Planet of Evil

Chapter The 174th, in which space travellers are trapped on a planet that's... forbidden. Where can the inspiration possibly have come from?

Plot:

The Doctor and Sarah respond to a distress call, and land on the (sentient) planet Zeta Minor at the edge of  known space. A geological survey team from the planet Morestra has been scouring the planet for a crystalline power source that one of their number, Professor Sorenson, has hypothesised will solve their energy crisis. The planet, though, doesn't want him to take any samples away, as they are anti-matter somehow and will be destructive once they leave the somehow safety of Zeta Minor. It fights back in the form of semi-invisible Id monsters like in Forbidden Planet (but not so alike that anyone could get sued or anything). When the TARDIS and a Morestran rescue ship simultaneously arrive, Sorenson is the only member of the original team left alive. The Morestran military have unfortunately put an idiot in charge of the rescue, Salamar, who won't believe the Doctor is innocent no matter how much he helps out. The Doctor convenes with the sentient planet and agrees that all the anti-matter material will be returned. But Sorenson has smuggled some on board, and when the Morestran ship attempts to leave it is gradually dragged back to the planet. Sorenson starts to go all Jekyll and Hyde, turning into an anti-matter monster and killing people because ripping off Forbidden Planet can only get a story so far. The Doctor takes Sorenson and the anti-matter material back to Zeta Minor in the TARDIS, and this persuades the planet to let everyone go and return Sorenson to normal.

Context:

We started this one on the last weekend in November, completing the month having watched an episode of Doctor Who every week on Sunday afternoons. We in this case was the kids (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) and me, and the story was viewed from the DVD. After the first episode on the Sunday, it was then put on an episode a night over the next few nights. I suspect that our weekly ritual may be reaching its natural end, as the eldest bailed before the end of episode 1, and only the youngest joined me for the next episode. She watched it to the end, but is getting as cynical as her brothers with age, and kept shouting "Fake" at various effects shots. After four new series episodes in a row, I had been crying out for some classic Who, but the children obviously less so. A shame. Still the next one to come up is another new series episode, so we'll see what they make of that, if anything. Some sample comments: the youngest is still predicting who will die from one scene to the next, and celebrating when she's right; the middle child said that one death scene was "terrible acting" but said a zap gun fight was "Pog" (this means good, apparently). The eldest, when the exploration team were gathering up crystals in an early scene jokingly asked "Are they making a meth lab?" which makes me worry as a parent where he's picking this stuff up from! He promised it wasn't from personal experience. I hope not.

First time round:

I first got a glimpse of this story on The Tom Baker Years, a video presentation released in 1992 which featured Tom's reactions to clips from every one of his stories. A number of those stories hadn't been released on VHS yet at that time, despite the early years of the VHS range being weighted very heavily in favour of the fourth Doctor. To a Doctor Who fan eager to see every single moment of his favourite show, this made an impression. The choice of clips used was a little erratic to say the least; sometimes the excerpt was misrepresentative of the story as a whole, and so the impression it therefore made on me was prejudicial. I think I may have seen the clip from Planet of Evil in the context of the Tom Baker Years more often than I've seen it in situ within the four episodes proper. As I watched the moment where Salamar recklessly zaps the Mr. Hyde wolfman version of Sorenson, turning him into many invisible Id monsters, I was surprised that a little inset of 1990s Tom Baker laughing didn't appear in the screen, top right.

The clip from Planet of Evil did not showcase the magnificent jungle set, but the empty undetailed spaceship sets, it highlighted possibly the worst combination of make-up and effects work in the piece, and captured Tom Baker failing to get sufficient urgency in his performance: he's supposed to be chasing to stop a misguided attempt at heroism that's going to make the situation worse, but he literally strolls around the corridors, half-heartedly asking Salamar to stop. Production values and Tom himself are much better elsewhere in the story, but it was clearly felt preferable to show him a rubbish sequence and get a laugh out of him. I finally saw the better stuff surrounding that small clip when the VHS came out at the end of 1993, between Christmas and New Year. It was an odd release slot, but it happened occasionally in the early 1990s that videos would come out at the fag end of the year with no fanfare. I wasn't expecting the release, and if memory serves I saw it in Boots in Worthing and snapped it up, when out doing post-Christmas shopping.

