Arachnids in the UK

Chapter The 204th, which features the ultimate in creepy crawlies: a U.S. businessman looking to go into politics.

Plot:

Returning Graham, Ryan and Yaz to Sheffield 30 minutes after they left, the Doctor discovers giant spiders are at large in the city. Meeting up with a scientist Dr. Jade McIntyre whose research into arachnids is almost certainly involved, though she can't see how, they work out that the creatures are centred around a newly built hotel where Yaz's Mum Najia is employed. Or was employed, as the charmless owner, businessman and wannabe politician Jack Robertson, fired her when she inadvertently walked in on him having a clandestine conversation with a couple of underlings. This was about a dubious plan to bury industrial waste beneath the hotel that has backfired: chemicals plus some improperly disposed-of experimental material from McIntyre's lab have created the spider problem. Trapped inside the hotel with the rest of them, his two underlings having been killed by the spiders, Robertson begrudgingly helps the TARDIS team (plus Yaz's Mum and the scientist) to sort the situation out. The spiders are driven into Robertson's panic room and locked in so that they can have a humane death by starvation or asphyxiation (doesn't sound that humane to me, really, but talk to the Doctor - it's her plan). The largest of the spiders is still free, but is suffocating because of its excessive size. Robertson shoots it, which actually seems kinder than letting it suffer, but everyone has a go at him for being cruel, so what do I know? Yaz, Graham and Ryan decide to continue travelling with the Doctor.

 

Context:

I watched on my own from the disc in the series 11 Blu-ray box set on a Saturday morning. I decided not to ask the children to join me, as they have not been too enthusiastic about watching Doctor Who recently. I've seen this happen before, and it is usually in the long gaps between new series being shown on BBC that their interest in Who of any era starts to wane. It will be informative to see if the imminent series (serial?) 13 stokes things up again, or whether they - unlike their Dad - are finally growing out of it for good! [Stop press: the two youngest (boy of 12, girl of 9) happily watched the first two episodes of the newly animated The Evil of the Daleks once the Blu-ray came through the letterbox. They even chanted the excited "Next ep, next ep..." at the end of both. I shall see if they sustain this through all seven parts of that epic.]

First Time Round:

It was just before Halloween (and it was an apt scary story concept for the time of year); the family (minus one) watched this story go out live on its BBC1 broadcast on Sunday 28th October 2018. That year, the youngest (6 at the time) had refused to watch any more Who after being scared by the reveal of Tim Shaw's tooth-encrusted face in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, and wasn't tempted back until the next series. My memory of the time is that this new version of Doctor Who, four weeks in, was riding high: there were Doctor Who billboards just like for Christopher Eccleston's debut in 2005, there were Doctor Who trailers in the cinema just like there were during the years of David Tennant's imperial pomp. There was even a Doctor Who themed dance on Strictly Come Dancing the evening before Arachnids in the UK, with Stacey Dooley playing the Doctor, and Kevin Clifton dressed up as a Cyberman. People who may now be thinking that the show has lost its reach (see Deeper Thoughts below) are forgetting such 'cut through' events (and others more recently like the message Jodie Whittaker delivered in character near the start of the UK Covid lockdown where she was the perfect Doctor of that moment). Frankly, they're also forgetting that there is usually a bit of moaning regarding the show looking tired around the start of a Doctor's third year in charge; I certainly remember it happening with Capaldi.

Reaction:

Though it looked like the 2018 run was doing something very different (new Doctor, new regular cast, new directors, new writers, new music, new logo, new title and credits sequences, no returning elements from older stories) the foundational structure of the series follows a pattern set up in the very early years after its return in 2005 and reused many times since (in the preceding 2017 series for example). The first three stories of the year are a contemporary alien invasion story (often where the Doctor meets a new companion or companions), then a futuristic one on an alien planet or space station, then one set in a period of Earth history. This sets out the stall of the type of stories that the show can do for the new companions / viewers. For the fourth story, the TARDIS returns the new crew home a little changed, where they get to face another invasion or monster but this time as more experienced adventurers. In 2005, there was Rose, The End of the World, The Unquiet Dead and then Aliens of London; in 2017, there was The Pilot, Smile, Thin Ice and then Knock, Knock. Jodie Whittaker's first year pulls the same trick. Arachnids in the UK follows The Woman Who Fell to Earth, The Ghost Monument and Rosa - present, future, past, then back home. Chris Chibnall's script leans more towards Russell T Davies's 2005 approach than Steven Moffat's 2017 one. The adventure ends with the Doctor's new friends electing to rejoin the Doctor on her travels, as home seems a little smaller than it used to be (despite the giant spider infestation). There's even a couple of Davies Who preoccupations in the narrative, with a protective Mum and a slightly ineffectual Dad (two, if one counts Ryan's Dad, mentioned in passing).

The other major aspect of Doctor Who's back catalogue of tricks that Chibnall is showcasing here is horror. Despite a few moments of nastiness from Tim Shaw, Jodie's first story was more action oriented, the same goes for the second, and the third was a time-travelling moral quandary. Arachnids in the UK is the first story of the year to go all out to send any newly recruited audience members behind their metaphorical sofas. The opening creeping shots of the exteriors and interiors of the hotel are a case in point. The setting being an empty hotel is, of course, an instant giveaway of the genre - Robertson's new build is the Overlook Hotel in all but name (and Chibnall is not alone in such pilfering, the finale of the latest series of UK crime series Endeavour in September 2021 jumped through various contrived narrative hoops to trap its characters in an abandoned hotel during a snowstorm, and was all the more fun for it). This being Doctor Who, the hotel is built on top of an old mine filled with industrial slime and genetically engineered mini-beasts rather than anything more spiritual. So, Arachnids in the UK = The Shining + Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story The Green Death? Is that all there is to it? Quite frankly, that should be enough! But, no, it has a few other things to recommend it too. Firstly, there's some impeccable CGI work creating the spiders. They all look wonderfully realistic and contribute to some nice shock moments. The practical effects to cover rooms and people with thick cobwebs are excellent too, and aid the creation of the tension and dread that is punctuated with those shock moments.

There's a lot of fun in the script. It presents us with horrific versions of all the spider clichés (a spider emerging from a plughole in a bath, capturing one under a glass / cauldron, "they're more afraid of us than we are of them"). Chris Noth as Jack Robertson is great value, managing to be sometimes sinister, sometimes funny, and it's no surprise at all that the character returned to the show a few years later in Revolution of the Daleks. I think the script maybe needed a few more tweaks at the end before going in front of the cameras, though, as the Doctor's humane plan to get rid of the spiders seems cruelly inhumane, whereas the bad guy's plan just to shoot them would be quick at least. In his next appearance, Robertson is positioned much more clearly as the hiss-able Panto baddie. The TARDIS team are still fresh and new here, and their emotional arcs just starting out. Yaz's family are perfect. Graham's grief, and his imaginary conversations with Grace are touchingly performed. Ryan's letter from his Dad keeps his subplot moving along too. There's also some nice moments of the three of them with the Doctor just enjoying each other's company. A lovely throwaway moment is Ryan in the background making shadow animals on the wall when in McIntyre's lab. Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor gets some lovely moments and funny lines too: getting small talk wrong, mistaking Robertson for Ed Sheeran, "I call people dude now"...

