Frontios

Chapter The 129th, where the Doctor appreciates the gravity of a situation.

Plot:

The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are brought down onto the barren planet Frontios in the far future, where the final few humans, escaping from a terrible catastrophe, are struggling to survive. Supplies are low, and discipline is at the point of collapse, with people abandoning this society to become Retrogrades or Rets. On top of this, Frontios appears to be at war with another assailant, assumed to be on a nearby planet, who has been bombarding them with missiles for decades. But the danger, as a few of the colonists have suspected over the years, is not from above but from below. The TARDIS is blown apart during an attack, and the leader of the colony, Plantagenet, is sucked into the Earth. Finding a covered trap door in a research centre, the Doctor, his two companions and various colonists venture below into an abandoned quarry and find that giant woodlice-like creatures called Tractators are hollowing out Frontios so they can use their gravity powers to pilot it around the galaxy and plunder other planets. Turlough, who has encountered the creatures before, knows that the way to defeat them is to separate the other Tractators from their leader, the Gravis. The Doctor tricks the Gravis into gravitating the broken bits of TARDIS back together around them.The Gravis, trapped inside the TARDIS, is whisked away to a far off uninhabited planet by the Doctor, and everyone lives hungrily ever after on the edge of societal collapse.

Context:

Back to random selection after a planned detour to Canary Wharf. This one was watched by the whole family (me, the Better Half and three children - boys of 13 and 9, girl of 7) over the course of a few evenings. The Better Half remembered watching the story back when she was a child, when it first went out, but has no memory of seeing it since. There would have been at least two opportunities (when the video and DVD releases came out, and I bought them and watched them) but somehow she missed out on both of them. Things started promisingly with the children engaged and TBH vaguely appreciative, but the final episode alas lost them all.

First time round:

I don't know what I was so busy doing on weeknights in late January and early February of 1984, but this is one of the few stories where I missed not just one but two episodes on their first BBC broadcast, the first and the last. Imagine trying to piece together what was going on in Frontios from just the middle episodes, 2 and 3; I presumably thought it was mostly about Turlough having a nervous breakdown in some caves. I have very few memories of what I did manage to catch, nor of what I was doing at the time. I can very clearly recall a few weeks earlier, getting into position in front of the dining room TV on my own, before the first episode of the season went out (meaning that the rest of the family was in the living room watching something else). I have clear memories of watching the story after Frontios, and the later stories of the season. But my only recollection of the time around this specific story was talking to a friend at school about the finale, and him explaining to me how the TARDIS had come back together at the end. He made the effect sound much better than it was!

It would have been just over 13 years later that I finally got to see the whole thing, and be slightly disappointed by that effect. In a double pack with preceding two-episode story The Awakening, Frontios came out on video early in 1997. This release was of minor significance as being the last VHS with a painted artwork cover, which had been the house style for the whole of the 1990s up to that point; everything after this would be adorned by a photo montage with somewhat unimaginative swirly photoshop effects applied. This was also one of the earliest stories to come out in the relaunch year for the VHS range, 1996 having seen releases suspended to make room for the Paul McGann movie. I would have snapped up the video as soon as it was on the shelf in Volume One in Worthing, starved as I was of my usual regular fix of non-McGann Who, and watched it in the little studio flat I was living in at the time (presumably without the Better Half, who came back for holidays, but was away at university the rest of the time). Probably because half of it was brand new to me, I remember very much liking it on that watch.

Reaction:

Frontios was the fourth Doctor Who story directed by Ron Jones, whose first directing job (not just for Who, but ever) was the early Peter Davison story Black Orchid. This was followed by Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity. It's fair to say that none of those three earlier products of his directorial efforts is very well thought of by Doctor Who fans. But how much of that is down to him? Imagine being given the scripts to Black Orchid to make sense of when you're fresh off the BBC director's course. Imagine getting a call some weeks' later to be invited back and finding that visualising the next script was pretty much impossible, involving as it did a depiction of Concorde crash-landing into a prehistoric wasteland. And the less said about Arc of Infinity, the better. Frontios might have been the first time he got to show what he was made of with a script that was half decent, or maybe he was just getting better. Whatever the reason, sitting down and watching the initial episodes of this story, it is in a different league, and maybe even a different sport, to those previous efforts.

