Frontier in Space

Chapter the 285th, here be Dragons...

Plot:
The TARDIS materialises aboard a cargo spaceship. It's the 26th century and there is a frontier (in space) between the Draconian and Earth empires. Relations are strained as both sides have apparently been attacking each others ships. The Doctor and Jo see Ogrons board, but the crew - thanks to a hypnotic signal - see them as Draconians. By the time rescue arrives, the Ogrons have gone, taking the TARDIS with them. The Doctor and Jo are arrested as spies in league with the Draconians, and nobody will believe them when they say a third-party is stirring up both sides to create a war. The third-party turns out to be the Master who arrives posing as an official from a colony planet with forged warrants for the Doctor and Jo's arrest. The Doctor has already been taken to a prison on the moon where political prisoners are held. During an attempted escape that goes wrong, the Master rescues the Doctor and takes him and Jo off in a stolen Earth ship. Later, the Draconians board them, and the Master signals the Ogrons to rescue him. On Draconia, the Doctor is meeting the Emperor when the Ogrons attack. They escape with the Master, but leave one of their party behind. When the hypnotic signal wears off the Draconians see him change from a hallucinated Earthman to an Ogron, and are convinced. There's more back and forth space shenanigans: Jo is captured by the Master and taken to the Ogrons' planet, where the TARDIS is; the Doctor and a Draconian prince persuade General Williams on Earth to help, and they all go there too. The Master reveals for whom he's been plotting - the Daleks. They want a war to destabilise things so they can invade. Williams and the Draconian prince leave to warn their respective empires. There's a tussle where the Doctor is hurt (somehow), and the Master escapes (presumably).

Context:

I was a little bit Who-ed out towards the end of November 2023. There was such a lot of different programmes old and new being made available (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for more details) and I'm still working my way through the episodes on recent Blu-ray purchases (The animated Underwater Menace and the Season 20 Collection box-set) too. As such, I set myself a one episode per day limit to avoid Time Lord Appreciation Fatigue. I have enough, with everything that's being shown, or that I plan to watch from newly bought disc, or cover for the blog, to get me to Christmas Day and Ncuti's debut. I watched Frontier in Space therefore stripped across six consecutive days in late November and early December 2023. The family have current Doctor Who back on TV with David Tennant and Meeps to keep them amused now, so they didn't join me.

Milestone watch: I started this blog in 2015 to cover all of the new and the classic series of Doctor Who in a randomly shuffled order. I am keeping closer track now that I'm nearing the point of catching up with the serial broadcasts of new episodes. This story marks another season of Doctor Who completed, the 10th season, Jon Pertwee's fourth run from 1972/73. This is the 18th season done out of the total of 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13).

First Time Round:

This is a rarity, a story where I saw the final episode first, long before the rest. The reason for this was a VHS release in early 1992 called The Pertwee Years. The Years tapes were the brainchild of former Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner when he worked as a consultant to the VHS range in its early days. The Hartnell and Troughton Years tapes had come out the year before, and provided a home for some of the orphaned episodes, where the rest of the story was missing. Jon Pertwee's tape was made at the same time, and there was a plan to complete the series for all seven of the actors who'd by then starred as the Doctor, but Nathan-Turner parted company with BBC Video before all of them were completed. The later tapes that did get made (for Bakers Tom and Colin) involved clips rather than full episodes as everything of theirs was present and correct in the archives. But this was true of Pertwee too. Perhaps the episodes were Pertwee's favourites, or perhaps Nathan-Turner selected them; however it came to be, the three that ended up on the tape were the final episodes of Inferno, The Daemons, and Frontier in Space. To put it another way, the Pertwee Years tape celebrated his tenure as the Doctor by ruining the ending of three of his stories. I had already seen Inferno and The Daemons on fan-exchanged nth generation tapes by 1992, so it was only Frontier in Space that had me scratching my head working out what might have happened in the first five-sixths of the story. I finally found that out when it was released in full on VHS in August 1995.

Reaction:

Frontiers, politics, different space-faring races, neutral zones being entered at the risk of war: this story is bloody Star Trek more than Doctor Who, isn't it? This kind of space opera underpinned by relatable politics is much more commonly done by my favourite show's US rival. Gene Roddenberry's famous creation might not have been a direct inspiration; writer of Frontier in Space Malcolm Hulke tended to imbue his tales with political parallels, and the creature races in his stories tended to have more depth (except for the Ogrons, perhaps, but they were inherited from an earlier story - more on them in the Deeper Thoughts section below). Who had anyway blazed the trail of peripatetic space opera in its early days with stories like The Daleks' Master Plan, and that was before Star Trek even existed. There's no reason why the flexible format of Who shouldn't try something like this, but the one thing Frontier in Space doesn't have is warp drive. There's mention of hyperspace and hyperdrive, but they don't seem to make things swift enough: travels through space and to planets in this story take up a lengthy amount of story time, which can get a little boring. Such sequences are interspersed with capture-escape-recapture moments which are less boring at first but get quite repetitive as things progress. You could lose almost all of episode four, for example, and the narrative would barely be impacted. The Master extricates the Doctor from the prison on the moon, they travel to his base but are boarded by Draconians, then the Master secretly signals the Ogrons to rescue him. That's all that happens in 25 minutes: two minutes of plot - less than the recap for some of the story's episodes.

