Snakedance

 

Chapter The 169th, which features snakes on an astral plane.

Plot:

Tegan is having a recurring nightmare, evidence that the Mara creature is still living in her subconscious mind. The Mara takes brief control and sets the TARDIS destination coordinates to arrive at Manussa, its home world. Celebrations are ongoing as it is the 500th anniversary of the destruction of the Mara by someone who went on to found 'the federation'. This federation doesn't seem to be the Star Trek one, nor the Blake's 7 one, including as it does an inherited power structure, with the current federator being a descendent of that founder. His wife Tanha and son Lon are in town for the closing ceremony of the celebrations. The Doctor and Nyssa lose Tegan who falls more and more under the Mara's control. Investigating, the Doctor finds out that there is a legend of the return of the Mara, being brought back through a dream, which suggests that Tegan will make that legend come true. He tries to persuade people of this, including Ambril, the director of the Mara research institute, but everyone thinks he's a ranting conspiracy freak.

Tegan meets with Lon, and the Mara takes him over too. Lon plays on Ambril's greed to persuade him to include the great crystal in the imminent ceremony, something that's strictly forbidden. The crystal, the great mind's eye, was built by the advanced civilisation that previously inhabited the planet, and which was destroyed and lost during the Mara's reign. It can turn thoughts into energy and matter, and it was this that created the Mara in the first place, when it absorbed all the negative energy of the populace. The Doctor, helped by Nyssa and Ambril's assistant Chela, locate the previous director, Dojjen, who has gone to live in the wilds of the planet with a tribe called the Snake Dancers. The rituals of this tribe involve meditation while under the influence of a snake's poisonous bite, as mental preparation for the Mara's return. Dojjen gives the Doctor the clue to how to defeat the Mara, finding the 'still point' in himself. At the ceremony, Lon puts the crystal back in its socket in a cave, and the Mara starts to become a corporeal reality again. The Doctor and friends arrive as everyone is falling under the Mara's control, but the Doctor resists, and this resistance destroys the Mara.

Context:

As is becoming the current style when viewing classic series multi-part stories, this was watched from the DVD, one episode at a time, spread out over a week or so. This seems to go down better with those accompanying me on the watch (the three children, boys aged 14 and 11, girl aged 8) than doing it all in one go. The Better Half is still not partaking, which is a shame in this instance, as I know she watched and was scared by a moment in this story (the dead snake vomiting pink goo) as a nipper; she watched it with me a long time ago, though, probably when the DVD first came out, and discovered that it was no longer scary to her at all. The children didn't seem scared by anything in the story either, though the youngest thought that some of the early scenes were creepy. The eldest kept asking why one of the main characters was named after a car, until I clarified that it's Nyssa not Nissan.

First time round:

I first watched this story on its debut BBC1 broadcast in January 1983. I'd very much enjoyed the story Kinda the previous year, for which Snakedance was the sequel, so was very excited by another story featuring the Mara. I think, despite the giveaway in the title, that I came to the story unaware that it included said psychogenic python, or mental mamba. I could have been spoilered, though as by this time I was regularly buying and reading Doctor Who Magazine. I remember reading an article on Tegan and Nyssa's new frocks around the time of watching this story, but I don't remember it giving away any details of the plot. On the subject of magazines, as I mentioned in my post about the preceding story of the season Arc of Infinity (the very first story covered by this blog), my family only got the Radio Times at Christmas, so I normally would not have seen the listings for Snakedance. I did, though, see the first episode's write-up while round at a friend's house whose folks took the magazine throughout the whole year. I was intrigued by the odd story title WhoSnakedance, until I realised that the words had just been printed too close together.

Reaction:

The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide, one of my favourite publications about classic Who, says of Snakedance that it is "Not quite as gorgeous as 'Kinda', since it almost tries to be a normal Doctor Who". I have to take exception to this. Both the Mara stories, writer Christopher Bailey's only contributions to Doctor Who, are great, and both stand out as attempting to transcend the usual format of the show. Of the two, though, I think Snakedance breaks the mould more. Kinda has a few action scenes, some of which involve the moving robot armour box thingy, the TSS, which is very in-keeping with the action-adventure style brought in by Eric Saward as script editor, working with John Nathan-Turner as producer. Bailey, having had trouble making Kinda's scripts work in the editing process, has now learnt the formula, and this helps him subvert it more effectively. He delivers something superficially more acceptable, but which is fundamentally different from the stories around it. Snakedance has barely more than a couple of scuffles with guards, which Bailey implies on Snakedance DVD's Making-of documentary were bits that Saward insisted he add. The remainder of the action of the story takes place entirely within the minds of the key characters.

Why doesn't this produce something static and dull? First, those mental battles are visualised with some striking imagery and special sound. This is sometimes big stuff, like the repeated images of snakes or snake skulls, but the story succeeds in the more subtle stuff too. For example, the intermittent dialogue-free cutaways to the at first unnamed shaman, who we gradually realise is Dojjen, waiting in the barren hills, wild-looking but silent and still. These are jarring, unexplained and deliberately disrupting to the texture as they are filmed rather than on video, though still in a studio. Magic. For any Who that is studio-bound without location filming there is a risk that it will feel stagey, but here that's embraced. Manussa is a bit threadbare, having reduced its rich history down to a tawdry sideshow, so the less realistic and more theatrical feel (of "shoddy little booths" as Lon has it in the script) is fitting. The production has learnt lessons from Kinda, and nothing is as unconvincing as the final snake manifestation in that story; the various depictions are still not perfect, but as good as could be expected of the skills and technology available at the time, with clever use of real snakes towards the end, and the final large rearing snake model convincing well.