If there's one flaw, it's that it is all about tension and brief shocks, but there's no depth to the horror. The story as a whole doesn't have much heft nor make us feel too much, as the danger never seems tangible. This can be an issue with all-CGI monsters, but it goes a bit deeper: nobody we care about dies. There are three people killed by the spiders, one we never meet who's killed before the main action starts, the other two are the big villain's accomplices and we didn't get to know them very well anyway. It needs a nice empathetic character to be killed to up the stakes. With all the regulars' subplots to cover and already quite a few guest characters around, there probably wasn't room or time to add another character. As such, it comes down to killing off Dr. Jade; sometime after they are trapped in the hotel and she's delivered the necessary exposition, the scientist needed to be eaten by a spider; that would fix it. Even without this, though, it's still an exciting story for a new crew just starting to establish themselves.

 

Connectivity: 

Both this story and The Evil of the Daleks start in a more urban scenario before action moves to a big building in its own grounds (hotel in Arachnids, stately home in Evil). Both see the Doctor indirectly cause the destruction of the entire monster race at the end.

Deeper Thoughts:

He's RTD2, but he's not our only hope. Social media can be positive on occasion. Earlier in September 2021, Tanya Fear, who played Dr. Jade McIntyre in Arachnids in the UK, went missing in Los Angeles where she now lives. My socials were lit up by fans putting the word out, and then very quickly again were filled with confirmation that she had been found alive and safe. Whether or not those previous social media posts had helped in the search, it was good to see such tools used for good, and definitely good to see a happy ending to that particular tale. Doctor Who fans can tend to be a grumpy and pessimistic bunch, or perhaps the grumpy and pessimistic ones tend to have the louder (virtual) voices. In the aftermath of the brief flurry of Tanya Fear related messages, I did hear that even that topic had been hijacked by someone to moan about how Chris Chibnall was ruining Doctor Who. Something along the lines of 'Tanya Fear? Never heard of her. Oh, she's from a Chibnall episode, I never watch those. Not my Doctor, etc. etc.'. If that did indeed happen, I was lucky enough not to see it. But it was no surprise to me therefore that the next time my socials lit up with message after message from Doctor Who fans about a single subject, all generally positive, that some people would use this as a stick to beat up the current production team. This was the afternoon of Friday the 24th September 2021 (and carried on through the weekend at a barely reduced rate) where the Doctor Who online massive were taken by surprise and reacted with joy and lots of speculation at the news that Russell T Davies, the first showrunner of the revived 21st century Doctor Who, is returning to run the show again in 2023.

I certainly didn't see 'RTD2' coming. What was more predictable, however, was that this would start up a conversation about the deficiencies of the outgoing regime. If they were willing to twist messages about Tanya Fear to that end, the knowledge that the old guv'nor has been tempted back - in their heads, no doubt, to save the series and clear up the mess left by the other feller - would inspire the same sort of comments. The timing probably didn't help. Chibnall's latest series and specials have yet to be shown, and already his successor has been named. It's standard, though. Chibnall's appointment was announced when Steven Moffat still had a series and two Christmas specials to broadcast, and Moffat was officially confirmed to be working away preparing his new take on the show about the same amount of time before Davies's final episodes went to air. No doubt the preparation work that has to be done means many meetings with lots of people starting almost immediately, and it would be impossible to keep a lid on it for very long had it not been announced. Anyway, no conspiracy there. Chibnall's done fewer years than his predecessor in the role, which might give the impression he wasn't as successful; but Moffat did stick around for quite an extended time, and three or four years - and one global crisis - is enough for anyone to go through before considering changing their job. Good luck to Mister Chibnall in his future endeavours, and I look forward to his remaining stories. I'm giving too much credit to the naysayers anyway, trying to look for logical reasons for how they're interpreting things. Davies posted a celebratory instagram the day after the announcement; captioned "Day One", it was a photograph of himself in a garden - I assume his own - posing with a slightly dilapidated Dalek. I saw someone online saying that they took the state of the Dalek as a coded reference to the show being broken and needing Russell to fix it.

This was all despite Davies stating in an interview quoted in the press release that Chibnall is his "friend and hero" and that Jodie is "brilliant" and that he's looking forward to seeing their remaining shows as a viewer. The naysayers online will say he's being polite or has to toe the party line or whatever. This is how conspiracy mindsets work, and we see enough of them online talking about masks and vaccines at the moment without concentrating too much on the Doctor Who ones too. Simply put: the BBC would not give Chibnall a centrepiece slot in their centenary celebrations if they thought he was failing the show, and Davies is back because they need someone for the job, and he's presumably got some interesting ideas about what to do next. What could these be, though? The naysayers stating - no word of a lie - that Doctor Who won't be "woke" any longer now Davies is in charge, and that a woman won't be cast as his new Doctor, might well be in for a surprise. But so could we all. Part of me wonders what it would have been like with someone completely new in charge. I watched with some interest J. Michael Straczynski's public bid for the job, and would have been very interested to see his take. Not to be outdone by RTD, JMS is anyway also getting to return and reboot a series for which he previously was showrunner, as he's working on a new version of Babylon 5. Just as in that case, enough time has passed that the showrunner is not the same person as before. With shows like Years and Years and It's a Sin behind him, the Davies taking over now is not the same as the one that worked on Doctor Who in 2005. Anything could happen next. Exciting!

In Summary:

Whatever your feelings now, you have to accept that in 2018, like the spiders, Chibnall's version of Doctor Who had legs.

The Evil of the Daleks

Chapter The 203rd, which sees various humans come together to be inoculated with the Dalek factor.

Plot:

Instead of just capturing the Doctor and Jamie, the Daleks use human accomplices in 1966 to steal the TARDIS and leave an over-complicated trail of clues to lead the two time travellers to an antique shop in London. The shop is a front for another time traveller Edward Waterfield, who is really from 1866. He gasses the Doctor and Jamie to unconsciousness and uses a Dalek time machine to transport them to his scientific partner Theodore Maxtible's mansion in his own time. He doesn't do it immediately, though, he leaves an over-complicated trail of clues for them first. Waterfield is an unwilling accomplice: the Daleks have taken his daughter Victoria hostage in another wing of the house. Maxtible, though, is secretly doing a deal with the Daleks to give him the secret of turning base metals into gold (yes, really, in 1866 this is his number one desire).

The Daleks want to isolate the Dalek factor to inject into humans and turn them Dalek-y, but instead of experimenting themselves, they con the Doctor into doing it by asking him to isolate the human factor; then they can make the Dalek factor the exact opposite (or something - it's not an 100% clear nor logical plan). The Doctor monitors Jamie as he is manipulated into trying to rescue Victoria, escape booby traps in the house, and fight a mute strongman Kemel. This provides the data to form the human factor, which the Doctor injects into three Daleks. The Daleks are transported to Skaro after the experiments conclude, as are the Doctor, Jamie, Victoria, Waterfield, Maxtible and Kemel. They meet the Emperor Dalek there. Then, the three humanised Daleks spark a civil war, which destroys the race finally, but everyone except the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria, including her father, end up killed. Victoria joins the TARDIS crew.