Reaction:

The notion of the supergroup is always tantalising, but usually disappoints. I'm more of a pop than a rock fan, and the scope within that style of music for supergroups to be formed is probably less, but it does still happen. Electronic's first hit, Getting Away With it, is a fine song and one of my favourites, but is it as good as tracks by New Order, The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys and The Art of Noise (members of each of which were responsible for Getting Away with It)? No. Things are not often better than the sum of their parts. Planet of Evil is made by the era's go-to guys combo of director David Maloney and designer Roger Murray-Leach. The key persisting production team of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes favoured having these gentlemen in their respective roles perhaps more than any others. The two had not worked together on Who before, but in the previous season, the first of the Hinchcliffe / Holmes partnership, Maloney had directed the big story of the year, Genesis of the Daleks, and Murray-Leach have done breath-taking work creating the sets for The Ark in Space that were then re-used later in the season. The two of them with Hinchcliffe and Holmes would form a 1970s supergroup of sorts, producing very popular stories The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng Chiang the following year. This first effort, though, is not as well remembered, and frankly not as good.

The key difference would appear at first glance to be the script, Assassin and Talons were both written by Robert Holmes himself, and he's pretty much the master of classic Who. But Louis Marks' script for Planet of Evil is perfectly good, and very in-keeping with Holmes house style of the time. The story's roots are showing: the first two episodes are riffing on the 1950s CinemaScope sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, and the second half goes back a decade or two, with echoes of 1930s film adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Wolfman. The abrupt change of plundered source text midway through is a little jarring, but not much worse than something like Talons, which switches from Conan Doyle to Sax Rohmer to Phantom of the Opera and back again. The science of the narrative is bewilderingly hard to reconcile to the physical laws of our universe, but again this does not make it unique in Doctor Who's history by any means. Zeta Minor is on the edge of the universe, and is composed on anti-matter? Is that right? But it somehow exerts some force that allows anti-matter and matter to co-exist, but only within the immediate atmosphere of the planet. And the planet somehow senses that Sorenson and his team are after taking some anti-matter away, so they kill everybody else except the person whose plan it is to do that, let him live but change him into a monster? It isn't very convincing as science, but if one just adjusts to the simple truth that Zeta Minor = magic planet, then one can forget about it, and enjoy the story.

It's not the writing, and no other single contribution is particularly dragging things down. No, it's the dream team of Maloney and Murray-Leach just having an off-day. Even then, 50% of what they do in Planet of Evil is up to their usual high standard. The jungle sets of Zeta Minor are some of Murray-Leach's best work, and one of the best examples of set design and build done in classic Who. Unfortunately, the money has run out by the time he gets to the Morestran spaceship sets, which are used for a large proportion of the story. He gets to put in split levels with steps joining them, which is a favourite trick of his to provide a certain sense of scale; but, the walls are plain with hardly any detailing, and the few instrument panels are reused from stock, and also seem to be repurposed within the story too in different places. Maloney shapes an interesting if a bit hackneyed dynamic between the two main Morestran Space corps officers - the hotheaded inexperienced commander, and the more rational and experienced second-in-command. There's also some good eerie bits as our heroes walk through the mysterious undergrowth of Zeta Minor, and Elisabeth Sladen does her best 'frozen to the spot by ghostly power' acting.  Elsewhere, though, as noted above, there's a lack of energy in the performances.

It's not exactly bad. There's lots of individual aspects to pick out for kudos - the special sound, for example, stood out for me; I particularly liked the zap gun effects in this story. That might not be because it's better than usual, just because it's different. This is one of the rare classic stories from the early 1970s onwards where Dick Mills must have been on holiday and didn't do the sound design, instead it is Peter Howell - more known for being an incidental music composer for Doctor Who - doing that duty. There's some very good model work, it's lit well throughout, and the score by Dudley Simpson is fine. It's a solid story, but nothing much more than that.