The second factor keeping up the energy in Snakedance is the world-beating world-building. The story of Snakedance is essentially the backstory of Kinda, explaining how the Mara came to be. Exposition is so cleverly distributed through the narrative, as the Doctor uncovers the history, and its played with such conviction, that it never feels that way. An example of this is the quiet, but nonetheless devastating moment when Nyssa and the Doctor realise that the blue Manussan crystals are man-made, and what this implies. The Mara was not an invading evil from another world or reality. It's something that the people created themselves, the embodiment of their darkest desires. This scene is played out while the two TARDIS travellers are imprisoned in a cell, another superficially archetypal Doctor Who moment; but, instead of being padding or allowing for exciting escape attempts, it instead is just an opportunity to allow them to think and to talk. Bailey is smuggling in the mystical in these more ordinary clothes. Beyond the moments driving the narrative, he also litters his story with brief moments highlighting the character of this world, making it real: the six faces of delusion, the Surprise, the Punch and Judy show with a snake in place of a crocodile, and many more.

 

The characters all form part of this tapestry of forgotten tradition too. Each one of the local characters we meet - with the exception of the enlightened Dojjen - has lost track of what's important about the history they are nominally celebrating, and all for different reasons. Ambril intellectualises away any possibility that the civilisations before could have been wiser than him, convinced of his superiority; Lon is too indulged and bored to consider anything more important than his own pleasure; Tanha is blinded by her aristocratic life, and a bit too easily led by her spoilt son, to listen to anyone else; Dugdale just wants money, and the fortune teller just wants to please her audience. Even Chela, a character with more curiosity than the rest of them put together, is still too meek to challenge his boss. At the end of the story - a rare one for Doctor Who in which everybody lives - you get the feeling that everyone's going to feel very embarrassed now that they've woken from the Mara's spell. Without the intervention of the Doctor, they would have turned their world to hell not by being evil, but just by being a bit inept. Somehow, that's even more devastating. 

The director Fiona Cumming is a perfect match for a more mystical and lyrical script, and she gets great performances out of everyone. None of these is quite as flashy as the performances of Kinda, but they are just as high quality. Particular praise should go to Martin Clunes as Lon, in one of his earliest roles in a long TV career. He often ended up represented by Snakedance in those "Before They Were Famous"-style clip compilations, for wearing dodgy 80s clobber and eye make-up. It's terribly unfair, as he does everything that could be expected of him and more, nailing the part and having great chemistry with Colette O'Neil as his mother. She in turn is doing a right-royal job of channeling a certain UK family of inherited influence, but it goes beyond an impression and allows for some subtle moments. There is just a flash of wistful regret as she talks about her absent husband that speaks volumes about the life she's had after marrying into this life, and instantly explains her character, and her indulgence of her son. The regular cast shouldn't be forgotten either; Janet Fielding is having a ball playing both a scared Tegan, and the commanding Mara, often switching between the two in a single scene. Peter Davison too gives a great performance; his Doctor is ineffectual here only because of the granite-like stubbornness of everyone's imagination on Manussa; he plays off that with an increasing desperation which powers the narrative to the end.  

  

Connectivity: 

Snakedance and Image of the Fendahl have a very similar structure: an ancient evil, which had previously been thought destroyed but was merely dormant, influences people unconsciously to help recreate itself. It gains power through a glowing object (skull, crystal) takes over and physically alters a woman, then starts to take over more people, who cannot look away. Similarly,the evil's defeated in both instances as at least one person is able to resist, leaving it incomplete. In both stories, age-old legends are thought to be codified warnings or tips for defeating the evil.

Deeper Thoughts:

A big Bailey-Who! The speed that the world wide web and social media allows for the dissemination of false information is rightly a current concern, but the times before the web had their share of rumours, myths and hoaxes too. Doctor Who was particularly beset in those days. In fact, because it has since attracted a vast band of online know-it-alls who've investigated the series in every detail over the years, a hoax would be quickly quashed now; but, when the series was less well researched, and when information travelled at a much slower rate around the globe, certain stories did endure. One such tale was created when Doctor Who's organised fandom and tie-in journalism (both of which being in their relative infancy at the time) lost track of Christopher Bailey. After the two Mara stories, he was commissioned for Doctor Who a couple more times in 1982 and 83, but both stories did not progress to production. After that, Bailey "disappeared" for a couple of decades, until his "elusive" self was tracked down by Benjamin Cook of Doctor Who Magazine, and interviewed for a feature published in 2002. In truth, he hadn't disappeared and wasn't being elusive, he was just getting on with his life, and hadn't factored his couple of Who scripts as being that important in the scheme of things.

