The Monster of Peladon

Chapter the 301st, wherein the Miners are revolting!

Plot:
The Doctor makes a return visit to the planet of Peladon with Sarah Jane Smith, 50 years after he was last there. King Peladon's daughter Queen Thalira rules, but she is young and her advisor Chancellor Ortron holds sway. The federation is mining a valuable mineral on the planet to help in the war effort against another galaxy, but the local miners aren't happy. They're even less happy when an apparition of sacred beast Aggedor keeps appearing and killing some of their number. They down tools. The Doctor suspects someone is trying to sabotage the mining, but he is distrusted by Ortron, despite federation ambassador Alpha Centauri vouching for him. When some of the miners go on the attack, the federation's engineer onsite Eckersley persuades Centauri to call in federation troops. Some Ice Warriors appear on the planet, but there's evidence to suggest that they haven't just arrived and were previously in hiding. They are a rogue breakaway group and, along with Eckersley, were engineering the Aggedor attacks in order to take control of the planet; they plan to sell the minerals once mined to the enemies of the federation. The Doctor defeats them using their own combined matter projector / heat ray in the shape of Aggedor. Ortron is killed, and the Doctor recommends that the miners' leader Gebek is made the new chancellor.

Context:

I watched this story as nature (or at least Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks) intended, one episode a week during April and May 2024. I viewed the episodes from the DVD, rather than the iplayer; I don't know why really - habit, perhaps - as it makes no difference in terms of quality. I mean visual quality, of course, not story quality. Story quality is where this tale is generally felt to be lacking: it's six episodes long, and is not known for containing too many engaging moments of narrative or visuals, hence why I avoided watching it in one big lump or even slightly fast-tracked from the weekly frequency for which it was built. When I tried this experiment before, it improved my experience of watching the story (as it did this time) and even left me eager to see the next episode (it didn't quite get to that level for Monster of Peladon, alas).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another season, the 26th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I first saw this story after it came out of VHS in 1995. It came out a couple of days after Christmas that year, and I would have picked it up at Volume One in Worthing sometime around then. It was rare for a Doctor Who video to have a late December release, for the obvious reason that it could get lost in the post-Yuletide period. The previous time it had taken place (for a couple of tapes at the end of 1993), I remember vividly the excitement of finding something I wasn't expecting in a shop. I don't remember the same thing for The Monster of Peladon VHS, so I might have only got it in the new year. The one thing I can remember is that it came with a free postcard of the tape box's cover art, which had been happening for all the releases for the last few months of 1995. The box set released in November 1995 of The Five Doctors Special Edition paired with the King's Demons, which I received as a Christmas present that year, came with a little album to keep them all in (see First Time Round section of the Five Doctors post). I would have slotted the Monster of Peladon postcard directly into the plastic sheath within the album, and left it there forever after. I'm sure I still have the album, so presumably it's remained there to this day - let me have a look...

Album + postcard (taken out for the first time since 1995)

Reaction:

This story is a sequel to The Curse of Peladon, shown a couple of years earlier; as well as featuring a return to the planet Peladon, plus the Ice Warriors and lovable walking nob Alpha Centauri, they both have in common the hook of referencing contemporary political events from the UK as a gag / imaginative jumping-off point. Curse was a Doctor Who alien planet take on the UK's joining the European Economic Community; Monster does the same for the miners' strikes of the early 1970s. In my blog post on The Curse of Peladon from 2017, I put forward my view that that story isn't really political at all. It isn't doing a thoroughly worked out allegory, nor even light satire. It just throws in a reference to a vaguely topical area, then goes its own way with the story. The Monster of Peladon is a bit more political in one way in that it picks a side. It was surprising to me how pro-miner the Doctor was shown to be, expressing with regularity that the striking Peladons have legitimate grievances and should be given a fair hearing. Whether or not this represented writer Brian Hayles's views about the UK's National Union of Miners in real life, he certainly puts the Doctor on the side of the striking worker. Though there is internal squabbling in the ranks of the Peladon miners, they are presented in the story as the good guys against the antagonists - the unfeeling aristocratic class of Peladons in the early part of the narrative, and the scheming off-worlders exploiting Peladon's resources in the latter. They even - unlike in real life in the UK as it eventually turned out - get a happy ending, with their leader Gebek elevated to a position of power where he can make a positive difference for his comrades.