Context:

The BFI Screening of The Evil of the Daleks was a hot ticket: a well thought of story, and the biggest animation yet at seven episodes, with encouraging glimpses seen online beforehand. Plus, there hasn't been a new Doctor Who animation shown at the BFI Southbank for over 18 months because of Covid. This wasn't why tickets were limited to two per person - it seems to be the new policy for these events, and was the same for the Galaxy 4 animation screening, which went on sale this week. It made coordination of obtaining the tickets more difficult than usual for the group of us that attend, but had the benefit of creating a few new BFI members (members get to order tickets in advance of non-members). We ended up with one ticket too many, so I extended the invite to Phil, university friend mentioned many times before on this blog, who watched new Doctor Who videos and DVDs with me when they came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when we both lived near each other in Brighton. David, Trevor, Alan, and Chris were also in attendance. Another change that seems only for this screening was that there was no allocated seating, it was first come first served, and the BFI had sold all the seats (they still had distancing gaps between seats for the screening of Dragonfire in June). As well as being a hot ticket, it was a hot auditorium too, very stuffy on a warm September Sunday. This made me a little worried about the quality of ventilation in NFT1, though everyone was masked. At the time of writing, a few days after the screening, nobody has shown symptoms or been pinged. Fingers crossed.

First Time Round:

The first time I experienced this story was when it came out as a cassette tape with linking narration voiced by Tom Baker in July 1992. I believe I got the tape from Volume One in Worthing when at home during the Summer Vac between my first and second years at university in Durham. I had told Phil before we went to the BFI that the Evil tapes were the ones he was very sniffy about back in the day ("I've got orchestral recordings from the 20s better quality than this") when I was listening to it in my room in college. I'd not known at the time that they were home made rather than official recordings (the audio of the episodes otherwise missing from the archives only exist because young fans in the 1960s taped them from the telly). I have just realised though that the story to elicit his response was instead Fury From the Deep; I found the audio of Fury in a Newcastle shop in term time - as related in a bit more detail in the First Time round section of the Fury blog post from 2016. Coincidentally - I do not believe it was coordinated, that wasn't the style of the ranges at that time - the extant episode 2 of Evil was also released in July 1992 on the Daleks The Early Years VHS tape. I bought this, also from Volume One, at around the same time as the audio tape, and was able to experience all the surviving material of the story at that time. In between then and now I have watched an online reconstruction, but the story is long and has many action sequences, so it didn't feel very effective as a slide show with accompanying audio despite sterling efforts by the re-constructors. Finally, I recently read the very expensive novelisation (see the Deeper Thoughts section of a recent post for more details).

Reaction:

The late, great US film critic Roger Ebert often used the term 'idiot plot' to describe a narrative that would be "resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot". It's a good gag, and like all good gags contains a certain amount of truth; but, the more I've learned and thought about the craft of creating stories, the more I've come to believe that all plots are idiot plots. Some, though, are better at justifying their characters' idiocy than others. The fatal flaw of a tragic or comic character is the thing that blocks them from realising they are being an idiot. The Evil of the Daleks is the second of two 1960s Dalek stories written by David Whitaker in the season that saw Patrick Troughton take over as the Doctor. The former, which also got the full animation treatment in recent years, was The Power of the Daleks. In that story, had the Doctor had been listened to early on, the Daleks would have been destroyed and everyone would have lived reasonably happy ever after. But almost all the characters in the story apart from those that arrived by TARDIS are blinded by obsessive scientific curiosity, or desire for power and status, and so a relatively simple Dalek plot ends with a bloodbath that a lot of the guest characters do not survive. Evil too ends up with almost everyone dead and an explosive civil war playing out on Skaro, but its characters have made mistakes to lead up to this that seem too hard to explain away.

For example, if the Daleks never wanted the human factor injected into the Dalek race, why did they provide three test subject Daleks to the Doctor at all? It's bound to lead to trouble. If the Doctor cares for Jamie's life, why send him into a dangerous booby-trapped scenario? Why does everyone trust the Daleks to be good to their word and return a daughter / provide the secret of alchemy? In Power, the Daleks are cunning and hide their strength and true nature, but here they are violent and dismissive from the off. At first glance, the screenplay for Evil seems more complex than Power's, but it's really only convoluted. The simplicity of Power's narrative through-line - the Daleks growing stronger and stronger - allows the character plots to shine as they dance around that straight line. The characters are more colourful in Evil, but their actions don't always make sense. Why doesn't Waterfield just kidnap the Doctor and Jamie and send them back to 1866? Through his criminal associates, he has the means and opportunity. Why do the Daleks need someone who has travelled in time, but not too much, to experiment on? Why hypnotise Victoria to go off with the Daleks to another wing of the house rather than just force her at blaster-point, or knock her out and carry her? Why bother trying to do a dodgy conditioning job on Arthur Terrall to obey the Daleks when they already have other people in the house serving them, willingly or unwillingly?

The answer is that it takes up time, and seven episodes is difficult to fill. The first one and a half episodes of the story set in 1966 are pure padding, but it's quite entertaining padding. The Doctor picking up clues without realising he's being manipulated is great to watch, and once the action moves to 1866, all that's gone and forgotten about, and the story moves on to, well, another few episodes of padding. Watched episodically week on week, it might not have caused anyone issues, until they could look back on all seven weeks and reflect, and by then it was probably fading from memory. Terrall's subplot could also lift out and not affect matters one jot, but is mysterious as it happens. All the hocus pocus of creeping around dark rooms in abandoned wings of old houses, and hypnotism, and talk of ghosts - it's all unnecessary for plot, but perfect for atmosphere. Once we're on Skaro, the story changes gears into a third different genre, and forgets about the stuff in the stately home. Even this last section is padded, and could be done in half the time. Do the Daleks really need to pretend to Maxtible that they're giving him the secrets of gold production he's been hankering for, just to get him to walk through an arch? They could - as dialogue later states baldly - just push him through. But it's nice to watch him get his comeuppance, even if it seems inefficient from the Daleks' point of view.