The interview was a great piece of work, and Cook was rightly congratulated for it at the time. It revealed not an antipathy for the show from one of its cleverest contributors, but an unaggressive perspective of its relative unimportance, intelligently presented without prejudice. It was refreshing, but possibly made for hard reading amongst a readership that set a great deal more store by the show than Bailey did. The interview had a positive impact, though, on Robert Shearman, Doctor Who fan and writer. Shortly before he was commissioned to write Dalek, the 2005 episode of the relaunched show, he wrote an audio play loosely inspired by Bailey and Cook's interactions. It's well worth a listen. Shearman has gone on record of his admiration of Bailey as a writer, and said that Snakedance is his favourite Doctor Who story. The imaginative breadth of all his work, for Who and elsewhere, is at least partially inspired by Bailey's scripts for Doctor Who, and the play - called Deadline, and starring Derek Jacobi - is a nice celebration of that. It takes place in a counterfactual universe where the TV show Doctor Who did not develop in the same way, and in which there is an official Juliet Bravo Magazine. But even Shearman's big brain could not have scripted the story that arose between Bailey's last contribution and Cook's interview in 2002. According to that rumour, Christopher Bailey didn't exist at all.

The story was that the two Mara stories had been written under a pseudonym by none other than saucy-cerebral rock chanteuse Kate Bush. How such rumours get started is beyond me; the evidence for the prosecution seemed to boil down to the same initials (Catherine Bush = Christopher Bailey) and that Bush's work had included the odd trippy element, as do Kinda and Snakedance. With the greater access one now has to information, as I mentioned earlier, it's easy to look back and see that Bush was recording and then promoting her very first solely self-produced album during the period of 1980 to 1982, when the work on the scripts for both Mara stories was done. It does seem unlikely that she would have squeezed in lots of meetings at the BBC with Eric Saward and the writing of multiple drafts of two screenplays as well. Additionally, Christopher Bailey was interviewed for and featured in a Doctor Who book - The Unfolding Text - around the time of Kinda's production. Did the authors talk with Kate Bush and just forget to mention it? Okay, it might have been a bit more difficult to know these points prior to the internet age, but it easily would have been possible to know one other thing that would surely have made the whole rumour seem implausible: Kate Bush has never before nor since the period in question showed any tendency toward TV screenwriting. Did this not occur to anyone?

It's not the most preposterous rumour in Doctor Who's history (that would the theory that Harold Pinter temporarily put aside his stellar writing career to take on a minor acting role for six weeks in a Patrick Troughton story), but it's up there. I suppose it's apt in one way; Christopher Bailey's scripts heavily feature the importance of myth and legend; it's fitting that they gave rise to a myth, however silly, of their own.

In Summary:

Magnificent, mould-breaking, truly Mara-llous! 

Image of the Fendahl

Chapter The 168th, let's hope Nigel Kneale and his lawyers were watching the other side.

Plot:

The Doctor and Leela, leaving K9 in the TARDIS as it was a somewhat rash decision of the Doctor's to accept him as a gift in the previous story and the scripts haven't caught up yet, investigate the operation of a Massive Great Plot Device (MGPD) scanner thingy that's being operated somewhere on Earth, well England. A small scientific team - two archaeologists, Adam and Thea, a rich electronics expert called Fendelman, and his assistant Max - are investigating a skull that's been unearthed and appears to be much older than the recorded origins of human life. They are using the MGPD scanner thingy for this in some way, and are operating out of an old priory in the Home Counties. Why work there? Unclear, but it's probably something to do with the haunted woods nearby, caused by a time fissure. The combination of MGPD and fissure creates power that the skull absorbs, and uses to entrance and transform Thea into the Fendahl, an ancient evil known to the Time Lords.

Unbeknown to Fendelman, Max is a satanist working with a local group. The visions and predictions of a local occultist Ma Tyler, who works as a cleaner and housekeeper at the priory, have been coming true and that's clued Max in to the power of the skull. Max imprisons Adam and kills Fendelman; then, with his followers who've arrived at the priory, he performs a ceremony which completes Thea's transformation. The Fendadl skull, all that remained of the creature after it travelled to Earth millions of years before, had been influencing human development though the ages to get to this point, hence Fendelman's name and all the other coincidences. Anyway, it backfires on the satanists who all get transformed into parts of the gestalt Fendahl creature, except Max who kills himself before being converted. Realising that this will mean the Fendahl will be incomplete and weakened, the Doctor, aided by Leela, Ma Tyler, her Grandson Jack, and a freed Adam, attacks the Fendahl with salt, steals the skull (to destroy in a star going supernova at a later date) and implodes the priory using the MGPD.

Context:

Watched from the DVD, one episode at a time, spread out over a couple of weeks. The Better Half is not in the mood to watch Doctor Who at the moment, but is separately embracing binge-watching of things she's already seen. In the last few weeks, she's completed a re-watch of Lucifer (Tom Ellis starring ex-US network show now on Netflix), and Fleabag series 1 and 2 on the BBC iplayer. Next up for her is Good Omens on Amazon Prime. In her absence, I was accompanied by all three children (boys aged 14 and 11, girl aged 8). The eldest was derisive about the supposedly impressive computers in Fendelman's scanner room, but kept watching every episode to the end. Middle child is getting very narrative-savvy, usually predicting accurately what might happen in anything he watches; this time he predicted Thea would be possessed from very early on. He also expounded at length after one of the middle episodes about the theory that life on Earth actually originated on Mars (Nigel Kneale would be proud - more on him in a moment). The youngest is getting braver; she wouldn't have sat through those creepy scenes of characters being stalked through the dark woods even relatively recently, but she enjoyed them this time. What upset her more was the Doctor offering someone a jelly baby when it was clearly a liquorice allsort on screen - she couldn't accept that! Everyone found the final large version of the monster comical and un-scary, with the eldest querying why it had party streamers coming out of its mouth. Because we watched the episodes spread out over quite a while, they had all forgotten the set-ups in the early TARDIS scene that were called back to in the button scene in the TARDIS at the end, with the Doctor calling K9 a 'he', so that fell a bit flat.

