The Creature from the Pit

Chapter The 121st, which contains scenes that some viewers may find inadvertently naughty.

Plot:

Answering a distress call, the Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive on the planet Nominative Determinism (Chloris), which is abundant in greenery, but has very little metal. The cruel Lady Adrasta owns the only mine, all worked out now but still useful to house the giant creature to which she occasionally feeds her enemies. After the Doctor recklessly jumps into the pit to investigate the creature, having some intimate but fruitless attempts to communicate with it, Adrasta captures Romana and K9. She wants to kill the creature, but hasn't had the necessary firepower until K9 arrived. By threatening Romana's life, she gets K9 to agree, and they all venture into the underground tunnels, bumping into the Doctor. Before Adrasta can harm it, the creature regains its translation device and explains that it is Erato, an ambassador from the planet Tythonus. Erato came to the planet fifteen years earlier to negotiate a trade deal - their metal for Chloris' chlorophyll - but had the bad luck to run into Adrasta, who imprisoned it rather than risk losing her monopoly. Erato kills Adrasta and then seems to be in a hurry to leave the planet. It turns out that Erato's distress call has provoked the Tythonians to fire a neutron star at Chloris to destroy the planet rather than saving Erato (tip: don't work for the Foreign Office of Tythonus, they're a bit lax with the old duty of care to employees). Anyway, the Doctor and Erato work together to stop the star, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Context:

It took a month to watch and write up the last story for the blog, so I was hoping next for something short that zipped along. Alas, the random number generator decided upon The Creature from the Pit: not that short, and certainly not very pacey. I decided not to try involving the Better Half or kids this time, and watched the DVD by myself, an episode per evening, across the four working days after the Easter Bank Holiday Monday. It wasn't too difficult to get through in 25 minute chunks, but it can hardly be said to depict the most urgent of action.  One's mind could very easily wander...

...so, talking of randomising: it occurred to me watching this story after having recently watched The Leisure Hive disc of the Tom Baker Season 18 Blu-ray box set (which I'm finding even more hard-going than The Creature from the Pit - more on that later), that the randomiser was a very pointless addition to Doctor Who lore. Introduced at the end of season 17, this TARDIS plug-in was supposed to bring the erratic nature back into the Doctor's wanderings, and to stop his enemies from being able to follow him. But, by my count, it's used only twice, and in both cases it takes him to somewhere he's been before: Skaro (in Destiny of the Daleks) and Earth (in City of Death). Elsewhere during that latter story, the Doctor overrides it to visit Leonardo. In The Creature from the Pit, he overrides it to answer a distress call. In the next two stories, he happens to be nearby and gets sucked into the action anyway. In the season finale, Shada, had it been finished and transmitted, he'd have been seen to override it to answer a call from Professor Chronotis. At the start of the next season's opening story, the previously mentioned The Leisure Hive, he overrides it to go on a holiday; and, at the end of that same story, he gives the thing away. What was the point? (The Creature from the Pit may not have fully engaged me, I fear, if this sort of trivia was taxing my brain.)

First-time round:

This is one of only a handful of Doctor Who stories that I saw for the first time as a repeat on UK Gold sometime around 1997. UK Gold, known just as Gold now, is a UK pay television channel, which for a lot of fans was their key way of consuming - and recording for keeps - vintage Who stories during the period of time when Doctor Who was off the air as a going concern. It wasn't that way for me. Stories from 1982 onwards, when I became a fan, I saw as they were broadcast on BBC1. The stories before that, I mostly caught up with when the VHS releases came out. If you weren't lucky or flush enough to have collected them all, though, and particularly after BBC video discontinued loads of titles for no good reason in 1996, UK Gold was always there - showing Doctor Who weekly (or sometimes more frequently) from 1992 to 2007.

I got cable during the 1990s, and UK Gold came with my channels package. The memory's a bit sketchy, and I've long since got rid of the recordings, but I believe the first story that was shown after I was connected up - in omnibus format on a Sunday, as I recall - was new to me: The Invasion of Time. I had timed things poorly to get much more out of UK Gold's schedules, though. They'd already shown most of the earlier ones I hadn't seen, and weren't very far off those 1982 episodes, after which nothing would be a surprise. The Invasion of Time was followed by six weeks of showing all the Key to Time stories, which I'd already seen by then (well, nearly all of them - the final story was pulled on the weekend of Princess Diana's death, as its narrative features a princess in jeopardy; a bit of an overreaction, but it helps me to date this to Summer 1997). By my reckoning, I only managed to tape four more previously unseen stories before I decided not to renew the cable subscription, and they were The Creature from the Pit, Nightmare of Eden, The Horns of Nimon, and Meglos, plus The Invasion of Time: five of the least popular stories in the history of Doctor Who. Oh Well.