 

What you would lose by jettisoning that episode is character moments; the three regulars - Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo and Roger Delgado as the Master - are on fine form, particularly Delgado, who is at his most snarky in this story. There is a sequence where Jo (or maybe Katy?) has to improvise long monologues moaning about the lot of working for UNIT and being the Doctor's companion. Such material sometimes veers too far into silliness (the Doctor talking about a purple horse with yellow spots) or gets uncomfortably close to sending up the tropes of the series, but it's mostly fun. It's not quite enough, though, to make the dull, repetitive scenes of going from place to place fully worthwhile. One problem is that there's lots of other repetition going on in the story. The entire second episode is a succession of scenes of the Doctor and Jo telling different sets of disbelieving people that they are being manipulated towards an intergalactic war, over and over again. The only intermissions are zap-gunfights shot amidst the Brutalist architecture of the South Bank area. (I'm very familiar with this area from many visits to watch Doctor Who at the BFI, so I was trying to work out exactly which overhead walkway and staircase was being used in which shot). The repetition is the point, of course, highlighting the difficulty of convincing the obdurate authorities, but it unfortunately doesn't get paid off. The ending sidesteps everything that's come before.

General Williams, the embodiment of the aggressive warmongers of Earth, is ultimately persuaded far too easily that he's been in the wrong, with a revelation from the Draconian prince about a past misjudgement he made in battle. It doesn't, though, prove anything about the third-party manipulation theory. Okay, he's only persuaded to mount a mission to fetch evidence, but crucially he isn't actually seen to ever gather such evidence. He and the Draconian Prince go to the planet, see that the Daleks are behind everything, and then the Doctor tells them to "Get the truth back to your respective governments". But that's what people have been trying to do without success for five and a half episodes: why should it be any more successful now? It's as if, once the Daleks have been revealed, the production team wants to switch off the Draconian plot so they can get the Dalek story going (perhaps anticipating how their audience might be feeling too). If we give the benefit of the doubt and imagine that Williams's ship's sensors have recorded details of the Ogrons and the Daleks somehow, then at least we can assume that there isn't a terrible Earth-Draconia war, even if we aren't shown that to be definitively the case. If the status quo is re-established, though, that still means that political opposition is being ruthlessly quashed, with its leaders locked up for life in a corrupt prison on the moon. The President (played expertly by Vera Fusek, one of many instances of more diverse casting choices than usual) is presented as a goodie, but this has all been happening on her watch.

Maybe leaving the lunar subplot unresolved is a deliberate statement about the darker side of centrist politics, but to me it comes over more as a rather lax Terry Nation style 'Episode three was weeks ago, haven't you forgotten about all that by now?' approach to serial drama. Hulke is normally better than that. Even if we imagine that it's resolved too somehow, the defeat of the Master at the end is heinously bungled. I don't know what happened in the production - I don't know how it's possible to have such insufficient coverage when you're shooting multi-camera - but something must have gone wrong, or they ran out of time. There's a melee when the Doctor uses the Master's hypnotic device to scare the Ogrons, then a series of abrupt jump-cuts: the Master in close-up, a reaction shot from Jo, an explosion near the Master, the Doctor tussling with Ogrons, another reaction shot from Jo, the Doctor on the floor clutching his head, the Ogrons running away. Then, we cut to a longer scene of the Doctor and Jo alone, with her helping him up and into the TARDIS. It's not clear how the Doctor got injured or when and how the Master got away. It's especially sad, though nobody knew this at the time of course, that this would turn out to be Delgado's final work on the series - his last appearance is a disappearance, one second he's there and the next he's not.

There is a lot of merit in the earlier material leading up to this moment, don't get me wrong. Including lots of spaceships, locations and characters might have tested the resources of the Beeb, but they were not found wanting: the model work and design is pretty good throughout, particularly the Draconian masks, costumes and make-up. The filmed scenes of wire-work to show space walks are pretty effective. But, if you recall (see First Time Round section above), I saw the final episode with all its clumsy non-resolutions before I saw the rest of the story. It's possible that viewing it in that order may have sullied my enjoyment of the majority. The story also can be seen as just the first part of a two-story arc continuing with Planet of the Daleks: that second story doesn't in any way tie up the Frontier in Space plot either, but maybe it gave viewers of the time another six weeks to forget about it. 