Of all the classic series, the Jon Pertwee era is probably the most aligned with the current series in terms of political outlook; the raison d'etre for the villainy in Monster of Peladon - rampant capitalism cashing-in on a war - would definitely be on brand for a story in Ncuti Gatwa's first season. This villainy is personified in the character of Eckersley, a performance of smooth amorality from Donald Gee, who plays the character as slightly amused by everything happening around him throughout. Eckersley consistently expresses detachment from the events early on, not wanting to get involved in "local politics", so isn't exactly depicted as a saint even then; towards the end, though, it is revealed that he's been manipulating events all along. It's a nice enough reversal, but does relegate the Ice Warriors to henchmen rather than the main antagonists. As a sequel, the story was inevitably going to repeat a lot of the story beats of The Curse of Peladon. In that earlier story, the Ice Warriors are good guys suspected for a long period of being bad. One might expect that to be reversed here, with a period of time where the Martians are trusted but then turn against everyone, but that's not how it plays out. As that villain reveal twist is instead being done with Eckersley, the Ice Warriors are shown to be baddies pretty much as soon as they appear, which feels like an opportunity missed. It might have proved a useful additional subplot to have the Doctor (who mistrusted them the last time he was on Peladon) trusting them at first, and gradually coming to the conclusion that they are up to something. The Warriors also are not looking their best, with make-up not as convincing as in their previous appearances, and some of the costumes not fitting the actors as well. This may be down to general budgetary issues as the furry version of Aggedor here is a lot more fake-looking than the one in Curse too.

The key difference between The Curse of Peladon and its sequel is that the later story is two episodes longer. With mostly the same story beats playing out, that means quite a bit of padding. The recaps at the start of episodes are suspiciously lengthy, and there are some repetitive sequences and some longueurs. Interminable early sections are spent of capture, escape, recapture as the Doctor and his companion are chased by the Peladon guards; this, despite a high-ranking diplomat known to the court confirming his identity and bona fides. It's not that there aren't nice moments in there, though. There's some decent fights and action moments. Aggedor looks much better as a statue zooming towards people than in his fuzzy felt form. Ysanne Churchman's vocal performance as Alpha Centauri, delivering quite a few humorous lines - "Thank you Eckersley, but you are still a traitor" - some of them wonderfully bitchy, is fun. Nina Thomas as Queen Thalira does a good job at showing a young ruler trying hard to exert their authority. The romance subplot between Jo Grant and King Peladon from the first story is replaced by Sarah teaching Thalira about female empowerment, which includes the nice line "There's nothing only about being a girl". This theme is undermined by the Doctor being a little bit chauvinistic in places: maybe I'm overreacting or getting oversensitive as I get older, but I feel he crosses a line with the supposedly jokey roughhousing at the end: he pulls Sarah into the TARDIS by her ear.

Connectivity:

The Monster of Peladon, like The Stolen Earth / Journey's End, features the Doctor teaming up with allies from previous adventures in his era (including Sarah Jane Smith) to defeat a famous recurring Doctor Who monster race who aim to exploit a planet for power.  

Deeper Thoughts:

And on that bombshell... part 2. A quick reprise then, as we return to my treatise on cliffhangers: story structure dictates there will be at least a couple of significant moments in a story the length of your average Doctor Who tale, where the protagonist or the action goes through a fundamental change. These act breaks (for want of a better name) will rarely line up exactly with the point where the credits are required to roll at the end of that particular chunk of episodic drama, though. So, writers of such drama have to use different types of tricks to make any ending engaging enough for the audience to want to return. If everything lines up, you might have a game-changer cliffhanger; if not, then you might have the much more common bisected action sequence style cliffhanger (from which the name is derived): the Doctor is in a predicament - like hanging off a cliff - that it looks impossible to get out of, and we viewers are left for a while to wonder what cleverness they are going to employ to extricate themselves. Sometimes, though, a cliffhanger begs not so much the question "How will they get out of that?" but more "Oooh, what does that mean?". The third type of cliffhanger is the enigmatic cliffhanger. It's a more distant echo of the game-changer cliffhanger - something has happened, maybe not so significant as to fundamentally change anyone's life, but it nonetheless propels us into the next phase of the action. This is another that's often used in Doctor Who. One particularly prevalent version of this is the monster reveal. For all of part one of any story (or perhaps even later) we've caught glimpses or hints of the threat, but it is finally revealed in full.