First time round:

I first got a tantalising but tatty glimpse of this story in the autumn of 1992 when a clip featured on The Tom Baker Years double VHS release. This was a proto-Gogglebox / Behind The Sofa Blu-rays extra presentation where Tom was shown at least one clip from all his Doctor Who stories to get his reactions and memories (there were more of the former than the latter). As it was released relatively early on in the range, it provided such a sneak peek of all the stories of his that had not yet come out at that point. The producer of the Tom Baker Years tapes was John Nathan-Turner, and - though it may have been my imagination - it did seem to me at the time that he was choosing some of the worst-looking clips from the three years of his predecessor in the producer's role Graham Williams, better to differentiate with those once he'd taken over and made everything glossier. The clip from Image of the Fendahl showed up the worst aspects of the Fendahl monster's cumbersome and unconvincing costume. Only a few months later in March 1993, when the story came out on its own video tape, I got to see that the production values were not as bad in the piece as a whole. I'd bought the tape from WH Smiths in Durham, as I was up there studying, it being term-time.

Reaction:

Based on several public pronouncements he made during his life, Nigel Kneale, TV sci-fi innovator and genius, did not like Doctor Who, but Doctor Who certainly liked him. Arguably, the shadow of Kneale's work, particularly the 1950s Quatermass serials, was cast over Who from its very first story, and in the years since and to date it has continued periodically to seek inspiration / shamelessly steal from that source. Image of the Fendahl is perhaps the epitome of this tendency, merging as it does elements and approaches from three famous Kneale works, Quatermass and the Pit, The Stone Tape and The Road. Despite this, or possibly because of it, the story is well thought of by fandom; the general consensus is that while it's not an out-and-out classic, it is an effective horror-accented adventure from the last days of Tom Baker's Imperial phase. Is it more than the sum of its individual 'homage' parts, though? Yes, I think so. Writer Chris Boucher brings things to the party that Kneale wouldn't or couldn't, and the foremost of these is a lightness of touch regarding characterisation. Boucher creates characters that despite the heightened scenario are grounded without being dull. Little moments like Adam and Thea cheerfully ribbing Max about not making the breakfast when it was his turn go a long way, as does some great dialogue. Kneale's characters tend to be a bit more sombre and single-minded, and when he tried to introduce more levity he turned out Kinvig, widely considered to be his least impressive work (though I rather liked it at the time).

The dialogue, as well as being more fun than Kneale's, is better than usual for Doctor Who too. When I first saw this story, my only previous experience of Chris Boucher scripts were The Robots of Death and the Star Cops series, which were both more zinger-laden than Image of the Fendahl, so I was disappointed on first watch. This time, though, I realised how close run a thing it is. Perhaps it's just that very early on there is a duff line, one of Doctor Who's worst, when Adam says to Thea that he accepts "without reservation the results of your excellent potassium-argon test". That overshadows much of what comes later none of which is as clunky. A lot of the good lines are also spoken by Adam, e.g. "You must think my head zips up the back", "I think you have an industrial relations problem". or the reply to an enquiry about what kind of corpse he's found: "A dead one, of course - what other kind is there?". There's also a personal favourite Doctor line "You know, I don't think these cows know anything about the time scanner", and the exchange between the Doctor and a withering Leela towards the end: "Sodium chloride. Obviously affects the conductivity, ruins the overall electrical balance and prevents control of localised disruption to the osmotic pressures / "Salt kills it" / "I just said that!".

The regular cast are on top form; Baker talking to cows one minute, and next minute walking into the room just as Thea collapses with an instantly commanding "Don't touch her". Louise Jameson as Leela gets to be brave and funny as ever, despite the backwards step of her being back in leather leotards again. The guest cast too are perfect. Dennis Lill is good at doing the mad scientist without going over the top. Scott Fredericks, as the closest the serial has to a villain, gives good sneer, but also has the great scene where he asks for the gun to sacrifice himself rather than become part of the Fendahl. Wanda Ventham is good, but doesn't have much to do once she is transformed apart from stand there and wave her cape about. Ma and Jack Tyler are also fun characters, but again they don't have a huge influence on the plot. Even the Doctor and Leela don't add that much. Though it is fun to watch them all interact, there isn't much that's pushing the plot along, and the ending is a last minute plan to shoot things and blow them up. This is cleverly disguised by the script and direction, but it all boils down to that.