Connectivity:

Both Frontier in Space and The Star Beast feature conflict involving spaceship fights and gun battles between different alien races. They also both have a significant lead-in at the end to the next story.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nobody wants to bring the Ogrons back. Because they're racist? It's probably because they're racist, I think. It doesn't matter whether the many Ogrons seen on screen in the 1970s were played by black actors or by actors blacking up, neither way makes it better. Doctor Who throughout its long life has taken inspiration from the animal kingdom of Earth for creature designs, but visualising a race of ape-men came with unfortunate connotations. The manner of the Ogrons' comportment and speech too taps into a hoary old trope of the savage native (from Great White Hunter / Explorer films, or the depictions of native Americans seen in older Westerns). The insensitive nature of this was almost certainly inadvertent on the parts of the makers of the two stories in which the Ogrons feature, Frontier in Space and Day of the Daleks, but does that count for much to a viewer in the 21st century? Did it count for much to a viewer back in the 1970s? These sort of things might have been accepted, but maybe weren't or shouldn't have ever been acceptable. On screen, the Ogrons are a striking visual, of course, but that probably makes things worse rather than better. Visuals are powerful. One could argue or rationalise that they are just alien baddies and any similarities to anyone's skin pigmentation is coincidental and isn't supposed to suggest any aligned savageness, but the eye receives information before the brain. The new series has never brought the Ogrons back, but if for some reason a writer or showrunner wanted to do so in future, there would have to be a radical rethink in terms of how they are presented.

So, to recap: characters with a striking look originating in 1970s Who are likely to be problematic to a modern audience because of a negative connotation related to a minority group. There may not have been an intention to be insensitive on behalf of the people who created and designed these characters, and there was no specific plot point or line of dialogue that linked their bad actions to how they are or how they look, but they tap into old tropes that it's probably best to break away from when making television in the 21st century. As such, if they ever were to return, they'd have to be treated very differently to how they were in the past. Is this sounding familiar? This is similar to current showrunner Russell T Davies's expressed position about the character of Davros, which caused a bit of a storm of online opinion for a week in November 2023. After the Children in Need special scene on 17th November, there was a taster mini-episode of new behind-the-scenes show Unleashed, and Davies was interviewed. I'd watched the short, where the Dalek creator is seen without his usual wizened appearance or Dalek-like bottom half, and just assumed that it was set before whatever had happened to change him into the Davros I knew. Davies explained that there was more to it than that: "Time and society and culture and taste has moved on, and there's a problem with the Davros of old in that he's a wheelchair user who is evil ... A lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil, and trust me there's a very long tradition of this." Thus: "We made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring and without the wheelchair ... This is how we see Davros now."

Davros, as seen in Destination: Skaro

That was fair enough, wasn't it? It veered a bit towards virtue signalling, I suppose, but he was talking about a contribution to an evening long telethon for a children's charity. If there was ever a moment for virtue signalling, it was then. A lot of Doctor Who fans online, though, did not like what they heard. Some accused him of seeing negative intent from past creators of Doctor Who that wasn't there, but in the same interview he had said "I'm not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes and when the world changes Doctor Who has to change as well". Some accused him of ableism for seeing all disabled people as having one monolithic viewpoint, assuming they'd all be offended, but he did no such thing. He didn't talk for anyone but himself and fellow members of the production team. These are the people whose job it is to decide what is broadcast under the Doctor Who banner, and - as long as they stay within appropriate broadcasting regulations - they can make Doctor Who be anything they want it to be. That's why they're being paid. At the root of all this is probably the inflexibility of a certain Doctor Who fan towards the continuity of the lore. Many fans have interpreted Davies's comment to mean that if Davros were to come back in future, even if it was in a scene set later in his personal timeline, he'd still have the use of his legs and his good skin. He might just mean that they'll only revisit Davros in his past. Even if they do change the later Davros, there will be many narrative possibilities offered by a show featuring time travel and alternate universes to explain it.

No fan seems to have any problem in terms of narrative plausibility with the decision of successive production teams not to bring back the Ogrons. They have appeared twice, as allies of big-hitting A-list Doctor Who villains the Daleks and the Master. So, why has the Doctor never come across them again, when he bumps into old enemies and allies on a very regular basis? It seems to me that that's equally as explainable as some disturbance in the timelines creating an alt-Davros. I'm not immune to some of these fan feelings, of course. My first thought upon watching the interview with Davies was that it was a shame, as I like the character note that Davros created the Daleks in his own image. That's really only of relevance in Genesis of the Daleks, though, and that story isn't going to be remade or censored. On the contrary, it's more available to people than ever, and the same of course is true for the stories featuring the Ogrons. (In fact, the sole existing Doctor Who serial from the 60-year catalogue that is more difficult to view than the others is not being supressed for 'woke' reasons; much the opposite, it seems - but that's another story.) If Davies's decision means that in future even just one fewer wheelchair user gets called 'Davros' by some nob that thinks they're funny, then it will definitely be worth it. 

In Summary:

There's lots of good stuff in these six episodes, but the action is drawn out, and the end is abrupt and unresolved.