There are good and bad end of episode monster reveals; for example, it became a tradition that the Daleks would not appear in a Terry Nation story until the first cliffhanger. When this is at the end of an episode titled "World's End" then the appearance of a Dalek (rising up out of the Thames) has more impact than it does in, say, "Planet of the Daleks episode one", where it's obviously going to be less of a surprise. In that story, the Doctor already knows that he's facing the Daleks as they appeared at the end of previous story Frontier in Space, and he's gone to the planet deliberately to find the Skaro pepperpots. Yet, he still acts surprised to see one - he's obviously very committed to this cliffhanger strategy. With monsters that keep coming back (usually with a blaze of advance publicity) there will be diminishing returns in the monster reveal. Leaving it for a while since the last appearance and avoiding any publicity can help (see the end of Earthshock part one). For a new foe, it can also work very well. The Curse of Fenric has a nice reveal of the monstrous Haemovores at the end of part two, but tops it for the next cliffhanger with the reveal of the villain Fenric. A character is possessed by the spirit of Fenric, and rises up saying "We play the contest again, Time Lord". Oooh, now what can that mean?! It's better when the reveal is something even more intriguing that just a villain's identity. The end of City of Death part one has a nice enough monster reveal cliffhanger, though it's a bit nonsensical (why does Scaroth remove his mask and look in the mirror - vanity?). But the end of the second part is much more intriguing: he, or someone very like him, seems to be able to exist in different time zones. What can that mean?!

The earliest Doctor Who stories in the Hartnell era blazed trails, doing for the first time almost anything you could think of, so there's many an enigmatic cliffhanger, like the end of the first ever episode An Unearthly Child, where the shadow of an approaching figure falls over the incongruous police box exterior of the TARDIS transplanted to a barren landscape: the intrigue about what this might mean propels the audience into a 60+ year journey. Topping even that, though, and my personal favourite, is the end of A Battle of Wits, part three of The Time Meddler, where the Doctor's companions discover that the Monk has a TARDIS of his own. One thing that this era didn't ever really do - and it never really happened in any era of Who - was the fourth type of cliffhanger, the high-stakes choice. In the "Now Get Out of That" style cliffhanger, the Doctor or his friends might have to choose between the rock or the hard place, the lesser of two evils; but, that's more about the danger than the choice. A good example of a high stakes choice cliffhanger is the end of the third season of US Sitcom Friends. The character Ross has to choose between two loves, represented by the doors of two rooms before him as he stands deciding. He goes into one of the rooms, but the audience does not see which and has to wait until the next season's start to find out which he chose. The reason why this doesn't happen that often in Doctor Who is similar to why the game-changer cliffhanger is rare. Doctor Who's format is such that the adventures have to continue on and on, so fundamental choices - like fundamental changes - would undermine that. The nearest Who got to the high stakes choice is the "Do I have the right?" moment in Genesis of the Daleks: by touching two wires, the Doctor can change history and destroy the Daleks before they have become established; but, if he does, will he have lost sight of his own values?

Terry Walsh not Jon Pertwee

The Doctor pauses a moment, the two wires in front of him, almost touching; he doesn't know the right path to take. If the credits rolled then, it would be a great cliffhanger, but it comes a few minutes into the sixth and final episode; the actual cliffhanger at the end of episode five is just a bisected action sequence with a Kaled mutant trying to strangle the Doctor. This is an example of the first of two unfortunate cliffhanger types unique to Doctor Who: the mistimed cliffhanger. An episode has run short or run long, and no amount of editing can put the intended episode ending in the right place, so the programme makers end up with something sub-optimal and arbitrary. The most infamous of these is another Terry Nation story, Death to the Daleks - the story before The Monster of Peladon. At the end of part three of the story, the Doctor stops short of stepping on a mosaic floor. That's it! The music starts to play and we're into the credits. It's a bisected action sequence without any action. The second unfortunate cliffhanger is the one that brings undue attention to a production fail... twice. The audience gets to see the error during the exciting end to an episode, and then again in the reprise the following week. The co-pilot splits his trousers as he falls to the ground at the end of part two - and again at the start of part three - of The Horns of Nimon. The model tank looks pathetic at the end of part three, and the start of part four, of Robot. The Monster of Peladon has a great example of this type, at the fourth episode end. There's a fight between Ettis and the Doctor where the latter is mostly played by a stuntman. The wig is unconvincing, the voice is badly dubbed over the action, and in one shot the audience gets a face-on mid-shot view of someone who's clearly Terry Walsh doing Venusian Aikido, not Jon Pertwee. If by some miracle you missed all that, don't worry, it will be repeated in full the following week at the start of part five.

I've mistimed my own cliffhanger. I've run out of space without an interesting way to wrap up my discussion. All I can do is slap on a Next Time Trailer: in the next blog post's Deeper Thoughts section, there's always a Twist, there's always a Twist, there's always a Twist...

In Summary:

Like The Curse of Peladon but longer!