The Evil of the Daleks is a strange brew for sure, and some gulps go down nicer than others, but floating in it are some absolutely delicious fruity segments: scenes that epitomise the best of this era and Doctor Who as a whole. However badly it hangs together ultimately, it's good to have Evil in existence with wonderful animated visuals just so we can enjoy these scenes. The conflict scenes between Jamie and the Doctor are an example. Also, watching with an audience hammered home that the heart of the piece is the collection of sequences with Alpha, Beta and Omega, the humanised Daleks. Without Dalek movement synced to the audio, one loses the full incongruity of the child-like voices emanating from the traditional pepperpot shapes of Doctor Who badness. Being limited to audio reduced these three Daleks to just silly voices, but now they can be seen as characters in their own right. A huge "Awwwwww!" emerged from the audience when one was killed in a skirmish towards the end. The reveal of the Emperor Dalek and the final sequences of destruction as civil war rages on Skaro were marvellous at the time, as much as one can tell, but are - dare I say it - even better in the 2021 version of the story. Animation producer AnneMarie Walsh confirmed that they got an unprecedented 18 months to work on Evil of the Daleks and it shows; but, I believe that every release from this team betters the last anyway. Details in Evil caught my eye that I thought improved on anything we'd seen from the Who animations before; for example, many scenes with candlelight and smoke, and motes of dust floating about; plus, the swordfight between Jamie and Terrall is much better than the punch-up in the airport car-park in last year's Faceless Ones animation.

The movement of the 2D animated characters seems smoother and more expressive than previously. I compared what was on screen to the live action of surviving episode 2 in my mind's eye, and most moments seemed just as good if not better. No animated face can show as much emotion as Troughton does in the wonderful moment when he first realises that it's the Daleks he's up against, but the animated version almost matches the effectiveness of the moment in its own medium. It's a shame that the very first scene of episode 1 of the story involves the Doctor and Jamie chasing after the stolen TARDIS, as running is the one thing that the characters cannot do convincingly. Everything else was perfectly good, with bravura scenes like the Doctor riding on the humanised Daleks (a technical challenge as it is a 2D character on top of a 3D character) coming off very well. The backgrounds and character designs are uniformly excellent. The hypnotism scene has some close-ups of the faces of Molly and Maxtible, and they looked amazing on the big screen of NFT1. There was a difference of opinion amongst my viewing companions about some shots that couldn't have possibly been achieved by the 1960s production. The mansion is introduced with a sweeping establishing 'drone shot', which for some took them out of the action briefly as it didn't fit with a 1960s story style; others didn't mind it at all, mind.

A few other random points of interest after this watch: having a character in the early episodes share the same name (Mister Perry) as me was nice, though for a plot point they have to reveal his first name eventually, and it isn't the same as mine, alas; Kemel's characterisation is a trifle dodgy, a mute Turk in traditional dress who strips to the waist to do strongman feats, and is accompanied by on-the-nose music. Waterfield and Maxtible's successful time travel experiments are in keeping with the general tone of Victorian prestidigitation rather than sensible science: they created a link to another space/time event by applying static electricity in polished mirrors?! (Did they rub a balloon on the mirrors, perhaps?) Maybe for padding reasons again, but the Doctor's being a bit thick in the latter episodes musing how the Daleks expect to persuade him to cooperate (they're going to inject you with the Dalek factor, Doctor, it's obvious - they basically just said they would!!!). Finally, having a credit on the earlier episodes for "Skaro Concept and Design" does give away that the action is going to switch to scenes on that planet before the end. This wouldn't bother the hardcore fan, of course, but Phil knew nothing about the story going in, and there were probably a few unspoiled souls like him elsewhere in the audience too.

 

Connectivity: 

Both The Evil and the Daleks and Smile feature a new autonomous form of robotic or part-robotic life (the Human Factor Daleks and the Vardy / Emojibots) coming into being and this causing conflict with another group.

Deeper Thoughts:

Waterfield and Maxtible's Experimental Notes: BFI Southbank The Evil of the Daleks screening, 12th September 2021. Our hosts as ever were Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. As with the last screening, restrictions meant that there could be no quiz at the beginning nor audience Q&A at the end. Johnson dropped a hint that this might change for a soon-to-come screening that hadn't been announced on the 12th (but which I now have to assume is the November screening of the animated Galaxy 4). As the story was a mighty seven episodes long, the programme didn't have much time for extra content anyway, but we still got a brief interview after the interval (between episodes 4 and 5) and a more substantial Q&A at the end  Before the episodes were shown, Fiddy paid tribute to Roger Bunce, a camera operator on many Doctor Who stories including Evil, a pioneer of green-screen shooting, and before it "luminous overlay", a similar approach for black-and-white shows, which was used in The Evil of the Daleks. Roger had died two weeks earlier, having been due to make an appearance on stage that day. His family were in the audience and got to witness an appreciative and celebratory round of applause in his honour, and Fiddy dedicated the screening to him. After the first four episodes, the midway interview was with Mark Ayres, music and sound Maestro. He cheerfully explained that days before he'd been called to the BFI as they were having a rehearsal for the screening (an intriguing glimpse of the behind the scenes preparation that goes into these sessions); a BFI technician thought there was something wrong with the sound. They weren't aware of the home-made nature of the 50 year old recordings, and what they were hearing "didn't meet the expectations of a modern HD presentation". I think this is actually a compliment: Ayres has clearly got the sound as good as it can be so it almost sounds like it was recorded recently.

He mentioned that he had got the "noise floor" down, and been able to pull out a few buried lines, though he can't change the mix (as he does not have the elements like studio sound and music separately for stories of this vintage; the BBC didn't often retain those even for stories that it kept). Fiddy thought that elements had been enhanced, but Ayres put that down to him being able to hear the higher frequencies for the first time. On the musical side, Ayres commended Dudley Simpson's score and its pioneering use of synthesisers (and it is great, that Morse code-like rat-a-ta-tat Dalek theme is so memorable). Music was also the reason Ayres had to make so many different versions of the animation soundtrack. In the episode 1 coffee bar scenes, two contemporary pop songs were playing in the background. One of these has always been problematic because of rights issues, as it's The Beatles' Paperback Writer. For the UK, Ayres has (miraculously) replaced it with a number by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tish. For the US, both tracks had to be replaced by library music. Then different versions of both have to be made for alternate versions that are also going to be included on the DVD / Blu-ray: the 1968 repeat version of the programme (which was presented to TV audiences in 1968 with a couple of additional Troughton voiceovers as he was supposed to be relaying the tale to new companion Zoe, and the narrated telesnap version. Ayres made a version to keep on file with Paperback Writer included too, just in case it ever becomes possible to release it in future.

(L to R) Fiddy, Ayres

After the final episode, Johnson welcomed three people involved with the animation on to the stage: producer AnneMarie Walsh, storyboard artist Barry Baker, and 2D character animator Tom Bland. Interestingly, the team are not as big fans as many others that are involved in projects like this (like Ayres, say, or 3D animator Rob Ritchie who was in the audience and pitched in some comments and took some applause after a shout out from Walsh). Walsh mostly missed the show as she was too young for the original series, and too old for the new. Bland described himself as a "Doctor Who virgin". Baker was more of a fan, having watched the original series from the beginning up to the Tom Baker years, but displayed he wasn't quite as obsessive a fan as presumably 90% of the audience when he did a gag about the show being cancelled one week because of the "assassination of some US president or other"; true obsessive fans know that this is a myth, and the first episode of Doctor Who (that aired the day after JFK's death in November 1963) was barely even delayed. An early question was on how the particular stories are chosen for the animation treatment. Walsh would not be drawn on what was coming next despite some friendly interrogation from Johnson, but said that conversations happen between her team and BBC studios, and various factors are taken into consideration. They have their favourite Doctor and companion combos, but there's also an aim to complete seasons and close gaps, and they currently have to veto any story that they know features something that they currently could not handle such as large crowd scenes.