Reaction:

When you're the kind of obsessive like what I am, and you've watched all the episodes of Doctor Who several times, a title alone can bring up a host of preconceptions about a story. I thought it might be worth examining these in this case; so, before pressing play on episode 1, I scribbled down the following about The Creature from the Pit:

• Giant green duvet with a cock
• Nice to have a female villain and henchwoman
• Geoffrey Bayldon's good in it
• Tatty

All told, my impression was that this was the last exhausted twitch of an era coming to an end, being part as it is of producer Graham Williams' final year; they'd spent a lot of money and energy on the opening two stories (the one with Daleks, the one with overseas location filming), were saving a bit of money and energy for the finale, which alas was destined never to be finished. That left the remaining three stories feeling a bit lacklustre, with The Creature from the Pit the shabbiest of the lot. After watching the story, would I still feel the same?

Taking the points above in order then, and starting with the creature: it does most definitely look like a giant green duvet with a cock, there's no getting away from it. In its first appearances, in episode 2, it stalks around preceded by a substantial member. According to comments made by Tom Baker, this caused hilarity / panic in the studio gallery, and the prop was altered: in its appearances in episode 3, it has two cocks. They're smaller, but no less phallic, and it doesn't help that the action requires the Doctor to fondle and blow into them. By the final episode, all appendages are gone, but the damage is done. It's impossible by then to take Erato - in erect or castrated form - seriously, which is a shame as the script towards the end attempts to make this alien character somewhat more complex than usual. They might have been on to a loser anyway, even if the creature had been a giant green inflatable sans nob - the story they'd attempted the previous year with a giant green alien (The Power of Kroll) highlighted the problems of trying to have characters interact realistically with something of a vastly different scale; they should have learnt those lessons and not tried something so similar again.

It is indeed good to have a female villain and henchwoman. One of Graham Williams's strengths was that the stories made during his regime involved a wider range of decent roles for women; it wasn't too high a hurdle, though - eras before his would regularly see entire male guest casts with only the regular companion actor representing 51% of the world's population. Myra Frances gets a panto villain to play, and doesn't hold back. Better still is Eileen Way's sadistic underling Karela, who gets to shiv one of the cuddly bandits. But, aside from being there to elicit boos and hisses, what do the two of them achieve exactly? Not a great deal, and they're not alone in that. The bandits themselves deliver a few comedic lines, and are used at one point to move a prop into play, but other than that they serve no plot function. Geoffrey Bayldon is good in it delivering funny dialogue, but you could lift his character out of the narrative and not affect it one jot.

Finally, we come to the tattiness or otherwise of The Creature from the Pit. In this, my pre-watch impression was the least fair: the jungle sets and costumes are impressive, and the lighting in the underground sequences is sensitively handled. This wasn't the last gasp of the old regime - this story was the first one to be filmed of the season, so the energy and money hadn't run out. It's not the visuals that are tatty, it's the script; The Creature from the Pit has got story enough only for one episode spread across four, with random unconnected characters and a bit of humour thrown in to pad things out. This has little to do with budget -  story beats don't cost very much. So what went wrong? It's only a guess, but author David Fisher famously was having a domestic crisis around this time, which prevented him finishing the scripts for his other commission of the year (which ended up after a Williams and Adams rewrite as City of Death). Perhaps this had an impact on The Creature from the Pit's plotting too.

Connectivity: 

Both The Creature from the Pit and Claws of Axos are 1970s four parters where the Doctor travels underground to communicate with blobby alien lifeforms that are not all they seem.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds, and all that. As mentioned above and in recent blog posts passim, I have bought the Season 18 Blu-Ray box set, which I'm struggling through very slowly. The set contains Tom Baker's last seven stories, and a lot of people think they're the bee's knees. I wouldn't go that far, but certainly think they're watchable. For some reason, though, it's been a slog this time. It might be that the stories' very consistency - a quality aimed for by incoming producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christoper Hamilton Bidmead, and supported by Barry Letts returning to the show as exec producer - is the barrier, particularly when watching all of them together in one block. It's easy to see why those three gentlemen thought things had to change. They had the same feeling of the previous era of Who as I had going in, that it was tired and tatty. As I said above, though, this might have been at best an exaggerated impression. If, as I propose, the only real problem with Creature from the Pit was plotting rather than tone or visual production values, could some of the the work done to distance season 18 from its precedents be said to be an overreaction? Was the baby thrown out with the bath water? Should, perhaps, Doctor Who not be consistent at all?