A giveaway that some padding was needed is the narrative cul-de-sac in episode 3 where the Doctor and Leela disappear off in the TARDIS to visit another planet rather than stick with the action. They discover said planet to have been hidden by a Time Lord cover up, which has no relevance and is never referred to again. There should have been a better way to fill up the running time. Despite this, some questionable design choices, and a few other flaws, the story is indeed what everyone thinks of it, a solid Tom Baker effort from the end of his early phase, before things got a bit too silly. It also has more jokes than the Quatermass serials combined.

  

Connectivity: 

Slim pickings are to be found in the search for connections between Galaxy 4 and Image of the Fendahl. Both feature cute family-friendly robots (though K9 is only barely in the story), and the antagonist is female in both (though Thea is more of a possessed victim than full-on baddie like Maaga); that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

Scare factoring. The latest Doctor Who Magazine, to tie-in with Halloween, features a top 50 of the show's scariest moments. The purpose of any such article is to provoke debate or even fury, such passion being good for the subsequent issue's letters page. So, maybe I'm playing into their hands, but I didn't think many of the examples presented were that scary at all, and I didn't agree with much of the ordering. Image of the Fendahl, for example, is represented by the end of part one, with the Doctor rooted to the spot intercut with the skull starting to glow. That's the right choice of scene, I think, being the creepiest moment in the story, but it is languishing near the bottom of the 50, with scenes placed above it not scary at all - most of them are just thrilling, some strange, but not many provoking fear. As an example, Spearhead from Space makes the top 10 for the celebrated scene of dummies smashing through shop windows and going on the rampage, but that's an action sequence, an all-out attack. If anything it comes as a relief, a moment of catharsis after the build up of the previous episodes. There are various slower, more gradual scenes in those earlier episodes that I'd say therefore qualify better for this list: Ransome in the factory with - unbeknownst to him - one dummy in a long line behind him breaking ranks, and stalking towards him; the Doctor and Liz alone in the waxworks, surrounded by dummies who may or may not come to life any moment; Scobie opening the door to find his plastic replica staring back at him, advancing slowly. All these, though, are creepy but are they truly horrifying? Is there a difference? I know these things are very personal, and maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I believe there is, and will try to interrogate why.

Generally, when I think of Doctor Who - and I'm certainly not alone in this - I think of corridors. Sometimes these are corridors in an old mansion house, sometimes they are corridors in a gleaming space station; not a fusion of science fiction and horror following the pattern laid down by the pioneering Quatermass serials mentioned above, but sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes, yes, both. Sometimes the characters race down these corridors (action adventure) and sometimes they slowly creep, fearful of what's around the next corner (horror again). Despite all the 'Behind the Sofa' commentary over the years since the very beginning, Doctor Who was never primarily a scary show, because it was never primarily any one kind of show. More by accident than design, but very early on, it's prime production movers (including producer Verity Lambert, script editor David Whittaker, and regular writing contributors John Lucarotti and Terry Nation) broke any structural template that might have been laid down in the show's pre-production gestation. This time it's going to be a survival drama, then there'll be the Bug Eyed Monsters that the commissioning high-ups said should never be included in the first place, then we're going to do a surreal chamber piece where everyone goes mad stuck in the TARDIS. Well, then, I'm going to do a sweeping historical epic that takes place over months and months of narrative time. Okay, not to be outdone, I'll make the story after that a quest narrative where the genre changes every single episode.

So it continued. Through desperation for stories to put on every Saturday, those early Who pioneers created something unique, the show that could sample anything and turn it into 'Doctor Who'. That's the macro level, but even at the micro level things could never get too scary before there would be a joke, or a counterpoint with the endearingly mundane, or some philosophical strangeness, or some spectacle on a budget (indoor fireworks). There were children watching, so the truly horrific could never be fully embraced. Again perhaps more by accident than design, by reflecting life's plurality and not wanting to scare the kiddies too much, Doctor Who embraces a cautious optimism that is particularly attractive. Things will be bad, but we'll work together and we'll get through it. Horror, on the other hand, usually has a more bleak message than that, because the evil is never truly defeated, and usually comes back in some way at the end (or in the sequel, or both). So, even though at first I was surprised that Doctor Who Magazine had never done such an article before, I think now that it may be because Doctor Who doesn't have that many truly scary moments; there is always hope in the mix somewhere. Looking back, only three moments strike me as having properly scared me when watching Doctor Who, either as a child or an adult. Let's look at each of my top three, to see if my theory holds.

Number three is from The Seeds of Doom (it makes number 13 in the article): Keeler is tied to a bed, gradually being converted into a Krynoid, begging for help, and his voice and vocal patterns gradually change as he stops being human and becomes a predator of humans. This is lovely body horror style stuff, but it is extra bleak because a character is asking for help and neither the Doctor or his companion can do anything for him. I find the whole of this story unsettling, as the menace is actually natural plant life, meaning - as every gardener knows - it is relentless and can only be kept at bay for so long. Number two is the whole of the David Tennant story Midnight. A particular moment makes the article's number 19, but everything in the story is unnerving, and is finely calibrated through clever changes to ratchet up the tension (the creature inhabiting Sky starts copying everyone's speech, then syncs up so she is saying everything simultaneously, then zeroes in on just the Doctor ignoring everyone else, then starts to overtake him, so he is copying her, effectively stealing his speech and his soul). Again, this is much bleaker than usual: not only can the Doctor not help, but everyone else fails to work together too. The defeat of the monster happens by accident, and at the end the characters and audience know nothing about what exactly the threat was, meaning it could come back at any time. I think this is the closest Who has come to effectively doing a true horror without overstepping the bounds of acceptability for its audience.

