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