Despite this story's budget not stretching to any location filming, the 'exterior' scenes are dressed and lit well, with the ominous darkening skies before the bombardment convincing one (pretty much) that the characters are outside. The action of the bombardment is choreographed well too, with extras running to and fro, and good practical effects  Despite the earth being fairly obviously made of polystyrene in some close-ups, the effects of people being sucked down into the ground are good too, though the final stage of their disappearance being done with a video effect spoils it just a little. There's some creditable use of mattes to give the illusion of space to some sets. Costume and production design combine to give an effective vision of a desperate outpost, with a real grit and danger to it, making the first episode's small-scale challenges of generating light and power sufficient to help the wounded feel nonetheless dramatic. It is definitely a very 1980s vision of the future (the shiny plastic file with description written on in day-glo crayon, or the silver disco covering for the acid jar are good examples of this), but that's part of the fun. The depictions of the future in 1960s and 1970s Who could not escape their times either. Even the Tractator costumes, while impractical, are still well-designed and imaginative, and more mobile than this season's later giant creepy-crawlies, the slugs in The Twin Dilemma.

Jones gets great performances too. The style might be a bit declamatory, with a few characters staring through an imaginary proscenium arch and delivering cod-Shakespearean speeches (I'm looking at you, young Jeff Rawle), but it works, in the same way that the much more lauded Caves of Androzani does, with similar asides aimed at imaginary groundlings. The characters are well-written, and multi-dimensional: the gruff exterior of Officer Brazen conceals the heart of a canny politician; Range's fussy scientist has shades of grey, withholding evidence and risking others to save his daughter. All are brought to life by an excellent cast. Mark Strickson as Turlough gets an opportunity to go over the top (he's frothing at the mouth at one point), but it just about holds together. Best of all, though, somewhat surprisingly, is Peter Davison. His performance is incendiary, finding - with only a few stories left before he leaves - new found energy in the role: he's manic, he's playful, he's stern, he's bloody excellent, and it may well be his best acting in the series (although a few weeks later, he'll equal or maybe even better it in his swansong). 

But, all of this excellence just can't be sustained, and the story falls apart at the end. Some fault lies with the script: writer Christopher H. Bidmead is very keen on the scientific method, and pitches science versus politics in the early episodes (a throwback to the many 'science versus' stories that were made when he was script editor - science versus religion, science versus a backward aristocracy, science versus giant green mafia lizards, and so on). No method, though, scientific or otherwise, is used to discover the Tractators' weaknesses and therefore power the climax, it's just an arbitrary bit of luck that Turlough happens to know the answer. Jones' previous fleet-footedness in the studio abandons him for episode 4: the action scenes are ramshackle, Brazen's self-sacrifice is not shot nor performed adequately, and it therefore seems thrown away. The scenes of the TARDIS coming together are clumsy compared to the action of the earlier episodes, and the story seems to just stop, with the final sequence a little too twee and sugary given that these people still look like they're not going to make it without starving.

It also annoys me that the Doctor takes the Gravis off to an uninhabited planet at the end, as if that's going to make things alright. Wasn't Frontios an uninhabited planet when the Gravis arrived on it? And he made enough trouble there. He doesn't have the other Tractators now, so does he no longer have gravity power enough to crash land a ship there? If that's the case, why? How did this race evolve with this power that requires the presence of a specific one of their number alongside the others? Or have the Tractators not evolved like this, but the Gravis been specially engineered somehow, and if so how? Is there only one Gravis, and so this is the same group that attacked Turlough's home planet, or are there others? It's such a shame that this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as the rest of the script is very good. The world and people of Frontios are well thought out, and there's nice little touches like the subtle introductions of both the hat-stand and the block and tackle, before they take on a different relevance later on. It's not the first or last time that a Doctor Who story has a great opening, build up, twists and turns, but can't pull off the ending, and it likely won't be the last; this time, though, the story's start was so startlingly interesting, that it seems more disappointing.

Connectivity: 

In both this story and Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, the monsters manifest themselves from where they are hiding into another space, and are misinterpreted by those that witness this manifestation. In both stories, the Doctor is youthful, a bit manic, wears plimsolls and occasionally dons glasses.

Deeper Thoughts:

Can't think of a title punning on something to do with 'Target' that hasn't been done before by everyone ever writing about these books ever. I said above that I had to wait over 13 years to watch the whole of Frontios. I didn't, of course, have to wait that long to experience the full plot. That came in the form of a novelisation on the Target imprint, one of a series which - after starting in the early 70s with reprints of three pre-existing novelisations of Who stories from the previous decade - carried on for another twenty years, covering almost all the classic series. Sometime in 1985, by my estimation, I would have obtained the Frontios paperback, which had a rather good artwork cover by Andrew Skilleter. This felt at the time like the beginning of a new phase in Target's long run of releases, the fourth and penultimate phase of the range to my mind. The first phase went through to 1976-ish, and included the early new adaptations, starting with Doctor Who and The Auton Invasion (based on TV story Spearhead from Space) in early 1974. These were primarily done by erstwhile Who script editor Terrance Dicks and writer Malcolm Hulke, alternating, with other writers only occasionally getting a look in. They were fairly fat books, the prose fleshing out characters and plots, and they tended to have new and more exciting titles than their TV templates (Colony in Space became Doctor Who and The Doomsday Weapon, Frontier in Space became Doctor Who and The Space War, etc.).

