed on the exact same day that the Doctor first took them away.
And finally "The Evil of the Daleks", in which the Daleks ally with a nineteenth-century mad scientist named Maxtible and a shopkeeper named Edward Waterfield, in an attempt to genetically engineer the "human factor" (ingenuity, essentially) into the Daleks' makeup. (That's a plot the programme would mine again in 2007.) The story's climax sees a final battle take place in the Dalek Emperor's throne room on Skaro, in which Maxtible, Waterfield and the Dalek race are destroyed. At the time, this was intended to be the last ever Dalek story, and indeed, we won't see them again for several seasons.
Waterfield's death in "The Evil of the Daleks" leaves his daughter, the innocent Victoria, orphaned, so the Doctor and Jamie take her along as their new companion. We'll pick up with her first adventure as an official TARDIS crewmember with the next story in our rewatch, "The Tomb of the Cybermen".
By then, we'll have missed some significant changes in the programme. The most obvious is that Patrick Troughton will have become firmly established as the new Doctor. But beyond that, the very nature of Doctor Who storytelling will have changed.
Apart from the Daleks, the Hartnell Doctor had only one enemy in his entire run who appeared more than once: the Meddling Monk, who appeared all of twice ("The Time Meddler" and "The Dalek Master Plan"). But the Troughton Doctor fights the Daleks twice, the Ice Warriors twice, the Yeti twice and the Cybermen four times (they make five appearances in just three seasons once we count their debut here in "The Tenth Planet").
That's because William Hartnell's departure coincides with the transformation of Doctor Who into the monster-of-the-week show that we know and love it as today. Now, every story has a distinctive vision. Part and parcel of that is the decision to abandon the straight historical stories; "The Highlanders" would be the last straight historical until 1982's "Black Orchid". They're replaced with stories set on modern day Earth, in which the world is menaced by mad scientists or alien invasions, the first of which was "The War Machines".
So with "The Tenth Planet", we mourn the end of Doctor Who's roots. But we can also get excited as the show becomes the adventure romp at which it's at its best.
I
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Episode 2, 15 October 1966
Episode 3, 22 October 1966
Episode 4, 29 October 1966 (episode no longer exists)
Written by Kit Pedler
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd
William Hartnell as the Doctor (last regular appearance)
Anneke Wills as Polly (latest extant appearance)
Michael Craze as Ben Jackson (latest extant appearance)
Earth's far future. Space travel is routine, governed by an association of Earth's military and scientific associations called the International Space Command. People use weirdly but unmistakably phallic telephones.
The year is 1986.
The TARDIS materialises at the South Pole, where the crew are quickly captured by soldiers--because they've arrived at Polar Base, a command centre for the International Space Command. Currently, the base is coordinating a spaceflight by a pair of astronauts (one is American, the other is ... something else). But something is going wrong with the mission--unaccountably, the spaceship has started losing power at a dangerous rate.
Learning this information, the Doctor immediately grasps what's going on, but the base's commander, an American general named Cutler, won't listen to his theory. The Doctor therefore writes down his prediction and gives it to one of the base's scientists for safekeeping, like he's guessed the murderer on an episode of Morse or Poirot.
Soon, the base's astronomers become aware of something momentous indeed: a new, previously unknown planet is drawing close to Earth. As it gets nearer, the base's inhabitants get a better look at it. It is exactly Earthlike; even the land masses are identical to our own, with the exception that they're flipped upside down.
This, it's soon proven, is exactly the prediction the Doctor had made, but that's not enough to get General Cutler to trust him. It soon doesn't matter, anyway, as even more visitors arrive at Polar Base--from space.
A spaceship, undetected by the base's guards, lands a short distance away, and three metal men emerge. They surprise a patrol of the base's guards, kill them and steal their heavy coats. Thus disguised, they're able to sneak into the base and make their way to base's command centre, where they reveal themselves and take command of the base.
They are called Cybermen, and they come--unsurprisingly--from the new planet approaching Earth, called Mondas. Mondasians were originally identical to humans, but their scientists began replacing vulnerable, flesh-and-blood parts of their bodies with superior cybernetic implants. Eventually, very little was left of the Cybermen that was human; their scientists had even found a way to remove their greatest weakness--emotions--leaving them a cold, pragmatic race.