The balance was discussed between being sensitive to fans by not deviating too much from the story as it was originally, versus doing things that work better for animation. They reference any material they can get (camera scripts, stills, surviving footage) and do a certain amount of detective work. The location for Maxtible's estate Grim's Dyke had been used for filming of various Hammer horror films, so they were watched to get colour references. The 'drone shot' of the house was justified as being something the 1960s production would have done if they could have, and I just about buy that. Elsewhere, the audio has to be edited to remove dead moments that would work if one were looking at the human faces and movements of actors, but are too static when it's just animated characters not talking. 1960s TV favoured longer shots, and the modern animation, as would be expected, cuts more frequently. The extra time given for the production allowed more "in between" drawings, and so animated faces are more moveable; this made it possible to have more tight close-ups as in the hypnotism scenes I mentioned above. When asked whether the pandemic had impacted production (the 18 months of work, 6 pre-production and 12 for animation, fell pretty much entirely in the Covid lockdown period), the panel's answer was perhaps surprisingly that it had made no difference at all. The team - of about 11 full and part-time people - tend to work from home anyway, and share information on calls, emails and spreadsheets.

(L to R) Bland, Baker, Walsh, Johnson

Favourite bits, or bits that stood out on this watch, for each of the panel members: Bland's favourite character was Maxtible, and he enjoyed working on his face and hand movements to make him as expressive as possible; he could relax during the screening for anything he hadn't been involved in animating, but for those bits he had worked on, he was scanning the screen looking for mistakes; Baker liked the three humanised Daleks, and storyboarded their sequences to be as funny as possible, liking that they had gone down well with the BFI audience; Walsh likes the Skaro sequences, but thought they might prove controversial with fans as the animators have gone their own way rather than recreate what the 1960s production did. I think anyone unhappy would have to be a bit ungrateful as those sequences are excellent, and I think in keeping with the sprit of the original. Walsh hoped that fans would be as supportive of this animation as they have generally have been for the team's work previously. They made it as good as it could be in the time they had; if they'd had five years and a huge budget it would have been much better. The Q&A ended with her entreating fans to lobby the BBC for that treatment for the next story! After that, it was the usual trooping out to the BFI Riverfront bar, followed by a few drinks and chats with my friends and with other fans. It only occurred to me later that the one thing there wasn't in the whole day was a single Dick joke, not one instance of a double entendre based on Mr. Fiddy's first name. These are usually ubiquitous, but then so was Frank Skinner attending in the audience back in the day, and he doesn't seem to come along anymore. Will this aspect of the BFI experience return next time? I'll tell you in November, as I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the Galaxy 4 screening...

In Summary:

Padded, but gorgeous; rather like Yours Truly in his middle age! It's now more animated than I tend to be, though.

Smile

Chapter The 202nd, where at first I feel sad for a while, but then I watch Smile, I go ahead and watch Smile...

Plot:

The Doctor and Bill arrive on a colony world in the far future to find a city set up for colonists. It is deserted except for tiny microbots that swarm around called the Vardy, and some bigger (but still quite cute) bots with faces that display emojis, and act as a human-Vardy interface. They discover human bones being ground up for fertiliser in the gardens: the robots' programming has gone wrong - they're supposed to make the humans happy, so they have started to kill anyone who isn't smiling. The Doctor escapes with Bill back to the TARDIS, but wants her to stay there while he goes back to destroy the city. He surmises that the people killed so far were a set-up crew, and that more humans will eventually arrive on the planet to be killed by the Vardy if he doesn't intervene. Bill follows the Doctor back into the city and they find within it the spacecraft the humans arrived in. The Doctor goes to the engine room to set it to self-destruct, but Bill discovers a young boy roaming the ship - the colonists have already arrived; apart from the set-up crew, they've all been in cryogenic storage near the engine room, but are now waking up since the Doctor and Bill entered and activated the circuits. The Doctor cancels the self-destruct, and persuades the mob of awakened colonists not to go on the attack in response to the killing of their friends and relatives in the set-up crew. He has realised that the Vardy / bots have become a sentient and autonomous lifeform, and helps them and the humans negotiate a peaceful way to coexist on the planet in future.

Context:

I'm lucky enough to have a ticket to the BFI showing of the new animated version of The Evil of the Daleks on 12th September 2021 (which is still in the future at the time of writing, but which I'll blog about here once I've seen it). When I published the last blog post for Terror of the Zygons, it was quite early in September, and the screening is happening - unusually for Who events at the BFI - on a Sunday. As such, I won't get round to writing up all my notes on the event for likely a week minimum afterwards, as the day job takes up a lot of time on weekdays. I didn't want to leave so long between posts, so I though I'd squeeze in a quickie (it's always been an ambition) in between. Smile is a new series single-parter, so perfect for the task. Rather than waste time trying to persuade the family to watch with me, I watched on my own once everyone else was in bed or engaged elsewhere. I viewed the Blu-ray version of the episode from the Season 10 boxset.

First Time Round:

I watched this first on the evening of its debut BBC1 broadcast on 22nd April 2017, slightly time-shifted, accompanied by the whole family (Better Half, and three kids, two boys and one girl, the youngest of whom was only four at the time). I remember everyone enjoyed the story, though I felt it was a bit slight. The following day, we travelled up to Windsor and had a night and a couple of days in a hotel in Legoland. The Monday was an inset day at the little 'uns school, so we'd taken the opportunity to book when it wouldn't be as crowded as normal. Something in the Doctor Who story they'd watched before they left must have resonated, as I remember the kids, helped by the Better Half, making emojibots out of Lego in the hotel room. I wish I'd taken a picture of them back then to drop in here now, but there was an awful lot of Lego everywhere. Everything was made of Lego - too much to photograph it all.

Reaction:

I struggled to find similarities between this story and the last one covered by the blog (see Connectivity section below), but it occurred to me as I watched that Smile has lots in common with The Beast Below, the second story of Steven Moffat's first season as showrunner in 2010. Both have the Doctor and his new female companion embarking on a trip into the future after their previous introductory episode was out of the way; both have the Doctor and his new companion investigating together for a reasonable amount of time without other character interactions; in both, the Doctor has to manage a conflict and moral quandary between a group of humans on a spaceship and the so-called "monster" of the week that turns out not to be so monstrous. Both contain robotic creatures whose faces change to get progressively more unhappy, and they both end with a lengthy scene teeing up the next story. Was it coincidence? Was The Beast Below a story that the writer of Smile Frank Cottrell-Boyce happened to have remembered? Did Moffat point him in its direction for use as a template?