Clearly some of the changes made were successful. The new theme tune and credits sequence are welcome sprucings up (the previous style of titles was seven years old, the theme arrangement older than that, so it was overdue). It was also a good idea to not chop and change the costume designer every story and instead have one team working on the whole year, particularly as the person to lead that team was the operatically eccentric genius that is June Hudson. But, when the changes are less about the cosmetic and more about the scripting, they're not so convincing. Bidmead's focus on technology and science, leads - possibly unconsciously but nonetheless consistently - to a set of stories where civilisations or groups are stuck in some form of stasis, often caused by reliance on faith or belief, which requires a technological or scientific solution. There's a tendency - perhaps to leaven the harder science - to favour a poetic manner of storytelling too. This does not make for the most dynamic stories, but does create lots of opportunities for bearded men to sit about talking in spaceships that won't fly.

The approach also ended up having an impact on tone. The show that had long sampled the look and feel of other media to provide differing textures, story to story, was being held back. (Interestingly, the gothic story of the year State of Decay only got to be produced in its horror pastiche finery at the insistence of the director - if it had been up to Bidmead, it would have looked more like Full Circle or The Leisure Hive).  The Creature from the Pit looked and felt nothing like City of Death, and that's probably a good thing, even if it means the risk of any one story being a failure. It's not like the approach stopped that anyway. The second story of season 18, Meglos - a story very similar to Creature from the Pit, featuring as it does a jungle planet, a ridiculous green villain and some comic relief bandits - is just as silly as anything Graham Williams produced. New script editors came in to replace Bidmead the following year, and the show introduced more action-oriented adventures, and more variety in locales, and it was a welcome relief. Interestingly, Bidmead himself was able to contribute scripts during his successors' era that successfully fit this new model. Season 18 stands then as an interesting if not wholly successful experiment; just don't try to watch them all in one go, that's my advice.

In Summary:

The pits.

The Claws of Axos

Chapter The 120th, where the UK thinks it can go it alone to do a deal, but finds it's difficult and all the potential outcomes are disastrous.

Plot:

A UNIT monitoring station spots a UFO heading for Earth. Meanwhile, UNIT HQ has two visitors, a government official, Chinn, enquiring after the Doctor's immigration status, and Bill Filer from Washington, who's trying to track down the Master. Somehow both of them, even though they have nothing to do with it, end up involved in the UFO investigation alongside our favourite UNIT family: Doctor 3, Jo, Brig, Yates, Benton and the lovable rogue uncle of the family, the Master (who's already on board the UFO, Axos, having brought it to Earth in exchange for his freedom). Despite Chinn's attempts to blow it up, Axos lands in the South East of England. When our heroes enter, the inside is organic and plays psychedelic sounds and film clips on loops, like an alien version of a happening at Andy Warhol's Factory, and just as scary. A family of "Axons" appear and offer the Earth a rare element from their planet called Axonite, that can absorb and transmit energy and make things grow and such like. Despite this not seeming like that big a deal if you ask me, everybody's very keen to get their hands on Axonite (it was the 1970s, and people had to make their own fun, I guess).

Anyway, Chinn wants Axonite exclusively for the UK government, but the Master - released from Axos - leaks the information and it is sent out to various places around the world. It's a trap, of course: Axonite, the ship and the Axons are all part of one parasitic organism that plans to suck all the life out of the Earth, once the distribution of Axos material is sufficiently spread around the globe. With the Doctor and Jo now held by Axos, the Master helps UNIT to destroy the alien. It doesn't work, the Doctor and Jo escape, and the two Time Lords work together to stop Axos. It looks for a while that the Doctor is going to betray the Earth and escape with the Master, but that's just a bluff to keep the bearded naughty one engaged. The real plan is to trap Axos in a time loop. When the Master realises this, he makes a break for it. The Doctor also manages to break free, but finds that his newly working TARDIS can only travel back and forth to Earth, and his exile has to continue.