But Mondas has now begun to run out of energy. As it draws closer to the Earth, though, it will draw away the Earth's energy. This will renew Mondas's energy, but leave the Earth a darkened, lifeless husk. Humans need not fear, though; they will be transported to Mondas to save their lives--and to be converted into Cybermen.
(Planets stealing energy sound ridiculous to you? Then you, sir, have no sense of wonder.)
Ben and General Cutler are able to steal one of the Cybermen's Cyber-guns, which they use to shoot down the three invaders and free the base. Cutler immediately gets on the radio to the International Space Command's head office in Geneva to warn them about the coming invasion and the energy drain of the approaching planet.
That spaceship with the two astronauts aboard that was losing power? It's burnt up in the atmosphere by now, killing the crew, but before that happened, Geneva sent up an attempted rescue--piloted by General Cutler's son. Cutler now faces the task of trying to get his son back down to Earth as quickly as possible, or the young man will die.
But he's soon distracted by the news that a fleet of over a hundred spaceships has left Mondas, bound for Earth. Cutler knows that he won't be able to save his son so long as Mondas is in the sky, so he determines to launch a missile at the alien planet armed with something called a Z-bomb (pronounced "zee-bomb", because he's American), powerful enough to crack a planet right open.
(With Earth apparently not having expected to be literally attacked by another planet, one does have to wonder why they troubled to come up with a planet-destroying missile. We have for many decades had, say, fusion bombs in our arsenal, capable of irradiating the Earth's surface so that no life can survive. Yet even a complete bombardment with fusion bombs would do next to no damage to the physical rock that is planet Earth.)
The Doctor is horrified by Cutler's plan to use the Z-bomb. Doing so could well destroy the Earth as well, and at any rate, he says, Earth is in no danger from Mondas anyway: the planet is going to be so overwhelmed by the energy that it draws from Earth that it will be Mondas that gets destroyed in the process.
But Cutler dismisses the Doctor's concerns, and orders him and Ben confined. And the Doctor is growing strangely weaker, and soon passes out, leaving Ben and Polly to foil the general's plan on their own.
A second Cyberman task force arrives at the Pole, but base's guards, now armed with Cyber-guns, are able to fight it off; we witness Cybermen actually running away to escape being cut down.
Meanwhile, Ben and Polly have recruited an ally: Dr Barclay, the base's chief scientist, who's as horrified as the Doctor at the idea of using the Z-bomb. Barclay assists Ben in escaping from his cell, then distracts the engineer in the missile launch silo while Ben (acting on Barclay's instructions) sabotages the missile.
But Cutler discovers their plot and stops them, then orders the missiles launched. The episode three cliffhangers sees the launch about to commence.
Which is as far as I've seen of the story, because episode four has been lost. It's one of the most unfortunate of sixties Who's many losses, because it means we don't see the base once again invaded by Cybermen, who determine to use the Z-bomb to destroy the Earth. We don't see Ben discover the Cybermen are incredibly susceptible to radiation, and use this knowledge to defeat them.
And critically, we don't see the Doctor, Ben and Polly head back to the TARDIS at the episode's conclusion, where the Doctor, complaining of feeling tired, collapses. The TARDIS whirs into flight, and the Doctor changes, his whole body transforming into a completely different person--Doctor Who's first ever regeneration sequence, with William Hartnell leaving the title role to be replaced by Patrick Troughton. And the programme would never be the same.
What Lisa thought
The Cybermen are fascinating in their first ever appearance. Soon enough, they'd assume their familiar nature of being, essentially, scaled-down Daleks: a human brain inside an anthropoid robot body. But not yet. In "The Tenth Planet", they're recognisably mutilated humans, with human hands and, behind their masks, visible human eyes--blinking human eyes.
There's an interesting approach taken to their speech. The Cyberman actor opens his mouth and holds it, open but perfectly still, while another actor recites his lines off camera. It's a really good idea, though two things let down its execution. The first is the unfortunate fact that the Cyberman actor doesn't seem terribly in sync with his off-camera counterpart, so several times he has to hurriedly open his mouth after he's already started "speaking", while at others his mouth remains open several moments after his dialogue has finished. The other problem is that the actor delivering the Cyberman lines--presumably attempting to sound emotionless--delivers his lines in a far too quick-paced drone, and actually sounds rather friendly.