My number one scariest moment ever did not make the article at all, though a different moment from the same story did. It is the material either side of the episode 2 cliffhanger of Kinda. The Doctor, Saunders and Todd sit around the small wooden box of Jhana. The narrative has established that opening this box has potentially killed, or driven mad, anyone who's tried it before. The tension builds, the Doctor is forced at gunpoint to open it, Todd screams, the theme tune crashes in, roll credits. The next week, though, it gets better. A jack-in-the-box jumps out, and everybody laughs. This is a classic Horror effect, the "Cat" or false scare. But it is immediately followed by something else coming out of the box. Again, the Doctor and other characters are unable to stop something happening, and there's the terror of the unknown, but interestingly it turns out not to be something bleak at all, exactly the opposite really - it is an attempt to bring the conflicting factions of the story together. But the alien quality of the communication is frightening as well as intriguing. As such, I think this might be something rare in Doctor Who, a fusion of true horror and true science fiction, using the grammar of the first to explore the ideas of the second. This story and the other two of my top three are coincidentally all stories I have not yet covered for the blog, so it will be interesting when I finally get to them, to see if I still feel the same about these moments.

In Summary:

Derivative and a bit tatty, but still effective

Galaxy 4

 

Chapter The 167th, which features a blonde leader who is callous and aggressive, trying to stir up conflict between their followers and a race who look different: MAGA! No, sorry, it's actually spelt Maaga.

Plot:

The Doctor, Vicki and Steven land on a barren planet which is imminently going to explode. As they leave the TARDIS they are harassed by cute robots that Vicki dubs Chumblies. A couple of clone female soldiers from the planet Drahva rescue them from the robots, and take the trio to their leader Maaga in a grounded spaceship. The Drahvins are clearly untrustworthy and war-like, and tell them that they had a space battle with a ship belonging to the "disgusting" Rills (who control the Chumblies). Both ships were brought down onto the surface of this planet; the walrus-like Rills are repairing theirs but the Drahvin ship is kaput. Maaga wants the Doctor to help steal the Rills' spaceship so the Drahvins can escape. She takes Steven as a hostage to ensure good behaviour. The Doctor and Vicki visit the Rills' ship, and find them to be intelligent, polite and noble despite looking a bit monstrous. The Doctor helps the Rills power their ship for take off. The Rills tell him the truth, that Maaga turned down any offers of help from the Rills and killed one of her own soldiers, blaming it on them to stir up conflict. Steven escapes. With seconds to spare before the planet explodes, the Rills and the TARDIS team leave, and the Drahvins all get blown up.

Context:

First, I put the BBC Audio release (with narration by Peter Purves) onto my phone and listened to the episodes while on walks or doing chores over a couple of days. Then, I dug out the 'revisited' special edition of another William Hartnell story, the Aztecs. On disc 2, this DVD set has as one of its extras episode 3 of Galaxy 4 presented within the context of a cut-down Derek Handley reconstruction of the surrounding episodes, using surviving photos and clips, and newly made CGI sequences, all matched to the soundtrack (minus the narration). The episode was found in 2011, and this was the first available release that came out on which to place it. Taken together, this gave me as complete a picture as possible as to visuals while still getting to experience 100% of the action in audio form. There's a lot of padding clearly, as the cut-down version tells the story very well in 65 minutes (and - whisper it - could even have lost a little bit more).

First time round:

My initial experiences of the story would have been the novelisation in the late 1980s, then the audio release on CD in the summer of 2000, but neither left a lasting impression. In between them, towards the end of 1998, was a documentary collecting together surviving 1960s Who clips included alongside The Ice Warriors VHS release. This included a lengthy clip from episode 1 of Galaxy 4, which was fascinating to see. A more complete visual presentation of the story, though, was a much more exciting proposition. As mentioned above, episode 3 had been rediscovered for over a year by the time the Aztecs DVD came out on the 11th March 2013. I had by then built up a bit of anticipation to see some new old Who, and had pre-ordered the release from the BBC Shop when it had first been announced (as was my favoured approach at the time). I started the 11th March far from the DVD player, in Hamburg; I had been working over the weekend for the day job in that vibrant port city. I finished work and travelled to the airport by early evening, and was looking forward to a quick flight back to the UK, and a trouble-free journey home in a cab that had been booked in advance. If the DVD had arrived on schedule, I should have got in with more than enough time to watch Galaxy 4 before I had to turn in that night. Then, snow began to fall in Hamburg, dusting the planes and the runway. It didn't delay the flight by long, but by the time I got back to London and was getting in the car to take me home, it was thick on the ground and thick in the air. It usually takes just over an hour to get home from Heathrow. Two hours into my journey and I'd ceased to worry about whether I'd get home in time to watch Galaxy 4, and started to worry if I'd get home at all.

