The Mutants

Chapter the 261st, It's... Marshal's plotting on flying Skybase.

Plot:

The Doctor and Jo are sent by the Time Lords to deliver a box, contents unknown, to someone, also unknown, on the planet Solos in the 30th Century (the box will only open for the right person). The planet's atmosphere is poisonous to humans during daylight hours, so the Overlords, as the colonising Earthmen style themselves, live on a space station called the Skybase. (They are all Earth - and Solonian - men, by the way, no women on Solos.) There seems to be a plague mutating Solonians into monstrous "Mutts", and a faction of the locals led by Ky are agitating for their freedom. Earth government has decided to pull out and grant independence, but the Marshal - who has been experimenting with a Professor Jaegar on how to make the planet's atmosphere suitable for humans - doesn't want this. He arranges the assassination of the colony Administrator during a meeting with the Solonians. Chaos ensues, and martial (and, for that matter, Marshal) law is declared. In the confusion, the Doctor passes near Ky, and the box starts to open. Before the Doctor can talk to him, though, Ky escapes to the planet's surface. The Marshal uses threats to Jo's safety to coerce the Doctor into helping Jaegar's experiments. There's lots of escapes and recaptures, and travel back and forth between the Skybase and Solos. The Doctor finds Ky and the box is opened to reveal ancient tablets. They find a scientist Sondergaard working in a hidden lab in some caves, and he helps to translate them. The mutations of the Solonians are a part of their normal lifecycle, but have been brought on prematurely by Jaegar's experiments. An investigator from Earth is en route to Solos, so the Marshal forces Jaegar to accelerate his work, but the Doctor is able to put right the damage done. Ky fully mutates into a floating, rainbow telepathic creature and kills the Marshal.

Context:

Because of a pre-existing commitment, I again had to miss a BFI screening and panel connected to the release of a Doctor Who season Blu-ray box set. This time it was a showing of The Sea Devils connected to the release of season nine (Jon Pertwee's third year in the role) in early March 2023. Two weeks later, the pre-ordered set popped through my letter-box. I did my usual randomly guided decision as to whether I would blog a story from the set (flipped a coin and it came up Heads) and which of the two stories it would be (it came up Tails this time, meaning The Mutants rather than Day of the Daleks, the only other story from season 9 that I haven't yet blogged). The Mutants doesn't have the best reputation for engaging an audience, so I didn't inflict it on anyone else. I watched it, as I watched all the episodes from the box set, an episode a night on average. There's 26 episodes in the season, and loads of extras that I wanted to view also to inform the overview (see Deeper Thoughts section below) so it took a few weeks.

First Time Round:

I saw a few clips of this story over the years between becoming a fan in the early 1980s and when I finally got to see the whole story a couple of decades later. It does seem eminently clip-able, perhaps because of the striking creature design or the moody location work in Chislehurst caves. Or maybe, if one were less charitably minded, one might think that short clips are the best way to experience The Mutants because anything longer than that is a chore. This impression, right or wrong, is probably why its release was put off until it was one of the last few Doctor Who stories to come out on VHS. It was released in the final year of the range, when other stories were already being re-released on DVD with regularity. I would have bought it on the day, 17th February 2003. Assuming I was at work, and I think I very probably was, I would have got the Doctor Who DVD that came out that day (Patrick Troughton tale The Seeds of Death) in the morning, as I walked from London Bridge station into the City of London for work. There was an MVC on the north end of the bridge that had the Doctor Who DVDs, but rarely the videos. At the end of the working day, after having commuted back down to Brighton where I lived at the time, I would have rushed down from the station to the MVC in the centre of town that did stock Who on VHS and snapped up The Mutants. I then would have gone home, probably called my friend Phil (mentioned many times before on the blog) who would have come and watched at least one of the stories with me. We would almost certainly have drunk wine as we did. This would have helped The Mutants go down better, I'm sure.

Reaction:

It's not that bad. In fact, it's pretty good mostly. I think every time I watch the story I'm pleasantly surprised, so awful is its reputation. As an example, Rick James comes in for a lot of flak for the quality of his performance, but he's perfectly okay for the most part. Then, every so often he stumbles over a line and. Delivers it as if. It. Has been punctuated. Randomly. It's unfortunate too, as Doctor Who didn't cast people of colour that often back then, that he's appearing in this colonial parable as a character called Cotton (this is picked up in the documentary on diversity from the DVD that's been ported over to the new Mutants disc, but was clearly inadvertent). Other actors are good, with the regulars on fine form, and Garrick Hagon great as Ky. The other performance that's a bit questionable is Paul Whitsun-Jones as the Mashal. I don't think this is his fault, the script just doesn't give him sufficient motivation for the enormity of his actions. In a way, George Pravda as his sidekick, the scientist Jaegar, has a better time of it. He's just obeying orders, so can play the banality of evil and be a bit more chilling because of that. The Marshal comes over as a one-dimensional panto villain; it's hard to underplay when your character goes to such lengths (he's going to commit genocide on a global scale and change a planet's entire atmosphere). The script eventually falls back on the usual Who stand-by that he's mad. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin do get a couple of nice lines in there related to this, "Madmen lose... I've won", but it means the actor can only go large.