Whatever, it's an interesting parallel. They both take place at the same point in the Doctor / Companion relationship - the introductory story has been a whistle-stop affair, but this next one is where the two characters size each other up. The best part of this story are the early sections where it is just Capaldi and Pearl Mackie 's interactions as they explore alone. This lets Bill, as well as any recently embarked audience members, find out the standard details - stolen TARDIS, two hearts, etc. - but also showcases Bill forcing the Doctor to reveal his nature (and therefore the concept of the show): he might claim not to want to get involved, but he can't leave if there's a chance to help, and he feels he has to be the one to do it: "You don't call the helpline because you are the helpline" as she puts it. In The Beast Below it was "You never interfere in the affairs of other peoples or planets, unless there's children crying".

Pearl Mackie is so brilliant in the role of Bill, so talented and so precise. The character is all questions, questions, questions, which could be irritating if less well handled, but she makes Bill not just fabulous and fun but wise, but with an offhand manner so it's nowhere near overbearing. Capaldi synthesises his two prototype takes from each of the previous years - not as grumpy as his first year, but still a bit grumpy; not as wacky as in his second year, but still a little unpredictable. It just makes one wish that he'd stayed on for another year as he'd just found the perfect balance for the character and had the right supporting cast (as well as Mackie there's a little comedy with Matt Lucas's nagging Nardole) to allow him to shine. The script is also well structured to show off these characters at their best: Bill hesitates for a moment, but then follows the Doctor back into danger in order to do the right thing, as she's made of the same stuff he is. As it is all about the regulars, the guest cast don't get much of a look-in. Mina Anwar and Ralf Little have not much more than cameos. A giveaway that the emojibot plot is not necessarily the main draw here compared to just watching our two heroes together is that the set-up is made very clear to the audience before our heroes cotton on. That's not to say that there isn't good stuff there though, like the wit of the "skeleton crew" that turn out to have been reduced to piles of bones - and a couple of interesting story developments (Cottrell Boyce makes up for his 2014 misfire In The Forest of The Night with a solid script here) but it's a subplot.

What also raises Smile above the rest is now it looks. The location is beautiful, the white curving walls of the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain are almost custom built for a futuristic setting such as this. They are shot very effectively too, but are just one of the glorious vistas on show throughout the story: there are the cornfields stretching out as far as the eyes can see, and the grimy industrial interiors of the spaceship. There's also crisp, effective iconography: the blue jelly cube food, the mood indicator badges, the bot faces with the transitions taking each character seeing them through a set of cutesy stages towards their own destruction. Production designer, the late great Michael Pickwoad, was a bone fide genius and could give you anything from minimalist futuristic to grimy industrial, and does so here within the space of a few minutes. It's not just talking and landscapes either: there are some nice shock moments, a couple of good action moments, like the Doctor's tussle with the emojibot on the engine room gantry, and some difficult truths and compromises faced head on in the plot (the Doctor's voiceover monologue telling the story of the magic haddock just avoids being too smug and is instead a little bit magic). It even has an elephant at the end. All told, it packs a fair punch for all that it seems quite a small story at first glance.  

 

Connectivity: 

Both Smile and Terror of the Zygons see the Doctor on a spaceship to which he does some violent rewiring in order to get the ship to self destruct.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Gatekeepers of Doom. Smile is just one of many examples of science fiction to use robots - at least in passing in this Doctor Who story - as a metaphor for slavery. By having such a theme, even fleetingly, I would expect someone somewhere to have taken against the story. At least it gives the lie to another social media trend, that only the latest years with Jodie Whittaker have had themes informed by a social conscience or progressive politics. In the parlance of our current times, Doctor Who has always been "woke"; classic Who went from "Kal is not stronger than the whole tribe" in the first ever story to "If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals" in the last; in between ran the gamut of themes such as the impact of colonialism, fighting against fascism, the dangers of polluting the environment, etc. etc. In some periods, of course, this was much less pronounced, and if those eras are a particular fan's favourite, they could feel that their show recently has been saddled with an agenda... but only if they put their blinkers on and ignore the show's rich history. The epitome of the "social justice warrior" approach to their favourite programme perceived by this group of fans is the decision to cast a woman as the Doctor in 2018 (and then again in 2020). This, mixed in with various flavours of dislike of Chris Chibnall's writing / quality control filtered through social media creates a particularly toxic online persona that fits a vocal minority. These have been regularly moaning for the last few years, and crowing recently as the end of the Chibnall / Whittaker tenure is in sight. This can even include fans who are perhaps more aware of the show's history than others, and therefore should know better.

Recently, a couple of more famous older fans have been making such pronouncements on twitter, and it's caused a lot of comment. As usual, the majority of responses are rejecting their take, but - as is the way with the medium - nonetheless amplifying it. Younger fans seem pitted against older ones (disclaimer: not all younger fans, not all older ones), playing out in miniature the polarised generation gap that of late seems very prevalent in media (both old and new) in the UK certainly but elsewhere also. At this point, I have to consider my own behaviour. I am after all an older fan who has had a pretty intensive and detailed long-term interest in the show. My reviews on this blog can be very critical on occasion. But I hope I'm fair and articulate my rationales (one of the reasons I save my critiquing for a blog and not a micro-blogging site where character limits are thieves of nuance), and I hope that I always remember that someone is a fan of every story. I'm Gen X, though, in real life as well as in Doctor Who terms. I'm neither one thing nor t'other - not a Boomer that was there from the beginning watching from the afternoon of Saturday 23rd November 1963, but not young - or even relatively young - and coming to things later with fresh eyes. As such, as it sometimes is with other fevered discussions in the wider world of politics between Boomers and Millennials, I feel all I can do is watch from the sidelines as the two polar opposites do battle. I'm lucky, though, I think, not to have had too hard a job of shrugging off the illusion of privilege. Doctor Who does not belong to me, or anyone.

Older fans may see themselves as the gatekeepers, but they're not and they can't be. Fandom is open to all, whether you've seen every episode when it first went out or not. I knew that from the start as it had been going ten years before I was even born, and almost twenty before I got into the habit of watching it regularly. Anyway, as with any area of study, the more you find out about Doctor Who the more you find out there is yet to learn. However much you know, unless you're maybe ace researcher Andrew Pixley you'll very quickly find several people who know more than you. That can be scary, of course. This all stems from fear ultimately. Fear that something special to one is going to be taken away, or damaged, or will have to be shared with too many other people. This is at the route of all the polarised discussions I'm seeing at the moment: fear of getting old fueling arguments about funding the social care of an ever-ageing population, fears of individual freedoms being too easy sacrificed for the common good in the discussions on masking and vaccinations, fear of immigration. Just because we may think the fears are unfounded, we must have empathy for the fearful. As depicted in the later scenes of Smile, we eventually have to work together even if tough compromises are inevitably involved, because the alternative is perhaps our own doom.

In Summary:

Smile does make me smile, mainly because of the great onscreen chemistry between Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie.

Terror of the Zygons

Chapter The 201st, which features a Cheviot, a stag and some black, black oil. And shape-changing orange embryo people. And the Loch Ness monster.