I was lucky in that the cabbie lived down South as well, so was motivated to make it through rather than to dump me somewhere and turn around. I was also lucky that he was quite experienced at driving in the snow, or so he told me. I believed him after passing many abandoned cars, or people pushing cars, on the way. We wiggled round small roads as the main A-road was closed. There was also a lot of backtracking as those small roads were travelled down with hope only to be discovered to be impassable. Finally, we were able to join the A-road for a final stretch - it must have just opened up, as for a long while we were the only car on it - this was very eerie, being the lone car on an empty, silent and white dual carriageway, travelling through the gloom. It took the best part of four hours in all to get to my front door, and it was then something like 1am. The cabbie got a hefty tip, and made his way back to his own home. I got in and flopped down exhausted and slept. Next day, the Better Half turned out to be exhausted too - the children had been challenging over the long weekend she'd been on her own with them. There was no sign of the DVD when I got in, so I consoled myself with the notion that even had I got home earlier, I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway. After a couple of day's wondering where the disc had got to, and thinking about emailing to chase it up, I found the package from the BBC shop in the laundry basket, where one of the kids had decided to hide it on the Monday. I finally then watched Galaxy 4. It was okay, but not as interesting as my journey home had been.

Reaction:

This was the opening story of the third season of Doctor Who, and was original Who producer Verity Lambert's last proper story (the Doctorless single-episode curio Mission to the Unknown immediately following this was her last Who credit). But it doesn't feel big enough to be either an "opening night" or a send-off. It's not that it isn't functional and competent, but it feels like it belongs in the middle of a season, a little bit thrown away, not drawing too much attention. As mentioned above, the story could be comfortably told in much less time than the four whole episodes it takes up - there's quite a lot of walking between the three ship locations, Drahvin, Rill and TARDIS, not a huge amount of what one would call action, and certainly no major plot reversals. It boils down to the following template: Doctor lands on a planet, there are some goodies and some baddies, the Doctor helps the goodies win and the baddies lose. The End. It couldn't really get more generic. It has got a visual hook, though, and that is that the "monsters" are the goodies, and the blonde attractive humanoids are the baddies. Don't judge by appearances, kids. That's it. It seems a bit slight written out like that, I realise, but it's most of what Galaxy 4's got going for it (though there are other plus points).

I'm still not 100% sure after many watches of this story over the years whether the intention was that the nature of the Drahvins would be a late-story shock reveal, and it's just been bodged in the execution, or whether it's supposed to be as obvious as it is from the off. From Maaga's first scene, it's clear that the Drahvins are bad. They talk bad, and they act bad; if they could but grow moustaches, you can bet they would be twirling 'em. Perhaps this was intentional, and the mystery is supposed to be whether the Rills are baddies too. It would be slightly more original, and still fit within the simple morality tale of Galaxy 4's structure if they were, but a big clue that they aren't is that their robot slaves are not called Robo-cyber-kill-a-trons or something of that ilk, and are instead branded Chumblies. These bots also chirrup and twirl cutely, and are powered by performers with names like Pepe Poupee. They are adorable, and are another overall tick in the plus column for Galaxy 4. As well as that, those beeps and bloops created by special sound designer Brian Hodgson, and the tubular tunes of Les Structures Sonores used for incidentals, give Galaxy 4 a unique and evocative soundscape. I'd only ever need a blast of a few seconds duration, Name That Tune style, to be able to identify it.

The ticking clock of the planet approaching its destruction is good too, and makes the final sequences seem a bit more brisk, but they still feel light on the jeopardy side; no one feels like the are in any real danger, though the actors try their best to make it work. The cast is the final big plus point of Galaxy 4, with key members performing well above the level of the basic script. The guest cast are mostly hidden in creature outfits, or in the case of the Drahvins are playing (literal) drones, so it's only Stephanie Bidmead who stands out. On the page, Maaga is a pretty thankless cardboard-thin villain part, but Bidmead brings a certain restraint that makes the character more interesting. There's a nice quiet moment where she bemoans her lot, surrounded by mindless soldiers - it's only slightly undercut by being a bit of a retread of a similar character's griping in The Space Museum, a few serials earlier. There's also echoes of the Drahvins, like the Moroks in that previous adventure, being a threadbare past-its-prime imperial race; this, coupled with a sulky leader in both, and the callback mention early on in Galaxy 4 of the Doctor and Vicki's adventure on Xeros, makes one wonder whether that particular story was the one on TV when writer William Emms was working on his Galaxy 4 scripts. 

Of the regular cast, Maureen O'Brien as Vicki, in her penultimate story, has unfortunately the least opportunity to shine, but manages to keep up the perky enthusiasm throughout; Peter Purves, who's only recently joined the cast, has always moaned about how his character was written in this story. His situations of peril, particularly the cliffhanger ending to episode 3 where he is stuck in an airlock with the oxygen running out were - he contended - a hasty rewrite of scenes meant for original and recently departed companion Barbara. Still, he makes the best of it that he can, though it does stretch credibility that he'd be less scared of certain death in the airlock than taking a chance outside with the Chumblies, because they are adorable, chirrup and twirl cutely, and are powered by performers with names like Pepe Poupee. Anyway, best of all performance-wise is Hartnell who is having a ball, particularly with the opportunities for light humour. After patiently listening to the fascistic Drahvin philosophy spouted by Maaga in their first scene together, his dead-pan delivery of the sarcastic line "Yours must be a very interesting civilisation" is a joy to behold.