The story would be improved with a more grounded and reasonable villain backstory, and it's there for the taking. The Marshal could realistically imagine he's being merciful, if he were presented as truly believing that the mutations the Solonians are experiencing would kill them anyway (at some points the script seems almost to be toying with this idea, but never develops it). The look of the monsters is perfect, costume designer James Acheson providing the first example of his stellar 1970s work on the series; the monsters are frightening, but also elicit sympathy. The design work throughout is strong. Jeremy Bear's Skybase interiors are innovative and solid-looking (the mould he made to create the Buckminster Fuller effect on the walls was reused in Doctor Who and elsewhere forever after). Most of the effects work is impressive, and there's a lot of film - director Christopher Barry shoots the caves well, and good dressing decisions on location from Bear sell this as an alien environment. The trippy interiors of the radiation cave filmed in the studio work for me too. No word of a lie, when it all comes together - scenes in the caves fighting off the mutant Solonians, chase scenes in the Skybase - this looked closer to Doctor Who doing a high-tech adventure like Star Wars (before Star Wars existed, of course) than anything from Doctor Who in the 1980s.

The only moment that really doesn't work visually is the end of episode four where various characters including the Marshal risk being sucked out of a breach in the Skybase wall into space. The blocking is wrong - the Marshal's too close to the breach so it's implausible that he could hang on; Whitsun-Jones can't really act fighting against the pressure escape from the position he's in, and doesn't really try; this looks a bit silly and reduces the jeopardy for our heroes who are much farther away from danger than him. The camera barely catches him moving away from the breach either, so when he turns out to be alive in the next scene it looks like a cheat. It's just one moment, though. The very first scene of episode one comes in for some stick too as it inadvertently looks like the beginning of an early episode of Monty Python - the elder Solonian rushing towards camera is a dead ringer for Michael Palin's "It's man" from the comedy series. This probably wouldn't have registered for the target audience at the time, though. The pacing, which is a big part of its negative reputation, was perfectly fine, even when watching at the accelerated rate of an episode per day. For the weekly episodic pace for which it was intended, the story has enough going on, presented well. If one were to watch it all in one go, the to and fro from Solos to Skybase and the running about would probably get a bit repetitive, but this is true of almost all stories of six or more episodes. The addition of the subplot of the Earth investigator for the last two episodes helps to keep things moving.

Thematically, The Mutants stands out from other Jon Pertwee stories in how seriously it treats its subtext. A lot of stories around this time use the trappings of colonisation and empire as window dressing, but here it is fully explored. This creates some issues, though; for example: because of the general structure of Doctor Who as a series, with a single titular hero, it inevitably becomes a "white saviour" story, with the Doctor - and to a lesser extent Sondergaard - the ones with agency, coming from outside Solos to rescue the natives from their fate. The script tries to make this work better, as the Solonians are just being reunited with their own history and culture, having lost sight of this because of the negative impacts of occupation. To make this plausible it requires the Earth empire to have been in charge for a number of generations (500 years is the figure given in the story). This feels like too long a stretch of time for the situation as presented in the story; the impacts of imperialism can still be felt after centuries, of course, but in more subtle ways than those shown in The Mutants, to my mind. I'm aware, though, that this opinion may be affected by my being white and aligned to the society of the oppressor rather than the oppressed. The same is true, though, of the writers, directors and producer of The Mutants. In the end, the colonised race turn out to be multi-coloured butterfly super-beings, so maybe any serious reading is undermined anyway. Generally, though, the story's heart is in the right place, and it's much more watchable than I remembered.

Connectivity:

The Mutants like Midnight features a floating enclosed space where squabbling humans are protected from a planet's harmful atmosphere. There's also a performance in each by an actor playing a professor who had previously appeared in the Troughton era story The Enemy of the World (George Pravda is Professor Jaegar in The Mutants and had played Denes in the earlier story; David Troughton is Professor Hobbes in Midnight and had appeared as a non-speaking guard in Enemy).