Context:

Haven't had a lot of time for watching Doctor Who recently, but did manage to find 25 minutes each Sunday, once a week across four weeks, to watch The Claws of Axos. Each time, I was accompanied by all three of the children (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6). My viewing companions were good value from the off, with the boys describing the funny looking Axos spaceship seen in flight at the beginning as a "flying bone" (younger) and "rubber chicken" (elder). My youngest was a little scared of the monster versions of the Axons, but happy with everything else. By far the most comment, though, was reserved for the character of Pigbin Josh, who stumbles across the ship early on, and gets zapped. It wasn't this that caught their attention, or the strange bumpkin language he mutters under his breath, or his hackneyed and possibly offensive characterisation in general. No, it was before his encounter with the ship, when he stops in the snow to scavenge in a pile of fly-tipped junk for a bike, when he's already got a bike. They talked about that for ages afterwards. It's strange what tiny things can fire their imagination.

First-time round:

Monday 11th May 1992 was a good day to be a Doctor Who fan, but might have been a bit hard on The Claws of Axos. After sporadic releases on VHS in the late 1980s, the turn of the decade saw a burgeoning interest in, and supply of, new titles. It didn't quite make up for the programme no longer being on TV, but it was great to have two stories released on tape every couple of months. And although they were not exactly new, most of them were new to me. On that particular Monday, though, we fans were extra blessed, as we had no less than three new releases to buy. One of them was The Twin Dilemma, yes, but that didn't take away too much of the excitement.

I snapped up all three on the day of release, but even as a layabout skiver with lots of time on my hands as I was then, I couldn't watch them all on that day. Obviously, the first of the three to be viewed was the recently discovered Tomb of the Cybermen. Colin Baker's debut was next in line, despite - because of? - its infamy. This left the final one of the three, which was The Claws of Axos, a little overshadowed. As I remember, myself and my friend Mike - the only person I knew who had a VCR in my first year - only got through the first three episodes of Axos before getting distracted by other things. Before long, the term and the academic year were at an end. I caught up with the final part at home sometime during the long Summer vac, but I don't know if poor Mike ever found out how it concluded.

Reaction:

The Claws of Axos might just be the most archetypal UNIT story ever made. For a start, the full extended family is in place: Doctor, Jo, Master, Brig, Yates, Benton. It's got an Earth Invasion with a twist - the invaders pretend to be nice; yes, it's not the most original twist, but it's there nonetheless! It's got a bumptious government type, a comedy yokel, a research centre with a scientist in conflict with the Doctor, freak weather conditions, and the regular army taking over and imprisoning UNIT partway through. It's only missing a hovercraft to complete the bingo card. It's also early enough - the seventh Pertwee story, and only the third of the "UNIT family" era that started with this season - that nobody wants to mess too much with the formula. One deviation is the inclusion of, presumably, an American UNIT operative (he's introduced as being from Washington HQ rather than a separate agency). This was a broadening out of UNIT to reflect its intended international nature that would not be tried again until Battlefield, over 20 years later. From this point on until then, while it may police global conferences (so many global conferences), we only really get to see the Home Counties England division of the UN's Intelligence Taskforce.

The script was the first from Bob Baker and Dave Martin, a duo of young writers without much experience at the point where they wrote Claws of Axos, but who would go on to become seasoned contributors over many years. Their first script, with no doubt lots of careful midwifery provided by script editor Terrance Dicks, is very strong. Apart from a few tiny moments (in the space of one short section, for example, we establish that the aliens have an intimate knowledge of chameleons, describing Axonite as "the chameleon of the elements", but don't know what a frog is) there's nothing to suggest this story wasn't created by the experienced hacks - in the best kind of way - that Baker and Martin would become.  The main issue is the scale of its ambition, which is a hard quality to fault. It had nothing to do with their being newbies either: right up until their very last scripts for the series, a Baker and / or Martin script could always be recognised by the sheer scale of the events it expected the poor production team to depict within a small studio in Television Centre.

Compared to their subsequent asks - a singularity in the centre of a black hole, say, or a new planet being formed around a spaceship, or the inside of the Doctor's brain - creating an organic space ship that bombards one's senses with technicolour imagery was relatively easy. It's achieved very well by director Michael Ferguson. The Axons in all their forms are very striking, whether appearing as the "golden family" or the very memorable globby tentacled versions that attack UNIT in a couple of sequences choreographed by the HAVOC stunt team. Tiny moments of action are unclear or rushed - at one point, someone does appear to get turned into an Axon-themed duvet - but mostly the visuals are very visual, and the effects are effective.