Plot:

Called back from his travels by the Brigadier using a space-time (plot) device, the Doctor along with Sarah and Harry arrives in Scotland. Something is destroying oil rigs in the area, and UNIT are investigating. A cast taken of damage to a recovered fragment of a rig seems to show it was inflicted by a giant sea monster. Harry is down by the coast looking for any survivors from the latest rig disaster, and finds someone washed ashore, but he is shot by a kilted sniper before he can tell Harry anything. Harry is grazed and knocked unconscious by a second shot, but is found and taken to the sick bay in the oil company's shore base. Sarah's at his bedside when he starts to come round; she phones the Doctor, but is attacked by a Zygon (who was disguised as a nurse - Zygons can transform into a copy of any human that they capture). Harry's abducted and taken aboard the Zygon space-ship, and learns that their plan involves a huge creature from their planet, the Skarasen, that lives in Loch Ness and has over the years been mistaken for the monster.

Disguised as Harry, one of the Zygons attempts to recover an organic homing device found on the remains of one of the rigs, and when they fail the Zygon leader Broton sets the Skarasen onto the Doctor, but Harry interfering with the ship's controls allows the Doctor to escape. Broton is disguising himself as the local Lord, the Duke of Forgill. When researching in the Duke's castle, Sarah and the Doctor discover a secret passage into the spaceship under Loch Ness. They rescue Harry, and the Doctor is then imprisoned in the ship for a while as it flies off for a new location (a quarry - where else?!). The Doctor sends a signal from the ship secretly, allowing UNIT to track him down, and sets off the self-destruct after freeing himself and the remaining captives that the Zygons held for duplication. Broton still lives, though, and his plan is to plant a homing device at an energy conference in London while disguised as the Duke, and get the Skarasen to attack the building in which will be many VIPs from around the world. The Doctor and his friends cleverly defeat Broton by having a fight with him, then shooting him. The Doctor throws the homing device into the Thames, the Skarasen eats it and satisfied swims back up to Loch Ness.

Context:

The Summer Bank Holiday towards the end of August in the UK is never far away from my birthday, which is nice - I get a state-sponsored long weekend to celebrate. I half remembered that 'last year' I chose a favourite Doctor Who to watch with the family as part of my celebrations, overriding the random choice and using a fair amount of emotional blackmail on the fam to make them watch with me or else spoil my big day! I was keen to turn this into a regular thing. However, when I checked, it turns out that it wasn't last year but three years ago that I last did this. On that occasion, I chose a new series story so this time I wanted a classic era one. I scoured the remaining stories and finally settled on Terror of the Zygons. It's not necessarily an overall favourite of mine, but it was the one favoured in that moment. Sat down to watch with the whole family (Better Half making a rare appearance in the living room for a Doctor Who watch, and all three kids - boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) from the DVD. We split the story in two, watching two episodes a day. We coincidentally finished on August 30th, the 46th anniversary of the debut broadcast of the story's first episode. Early on, the eldest child asked "Is that the Downs?" about the filming location, and he's not far off: all the Scottish settings were filmed in Sussex, with the quarry where the Zygon ship hides being as near to where we live as the previous record holder for filming close to the family home, Brighton beach (as seen in The Leisure Hive and Mindwarp).

First Time Round:

I can't remember the exact circumstances of getting the VHS tape (though that is definitely how I first saw it). I often forget the specific action and emotion of watching more recent Doctor Who stories, and even some of the tapes that came out in the mid to late 1990s when the VHS range was going strong. Terror of the Zygons, though, was released very early on in the late 1980s, before regular and effective distribution seemed to have been established, and when each tape stumbled across in W H Smiths or wherever was like a gift from the heavens. The Zygons story would have been the 8th or 9th tape in my collection. The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which came out at the same time (November 1988) I remember very clearly getting as a Christmas present that year, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get the Zygons story at the same time. As such, I probably bought it for myself, either just before or just after Christmas (maybe the latter, funded by some cash given to me by another relative). It most likely would have been purchased in Smiths in Worthing (my regular home town supplier later, Volume One, had not opened then) or it could have been in Bognor Regis, if I saw it in a shop when visiting my Dad. I remember the feeling of the first watch, if not the details, enjoying the great visuals and its evocative score. As all stories were at that time, the VHS presentation of Terror of the Zygons was edited together as one feature length piece. The full version with end credits, re-establishing the magnificent cliffhanger of episode 1, did not come out until over a decade later in August 1999. I remember getting that (I was living in Brighton by then, so would have bought it in MVC), and remember watching and feeling a bit disappointed: I'd watched the old version so many times that just having the beginning and end credits re-inserted didn't feel that special. There was a nice little contemporaneous clip of Tom Baker on Disney Time included though. 

Reaction:

I met Dan Hall in a pub once, back when he was commissioning editor of the Doctor Who DVD range and I was still screenwriting. It was a writers and producers' meet-up, but a lot of those present were fans and talk turned before too long to Doctor Who. I believe, though it was a reasonably beery night and a long time ago, so I may be misremembering, that he confirmed there something that I'd heard rumoured, that Terror of the Zygons was being held back to be the final DVD release of the range. I've mentioned a few times in previous blog posts how the VHS release concentrated on the most popular stories upfront to such an extent that the final couple of years of the range were disappointing for a great many collectors. Obviously, they wanted the DVD range instead to go out on something more of a bang than a whimper. It came to pass, sort-of: it was the last complete story released of the planned range - a couple of stories that needed time-consuming animations or reconstructions to bridge missing episodes followed on after, and then there were a couple of previously missing stories recovered and released later too. The release of the Zygon story was in October 2013, though it was available slightly earlier in a limited edition luxury box "The Fourth Doctor Time Capsule" accompanied by a lot of old tat. Clearly, the story was thought of as something popular and special to merit this treatment. Indeed, that's what I thought too when I selected it for my Birthday watch. I was half right.

The first two episodes of the story are excellent. The script is solid, despite depicting an excessively twee, shortbread tin lid version of Scotland; the very first line of dialogue mentions haggis, someone called Willie, and someone else who "doesnae ken" something; a few minutes later there's bagpiping, kilts and talk of tossing the caber, and it carries on in that style. Perhaps there's no other way to script a story centring on the Loch Ness monster. Focussing on an oil company's rigs and shore base at least was a more up-to-date topic North of the border in the 1970s. What makes this story and particularly the first section atmospheric is the direction by Douglas Camfield and the score by Geoffrey Burgon. The combination of both can be seen in the incredibly effective sequence where a sniper aims at Harry and the man he's rescued on the shore, and the music and the tension builds and builds. Camfield gets some particularly spine-tingling moments in the can elsewhere too: the hayloft pitchfork attack by the vicious Zygon-Harry, and the wonderful studio moment where the bagpipe drone cuts out just as Sarah is mocking the landlord's extra-sensory powers, before the Doctor tells her that they'd been listening to a lament for the dead. The sudden shocking cliffhanger for episode one too: an abrupt first glimpse of a Zygon before the credits roll, only there for an instant but seared into the imagination of every child watching.