Deeper Thoughts:

Mutts, monsters and a Minotaur: Doctor Who - The Collection Season 9 box set overview. The two-person creative force behind the scenes during the Jon Pertwee era, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, inherited the earthbound format where the Doctor helped out a scientific and military organisation investigating the mysterious. They didn't like the restrictions this brought, and so every year they tweaked things a little bit more to move Doctor Who back out to travel the universe again. This is the middle year of their tenure and watching the stories in order, not that long after watching the set for season 8 (see here for more details), this process is very visible. Each of the new set of regulars established the previous year continues into season 9, the 'UNIT family' of Doctor, Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney), Jo Grant (Katy Manning), Captain Yates (Richard Franklin), Sergeant Benton (John Levene) and the Master (Roger Delgado). But, having realised they were overused in season 8, here they appear in different combinations, rarely all at the same time. This, plus having two stories off Earth (one more than in the previous year), means that UNIT have much less presence than before. As is pointed out poignantly in the new Making-of documentary for The Time Monster, partway through that finale's run is the last time all six characters would appear in the same episode.

Nice packaging

As both the UNIT stories at either end of season 9 involve time travel by some means or other, there's only one story for the year where the Doctor doesn't explore either a different time or a different world; this would remain the template for the following two seasons with Pertwee as the Doctor, and would stay more or less the same for the first two Tom Baker years (after which UNIT was written out completely). In Season 9, the one story where the Doctor doesn't escape Earth in the roughly contemporary period where he's been exiled still innovates. This is The Sea Devils, and it features the Doctor allied with military bods in blue rather than green uniforms, with significant help from the Royal Navy providing visual interest on screen. There's some nice bits of contemporary material from the filming included as special features (a radio interview with Pertwee who had served in the Navy, and cine camera footage made at the time) and most of the big new documentaries for the set are on the Devils disc, and are aligned to the story at least in part. The first is another in the Location Location Location series of docos by Chris Chapman, which sees Katy Manning meeting cast or crew at the locations used for filming The Sea Devils, as well as The Mutants and Day of the Daleks. She is also reunited with the three-wheeler bike featured in a chase scene in the Dalek story, and takes it for a ride (you can feel the documentary makers' insurance concerns burning through the screen during that sequence).

Defenders of Earth! The short used as a trailer for the set.

The other two documentaries are by Ten Acre Films, produced by Stuart Manning and Richard Latto. Both focus on career retrospectives of individuals, director Michael E Briant who's accompanied as he takes a sailing boat out onto the water, and stuntman Stuart Fell who visits a nice vintage cinema in Fordingbridge (if this is representative of each gentleman's hobbies then yours truly, who gets seasick in dry dock, is thinking he's more like Fell than Briant). Both are interesting and feature a lot of clips from other programmes (sometimes the same other programmes as both men's work coincided multiple times). The other main new features are five more episodes of Behind the Sofa, classic Who's version of Gogglebox. Here, Briant and Manning represent the people involved at the time, plus two other watching groups - Peter Davison (even more grumpy than usual) with his companion actors Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding, and a couple of other randomly paired companion actors, Wendy Padbury and Sophie Aldred. It's as fun as ever. The restoration of the episodes is up to the expected standard (we're very spoilt, us Doctor Who fans). They can't do anything about the somewhat soft quality of a lot of the film inserts for Day of the Daleks (what happened when that film was first shot / printed, I wonder?) just as it can't make The Time Monster an enjoyable story to sit through. Apart from working miracles, though, this is the best these episodes have ever looked, and possibly will ever look.

With this set, 50% of 20th Century Who is now on Blu-ray

There's also an effort to provide every conceivable version of the stories that exists. A different restoration method was used for a number of the episodes presented in the set when they came out on DVD earlier this century. Any that only existed as broadcast masters in the 525-line video format used abroad (which is quite a lot of season 9) had that picture data put back in using a process called Reverse Standards Conversion. This is no longer favoured as an approach as it introduced different picture issues, but the DVD versions are included as extras. Additionally, there's the DVD special edition of Day of the Daleks with new effects, newly filmed sequences and redubbed Dalek voices, and recreations of edited omnibus versions of that Dalek story and of The Sea Devils that were shown as repeats in the 1970s. Day of the Daleks in 60 minutes is a bit choppy, but the 90-minute Sea Devils is a good, tight telling of the story that still retains the spirit of the episodic original. Rounding off the additional material are a couple of filmed convention panels. The panel with Ingrid Pitt interviewed in 1992 is very informative, unless you're interested in her work in Doctor Who as she can barely remember any of it - she talks a lot about Eva Peron, though. The date I published this blog post gives an indication of how long it took to enjoy the volumes of material on this set. I recommend buying it, if you can still find it, or getting the cheaper non-limited edition that'll come out before too long.

 

In Summary:

A metamorphosis is taking place: The Mutants looks better and better, the more I watch it.