 

Connectivity: 

Planet of Evil and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS both feature a location with something of a mind of its own that traps some acquisitive invaders who want to steal part of it, until they give that part back. In both, the monsters are transformed humans with a less defined and more lumpen shape. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Tears and Tiers. [Warning: contains spoilers for Revolution of the Daleks, but only facts that have been revealed as part of pre-publicity.] Planet of Evil is solid enough fare, but it doesn't spark off any deeper thoughts particularly, so I'll instead take a moment to look around at what's happening right now. It's a strange time. Before 2020, one could be fairly sure that the plot of a Doctor Who story would be more complex than going out to have a pub lunch, but not any more. The Better Half and I were lucky enough to both have a day off recently, after lockdown 2 had finished, and took the chance to have a socially-distanced one household indoor meal at a local inn. Our area is Tier 2 in the UK's new categorisation, as most areas are, and this presents complications. During our time there having a beer and a burger, we witnessed many confused punters grappling with the rules. A party of six were turned away at the door because, even though they all worked together, they didn't live together, so they could only eat and drink in the beer garden not inside, but it was too cold. Another couple was discussing what exactly constitutes a substantial meal which one must order alongside alcohol (one main meal or two side dishes were fine, one side dish on its own was not enough), and one man came to ask "If I sit on own outside, can I have just a drink without having to have food too?" (No). The only person who knew what he was doing was the bloke that was very, very slowly nursing the last of his sausage and mash while ordering pint after pint of Guinness.

No matter how convoluted Chris Chibnall makes the plot of Revolution of the Daleks, it will be a blessed island of simplicity in the tumultuous sea that is everyday life right now. I could do with such a thing, as the festive season - as it has been in the last few years - is overshadowed by external events. This year, there's a pandemic, last year was a December UK election that brought in a Godawful populist government with a massive majority, the year before that there was the looming deadline for the exit of the UK from the European Union with no deal in place, which would have meant chaos (oh hello, we have that in 2020 too!). It may be me seeing patterns in things that aren't there, but the world does seem to have got just a little bit less good overall since the Doctor Who festive special moved from Christmas Day to New Year's Day for its regular placement. Is this a demotion, or is New Year's now the more sought after slot? I'd previously have thought anyone claiming the latter was deluding themselves, but I just saw the planned BBC line-up for December 25th 2020, and it's very uninspired and uninspiring; so, maybe I was wrong.  The week's additional wait is probably worth it, so that Doctor Who can be in slightly better company in the schedule.

 

Though there won't be any pandemic happening in Doctor Who's world, it's still likely to be an emotional rollercoaster. In one of the worst kept secrets in recent Who history - second only to the fact that Captain Jack was returning for this story, which was flaming obvious from the off - two of the principal cast are saying goodbye. Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole, who play Graham and Ryan respectively, are bowing out at the end of the new year episode. If one had to pick one of the three companions to stick around, it would be Mandip Gill's Yaz. Graham and Ryan's story has been fully explored (was after one season, to be honest), and Yaz always felt like she wasn't getting the full spotlight. The series up to now has been structured around the four leads to such an extent that it'll be interesting to see how things change. I hope that they don't add more people to the TARDIS team. Having so many regulars from the off struck me as a sign of lack of confidence in Jodie Whittaker to carry the show as the Doctor. Needing to include one companion as audience identification is fine, as Doctor Who's always worked best like that. But the need to include an old bloke and a young bloke as well, presumably so everyone in the audience could feel represented, wasn't valid to my mind. I hope no-one on the production team or in the wider BBC will panic that the show has become the adventures of two women exploring space and time, as I for one would like to see that given a go. 

In Summary:

Solid, unspectacular Doctor Who, which - given the people involved in the production - is a little bit disappointing.