Lisa thought the first episode, in which no Cybermen appear until the cliffhanger, perceptibly dragged, but the story really picked up for her once we moved on to episodes two and three. Like me, she's frustrated that episode four is missing--but I think we have to keep in mind that, as awesome as it would be to have the first ever regeneration, at least the story isn't completely missing. We still have the first three episodes of the Cybermen's first ever appearance.
 |
Following "The Tenth Planet", no less than Patrick Troughton's first seven stories as the Doctor are missing.
First, "The Power of the Daleks", which eschews the epic scale of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and "The Dalek Master Plan" to tell the story of the struggle between the crew of a crashed Dalek capsule and the population of a single human colony world, spiced up by Ben and Polly debating with each other over whether this strange little clown of a man is really the Doctor or not.
Then "The Highlanders", in which the Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive in the Scottish Highlands just after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and end up imprisoned as suspected rebels by the redcoats mopping up the area. At the story's end, they leave with a new companion, Jamie McCrimmon, a young piper in the rebellious Jacobite army.
In "The Underwater Menace", the TARDIS materialises on a deserted volcanic island in the South Atlantic sometime shortly after 1968. But the crew soon discover that beneath the island lies the continent of Atlantis, its civilisation still thriving after centuries. (This is the first of three completely contradictory explanations for the destruction of Atlantis that Doctor Who will offer us.)
Then "The Moonbase", in which the TARDIS team and the crew of an Earth outpost on the Moon must save the Earth from being destroyed by the Cybermen.
"The Macra Terror" sees the Doctor and his companions arrive on a distant Earth colony world whose population are being subtly and insidiously manipulated by the Macra, a hideous race of giant crabs.
"The Faceless Ones" features Doctor Who's first attempted alien invasion of modernday or historical Earth, when a race of identity-stealing aliens infiltrate Gatwick Airport. The major female guest star, Samantha, is played by Pauline Collins, who would later appear as Queen Victoria in 2006's "Tooth and Claw". Ben and Polly leave at the end of the story, when they realise that the TARDIS has landed on the exact same day that the Doctor first took them away.
And finally "The Evil of the Daleks", in which the Daleks ally with a nineteenth-century mad scientist named Maxtible and a shopkeeper named Edward Waterfield, in an attempt to genetically engineer the "human factor" (ingenuity, essentially) into the Daleks' makeup. (That's a plot the programme would mine again in 2007.) The story's climax sees a final battle take place in the Dalek Emperor's throne room on Skaro, in which Maxtible, Waterfield and the Dalek race are destroyed. At the time, this was intended to be the last ever Dalek story, and indeed, we won't see them again for several seasons.
Waterfield's death in "The Evil of the Daleks" leaves his daughter, the innocent Victoria, orphaned, so the Doctor and Jamie take her along as their new companion. We'll pick up with her first adventure as an official TARDIS crewmember with the next story in our rewatch, "The Tomb of the Cybermen".
By then, we'll have missed some significant changes in the programme. The most obvious is that Patrick Troughton will have become firmly established as the new Doctor. But beyond that, the very nature of Doctor Who storytelling will have changed.
Apart from the Daleks, the Hartnell Doctor had only one enemy in his entire run who appeared more than once: the Meddling Monk, who appeared all of twice ("The Time Meddler" and "The Dalek Master Plan"). But the Troughton Doctor fights the Daleks twice, the Ice Warriors twice, the Yeti twice and the Cybermen four times (they make five appearances in just three seasons once we count their debut here in "The Tenth Planet").
That's because William Hartnell's departure coincides with the transformation of Doctor Who into the monster-of-the-week show that we know and love it as today. Now, every story has a distinctive vision. Part and parcel of that is the decision to abandon the straight historical stories; "The Highlanders" would be the last straight historical until 1982's "Black Orchid". They're replaced with stories set on modern day Earth, in which the world is menaced by mad scientists or alien invasions, the first of which was "The War Machines".
So with "The Tenth Planet", we mourn the end of Doctor Who's roots. But we can also get excited as the show becomes the adventure romp at which it's at its best.
I
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