Another thing I've never noticed before, and which may have been a result of the inexperience of the writers, is that the opening of The Claws of Axos is pretty much a shot-by-shot recreation of  Spearhead from Space: a model scene of an object approaching Earth, then cut to a UNIT monitoring station manned by two uniformed staff, a local stumbling across the object as it comes to ground... It may be coincidence, of course, but there's lots of scenes throughout that also parallel Pertwee's debut (the fight between aliens and UNIT troops in an industrial complex is another good example). Perhaps the writers were reassuring themselves by emulating something that had worked well from the year before. Where the script breaks from that template, though, is where it is most successful: in the last couple of episodes, Roger Delgado's silky, amoral Master takes centre stage, working with UNIT as a substitute Doctor when the latter is trapped inside Axos. Then, he and Pertwee get the first opportunity to play a sustained sequence together in the later sections where we suspect that the Doctor might have gone rogue and aligned himself with his fellow Time Lord. Great stuff.

Connectivity: 

This is the hardest connection to make so far, I think. Because of the previous story's spin-off nature, they don't even have the Doctor or the TARDIS as a link. K9 and Company is set in a fictional village probably in the Cotswolds; The Claws of Axos is set in a fictional power station probably near Dungeness. Those areas, both with a strong Middle England Pertweeshire aura, are really not that geographically close, though, so I don't suppose that counts. That leaves me only with the desperate assertion that they both feature someone who knows the Doctor and UNIT. It'll have to do.

Deeper Thoughts:

Baker Bob and Oscar. One of the two writers of The Claws of Axos, Bob Baker, gained kudos later in his career for being in a different two man writing team. He co-authored with Nick Park the scripts for all the Wallace and Gromit shorts from The Wrong Trousers onwards (and also co-wrote the feature-length W&G movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as part of a larger writing team). Two of these shorts - Trousers and A Close Shave - won Academy Awards for best animated short, and Were-Rabbit also won in 2010 for best animated feature. A third short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, which has a cameo from an in-jokily named character called Baker Bob, was nominated but didn't win. Out of all the cast or crew of Doctor Who over the years, Bob Baker is therefore the person connected to the biggest Oscar haul. He isn't on any list of Oscar winners, though, as the categories mentioned are awarded to the producers of the films, but - you know - he was one of the writers, the people without whom the winning films would just be blank pieces of paper, so I'm letting him have it rather than get hung up on technicalities.

It's even more impressive for being so rare. Doctor Who is a long-running show that has been blessed with some very talented individuals both in front of the cameras and behind, but as a UK show it's perhaps not surprising that this hasn't translated into too many careers later gaining golden statuettes from Hollywood. Just under Bob Baker in the chart (or in the lead if you do want to get hung up on technicalities and somehow think that films write themselves by magic, grumble, grumble) is the mighty Jim Acheson, who has won the Academy Award for Costume Design no less than three times. He also designed some of the most memorable costumes for Who including the Mutts from The Mutants, the Giant Robot from Robot, and the magnificent Time Lord costumes from The Deadly Assassin (used and reused, but never altered, for decades afterwards). With no wish to slight Bob Baker, one probably didn't think watching his Doctor Who stories go out that the he'd one day be writing scripts for award-winning things. Acheson, though, always stood out as talented, and one might have forecast such future plaudits in his case. But everyone's go to start somewhere, and we fans are blessed to have had both their inputs into our favourite show.

Beyond that, though, there's not a lot. Many one-off guest crew and actors have gone on to be lauded stateside, but we can't claim any ownership of someone like Olivia Colman, say. She's been in everything, anyway, and her cameo appearance in The Eleventh Hour was not the best use of of her talents (Steven Moffat recently went on record as regretting not using her better). Of all stories, it is 2003 online animated curio The Scream of the Shalka that has the best record for regular cast with both Doctor (Richard E. Grant) and companion (Sophie Okonedo) being acting Oscar nominees. Derek Jacobi, who played the Master in that story, has had Golden Globe and International Emmy nods too. It doesn't really count, though, as Shalka was never developed into a regular series, so they're still essentially one-offs (though each member of those three has appeared as a different character in subsequent stories).

One final honourable mention goes to the person who garnered an Academy Award for best live action short with "Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life" in 1993. Surprisingly, he was the writer and director rather than the star, as he was mostly known before and since for acting. The winner in this instance was a fellow by the name of Peter Capaldi. Now, whatever happened to him?

In Summary:

Ambitious, archetypal and very 1970s, but pretty good for all that.