Connectivity: 

Galaxy 4 and Empress of Mars both involve a TARDIS trio arriving on a barren planet where there are two different factions poised on the edge of conflict. In both, the Doctor helps at least one of those factions to escape by the end. This is the third story covered for the blog in a row which does not start with a definitive article, and the second that doesn't feature a definitive article at all. This is rarer that you might think: Galaxy 4 is the last story title for the remainder of the 1960s not to feature a 'the' in there somewhere, usually at the beginning. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Closing the gaps. As run-of-the-mill as episode 3 of Galaxy 4 is, it's still great to have it back. Doctor Who has, at the time of writing, 97 missing episodes from the archives, all from its first six black-and-white years. Every find has been rewarding over the 40-ish years since it was first uncovered just how bad the archive holdings were, and people started searching in earnest. Since around the same time the episode of Galaxy 4 was found, another method of closing the gaps got going too. Of those 97, if I've added up right, 32 have now had commercial release on disc in newly created formats, either photo reconstructions or animations using the extant soundtracks. That doesn't even include the cut-down versions of Marco Polo, Galaxy 4's other parts, and the first episode of The Wheel in Space, which have also found their way onto DVDs or Blu-rays as extras. A couple of recent releases that further plugged a hole, or re-plugged one with a new an improved bung, were stories that I'd already covered by the blog in previous years, so I couldn't write a whole post about them anew; but I will take this opportunity to do a couple of capsule reviews here.

The first was a re-released special edition of Power of the Daleks that came out in July this year. My thoughts about the story and the original take on the animation are in my post from 2016 here. I haven't watched that version in the few years since. The triumph of the new version presented is best illustrated by my not noticing anything different. Having got used to the improvements in the animations done since then, by members the same core team, this just looked like more of the same or better, and all that I was noticing was the story itself. It was only when I dug out the old disc for comparison that the changes in the new version stood out for being superior (except in one way - the Doctor's trousers were checked throughout the 2016 but are plain now, I assume to allow more options for easier animation). The really big selling point of this disc is the major payload of extras. There are three discs in the set, one for the black and white animation (no colour version is included this time out), one for a photographic reconstruction (with or without narration from the audio CD by Anneke Wills) and another disc of additional material. Of this stuff, one of the biggest draws is some additional recently-found excerpts of moving image material from the original production added to the clips already in existence, which have been cleaned up and restored to the point where it looks like they were filmed yesterday. There's a lot of other great archive material and new features too. Additionally, the very first BBC-produced home version of Power of the Daleks is included - a recording with bridging narration read by Tom Baker, which has previously only been available on a cassette tape released in the 1990s. The word exhaustive was made for these recent sets, with multiple different ways to experience the story.

The next release was the eagerly anticipated animated version of Fury From the Deep, which came out a few weeks later in September. This was the first animation since the original 2016 Power handled by a new team, part of Big Finish and overseen by Gary Russell. It's another big success; we lucky fans have been blessed with not one but two brand new animations in a year (The Faceless Ones in March was the previous one), and - sales willing - this might be the case in subsequent years too, perhaps, with both the teams available to work on stories in parallel. The new team have brought in a new style, with characters based on drawings by different artists; this is refreshing too - both the Doctor of The Power of the Daleks Special Edition and of Fury from the Deep are comic book in style, but Fury has a very slightly more stylised look, with minimal lines and shading. It works well. The animation didn't change my reaction to the story that much (for my impressions of it after a watch of the recon - a new spruced-up version of which is also included in the set - see this blog post, also from 2016 ) but what did surprise me was how effective the new visuals are at conveying emotion. The subplot running through the story of Victoria's disillusionment with their fearful TARDIS travels could easily have fallen flat with the limited expressions possible in the 2D cartoon medium, but it does not here, far from it. This is testament to the continuing improvements in the technology, and the skill and talent of those who wield it to bring these stories to life.

Extras are similarly exhaustive on this set too. It is again three discs, and the episodes are available in both black-and-white and colour. Cleaned-up surviving clips are present, as are the reconstructed episodes mentioned earlier, and a couple of entertaining Making-Ofs (one for the animation, one for the original story featuring a lot of impressive shots of the abandoned sea forts used in the show to represent the rigs at sea). One thing that was missing was the audio of the 1990s tape version narrated by Tom Baker, but I'm sure it will be included when this story is eventually gathered up into a Blu-Ray season box set. In lieu of this, another audio version of the story is present, sort-of, in the form of The Slide, a radio drama by Victor Pemberton from earlier in the 1960s that he borrowed liberally from to make Fury. Roger Delgado, almost a decade before taking on the role of the Master opposite Jon Pertwee, plays the hero, the threat is mud rather than seaweed, and it's - dare I say it - clearer and a bit better structured than the six-part Doctor Who serial that came after it. Still, whatever extras we got or didn't get pale next to the sheer existence of these stories on shiny disc in shiny boxes. There are now only five Patrick Troughton stories that haven't had an individual release on DVD or Blu-ray or both. If the rumours circulating a while back were correct, two of those five are planned as the next animation releases and could be available in 2021. It wouldn't have seemed possible even a couple of years ago, but now I feel comfortable in predicting that one day every story in Who's long history will be available to buy and to keep.

In Summary:

Don't judge by appearances, except with blonde fascists - they're exactly what they seem.