Costume designer Jim Acheson delivers one of his many many iconic Doctor Who designs, and perhaps his best, with the Zygon suits. All production departments are giving their maximum, in fact, which creates a consistent visual identity as seen in the globby organic sets and props depicting the spaceship technology. All the performances are top notch. It's Ian Marter's best work, in both his two roles, and up there for Tom Baker too - enigmatic and brooding, but also witty and fun. Liz Sladen has less to do, but does what she's given very well. Nicholas Courtney and John Levene provide stalwart support as ever. The guest turns are great too. Lillias Walker as the sinister Sister Lamont ratchets up to Nurse Ratched levels. Broton is a great character, and John Woodnutt is great at playing him, as well as the subtly different takes on the Zygon-Duke and the real Duke. All of this quality, though, is masking a logical flaw in the story's set-up, at least at first; but, it can't be concealed as the piece develops and more details come to light. From episode 3, as good as are the direction, sets, score and everything else, it still starts to fall apart. The body-snatching Zygons are conceptually spies - quiet, gradual stealthy infiltration their stock in trade. Their Skarasen pet on the other hand is a weapon of mass destruction. It can chew through oil rigs and can't be stopped by nuclear weapons. The script tries very hard to create a plan that can involve both these very different approaches through the clumsy creation of a homing device that needs to be planted on a victim, but it's not very convincing.

The Zygons key power of impersonation is simply not needed when they have a monster that can eat buildings. They want to terrorise some bigwigs meeting for a conference, so Broton assumes the Duke's form to get in to the building. But he could just drop the homing device on the doorstep, and the creature would destroy everything around. It didn't leave much of the oil rigs unscathed after all. The focus on the oil company, which seemed so important in the first two episodes, is dropped instantly that the second half of the story starts. A key character Huckle is helping UNIT with the investigations, but from episode 3 disappears and is never mentioned again. The destruction of the oil rigs turns out to be a red herring, just a test of strength for the Skarasen, If so, why on Earth destroy more than one if it's going to put the humans on red alert? Why bug UNIT? Why pretend to be a nurse in the oil company's base, or a ghillie, or a lord? Why shoot the survivor of the rig? You have no need for stealth, Zygons, get down to London and use your unstoppable cyborg to take over the planet. The effects work of the climax in episode 4, with a puppet Skarasen head in front of a photo of the Thames, is rightly criticised, but the real shame is the premise running out of steam rather than the production finally running out of money. A tussle with Broton in a dingy basement was not the grand ending implicitly promised by the earlier scenes of his and the Doctor's confrontations. It's a shame as there are so many possibilities in both the Zygon concept, and in a story explaining the truth of the Loch Ness Monster. Trying to do both in the same story meant the potential of neither was realised.

Connectivity: 

Both Terror of the Zygons and Planet of the Dead were stories broadcast after a short gap since the last regular run, and both feature UNIT battling creatures - the Skarasen, the "Sky-rays" - that are armoured cyborgs (or at least part metal, the origin of the Tennant story's monster is unclear) with tough exteriors that are difficult to penetrate with Earth weapons.

Deeper Thoughts:

Predictive Textual Analysis. Terror of the Zygons famously contains a scene in the final episode where the Brigadier answers a phone call from the Prime Minister, and says "Yes, Madam". The story was made and broadcast in 1975 just after Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the opposition in the UK, but was supposed to be set later than that (in 1980, if one believes the dialogue in Pyramids of Mars, two stories later). It would be four more years after Terror of the Zygons was broadcast before Thatcher had won a general election and become the UK's first ever female PM, and so she was in power in 1980. Whether the writer or production team had this particular politician in mind or not, it was a good guess. Unfortunately, in a story a couple of years earlier the Brigadier had a phone call with a different Prime Minister called Jeremy, and that has not proved correct (at least not yet). It's somewhat rare for Doctor Who to predict the future with the accuracy demonstrated in Terror of the Zygons, though it got off to a good start. In the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, the Doctor's time traveller granddaughter Susan tells her suspicious teachers that she thought the UK used a decimal system of currency, but then remembered that it hadn't started yet. Decimalisation would eventually come in for the UK in 1971. It was probably an educated guess: a committee of enquiry had been set up by the government and reported on the feasibility of decimalisation in 1963, the year that An Unearthly Child was made and shown. From then on, though, the show's hit rate became decidedly variable.

The UNIT stories normally ignored their setting a few years in advance of broadcast altogether (and sometimes contradicted it, e,g. a price in pounds, shillings and pence being mentioned in dialogue in Doctor Who and the Silurians); when they did, they got it right about as often as they got it wrong. The Daemons predicted that the corporation would eventually stretch to providing a BBC3 channel, but alas imagined its output would be documentaries about archaeology much more suited to BBC4's remit (and both those two channels would have struggled to get a programme budget to cover a live outside broadcast at night). Battlefield predicted a five pound coin, car-phones and that a round of drinks in a bar would get very expensive, but also imagined that the UK would have a King before the end of the millennium.  Different stories over the years have predicted more general things that would eventually come, again extrapolating from the thinking of the day: The War Machines in 1966 presaged the internet, The Green Death in 1973 predicted Quorn products, Vengeance on Varos in 1985 depicted something not a million miles away from reality TV. Fear Her looked a few years ahead from its broadcast to the London Olympics in 2012. Characters watch TV on their laptops a lot in that story, which looked odd in 2006, but was exactly how I consumed my Olympics coverage when the day finally arrived. Had an unauthorised someone bent to pick up the torch and run with it to the stadium as the Doctor does, though, they'd have been jumped on by security before they'd made it as much as a metre.

As with continuity errors, areas where Who differs from the real world's events give rise to all sorts of fan and official creativity to explain them away. The main proposed theory for the near future depicted in the UNIT stories is that it is a parallel version of our own world, where the interference of aliens has impacted. Technology from the Cybermen in The Invasion, for example, was harvested after their defeat to accelerate the UK's space programme such that our little country can send multiple rockets into space c. the mid-1970s (as seen in The Ambassadors of Death). This theory fits neatly because, well, it's the truth, isn't it? What are stories except descriptions of parallel worlds like our own, but where something more interesting is happening? Since 2005, the new series has generally followed this theory, going as far as to depict Earth people or institutions (Torchwood, Henry Van Statten in Dalek) salvaging alien tech for gain, and ordinary punters becoming more and more aware of alien invasions. Too much divergence risks the audience's empathy, though: who cares about the events on a world that's too different from our own?  The series tends to periodically clear the decks to avoid this; Steven Moffat created a crack in time that undoes previous events, so Amy has no memory of the Daleks recently invading her world; the events of Terror of the Zygons ("the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness Monster") are hinted to have been covered up such that Ace and her generation are oblivious to them - as established in Remembrance of the Daleks). The point of Doctor Who is ultimately not to predict the future but to depict the present with just a little bit of exaggeration, adding monsters that wreak havoc, be they Skarasens, Zygons or the UK's first ever female PM (little bit of politics there for you, ladies and gentlemen!).

In Summary:

Either have the Terror of the Zygons or The Loch Ness Monster, don't try for both or you'll split the difference. It's testament to some excellent work done by everyone on the production that the story almost achieves greatness despite this.