The second phase towards the later 70s and into the early 1980s were thinner, with no deviations from the usual page count nor from the original TV scripts; they were being turned out regularly on something of a production line by Terrance Dicks solo (with other writers only occasionally getting a look in) and kept the same title as their TV show inspiration (though still in the 'Doctor Who and the...' format). It was during this period that I first encountered them as a nipper. Durrington Library had a number of hardbacks, mostly phase 2, but a few phase 1. Even before I was a fan, they held a certain fascination - the covers were definitely intriguing - and by the time I started watching the show, I had got them all out and read them multiple times (with the exception of Doctor Who and The Robots of Death, which I saw once when I'd maxed out my library card, and could never find again!). As I matured in my fandom, the books also changed. A subtle but significant change happened as the 1980s wore on, phase 3 started, and I began to buy and collect the books: the titles were no longer 'Doctor Who and the...' anything, but were instead, for example, 'Doctor Who - Full Circle'. Something about this reminds me of the decision made at around the same time to stop crediting the main character of my favourite show as Doctor Who, and start crediting him as The Doctor. This wasn't necessarily something fun for any kid to pick up any more, it was aimed at the enthusiast, who maybe took things a little bit more (too?) seriously.

Phase 3 looked different to the previous phases too, as - coincidentally, because of Peter Davison not being happy with the likenesses of artwork depicting him - the books adopted photographic covers for a while. Other writers were more involved by this stage also. But, with a few notable exceptions, the writing style stayed the same - short, sweet and faithful to the original show. That started to change with phase 4. As Davison was no longer playing the part by that time, the artwork covers came back with a vengeance, and the writers started to divert a little from being so faithful to the source material. Frontios, for example, has a gruesome description of the Tractators' excavating machine having been assembled from severed human body parts (it's just a grey box on the telly). Also, as there were fewer stories in production, but an appetite for regular book releases had grown, the range looked more and more to the back catalogue, filling most of the gaps in the first two Doctors' tenures, often getting the original script writer back. Terrance Dicks was only getting to write one or two per year by then, poor thing. I, like many fans at the time, fell in love with those early eras through some wonderful books, including my absolute favourite, The Myth Makers by Donald Cotton.

Phase 5 was the mop-up, finishing what could be finished through the late 80s and into the early 1990s. The latest scripts were being pretty much 100% novelised by the current series writers (Terrance still got to do a few old ones) and they were letting rip, expanding the stories and the page count. One of the absolute best, and probably my second favourite, is Ben Aaronovitch's Remembrance of the Daleks. And it wasn't just the new kids on the block either: 1960s writer Victor Pemberton had, a year or two earlier, converted his story Fury from the Deep into a magnificent novel (and my third favourite Target book) that was about double the size of any other at that point. There is a sort-of phase 6 as well, I suppose. When the range officially ended, there were four (or five, if you count Shada) titles outstanding. These were the two (or three, if you count Shada) written by Douglas Adams, who didn't want to write them for the money the publishers were offering, and didn't want anyone else writing them for all the money in the world, plus the two Eric Saward Dalek stories (which were caught up in some rights issue or other). Over the last few years, all of these have finally been written and released, though not all in paperback yet. Then, last year, four post-2005 series stories were published in paperback with imitation Target covers.

All these phases are covered in the recent Doctor Who Magazine special on Target books, which I highly recommend. It so inspired me, I have decided to obtain a couple of the books I haven't got. I have purchased City of Death by James Goss (Douglas became more relaxed about other writers covering his work once he died) and Rose by Russell T Davies. I'm heading off to the sun with the family soon, and they should make perfect holiday reading. Unfortunately, even if I get them all, I won't have completed my collection. I have one of each text (I have by no means tried to get every edition or cover design) with the exception of the phase 6 stories and two others. The final two Target TV novelisations were by John Peel (not that one): The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks. They came out while I was at university, when any spare cash I had was used for buying Doctor Who videos. Being absolutely brassic, I didn't buy them. They're long out of print, and it would cost me about thirty quid per book to obtain them now. If you ever find out that I have done so, you'll know one of two things: either they were reprinted, or the Better Half has become a lot more forgiving than she is right now!

In Summary:

It's very good for the first three quarters, then sinks without a trace.