The Ice Warriors

 

Chapter the 306th, Ice Cold in Ealing (and Lime Grove studio D).

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in a very cold future Earth.  A drastic fall in carbon dioxide has brought catastrophic climate change, a global cooling. The TARDIS team meet Leader Clent and his crew, who run the nearby base that is just one of many around the world that are going to work together using ionisation to defeat the advancing glaciers of a new ice age. They are having trouble with their ioniser as their expert Penley has left to become a scavenger (an underclass that are not participating in the plans to save the world) and is hiding out with friend Stoor nearby. The Doctor is roped in to replace Penley's expertise. One of the base crew brings back to the base what they believe to be archaeological find from the ice. When defrosted, it is revealed to be Varga, an Ice Warrior, who had crashed there thousands of years before. Varga takes Victoria hostage and goes back to where he was found, digging out his spaceship and reviving his crew of Warriors. The Doctor helps to sort out the ioniser, and the base is ready to go. There's just one complication: the Ice Warrior spaceship's power source will be destroyed when the ioniser is used, and could cause an explosion and fallout. Various different parties go to try to rescue Victoria and find out about the ship's power source. Storr is killed by the Warriors when he attempts to ally himself with them. Varga and his warriors attack the base, but the Doctor uses weaponry from their ship to drive them away. With every surviving human including the TARDIS team back at the base, and the glaciers almost upon them, it comes time to choose. Clent cannot bring himself to take the risk, so Penley makes the decision. The explosion of the Ice Warrior ship is small, only destroying the Warriors, who have returned there. The Earth is safe.

Context:

As I've done almost every year for the blog, I took a Doctor Who story away on holiday with me. The family (Me, the Better Half and our three offspring, boys of 18 and 15, girl of 12) went back to Corralejo, which we'd visited a couple of years earlier (see Deeper Thoughts section below and the blog post for Hell Bent for more details). There are so few Doctor who stories left to blog now that it would be difficult to pick something that tied in to the holiday location as in the past. The Romans is still in the 'To Do' pile and it features the main characters having something of a vacation in a villa; there's The Two Doctors too, with its location filming in Spain. These, though, are my final stories left to blog for the first and sixth Doctors respectively; I wasn't sure whether I was ready to deliberately accelerate goodbyes to those old boys yet. So, I left it to chance. The randomiser picked Patrick Troughton story The Ice Warriors, a story so misaligned to viewing in a warm climate that the incongruity tickled me and the choice was made. I downloaded the episodes to my phone using the iplayer app, parts two and three being officially made animations, and watched an episode every other day while away, the final one watched on the flight home. 

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 27th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13). Though there are a couple of black and white stories still left to blog after this one, The Ice Warriors marks the final story for the blog with any episodes missing from the archives.

First Time Round:

I borrowed a pirated VHS in the early 1990s (probably from David, long time fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog) that had recordings of some, but maybe not all, of the extant episodes (it can't have been many years after they were recovered in 1988) burned with a timecode. I don't know where they'd been sourced from before several generations of copying from tape to tape had led them to me, and I didn't ask. They were anyway of too low quality for me to follow. So, I properly engaged with the story for the first time when it came out as a sell-through VHS release in November 1998, the range's big release for the end of that year. The Ice Warriors was part of a box-set with a documentary and an orphaned episode of another Troughton story; the missing episodes were reconstructed from the audio and still photographs. Later still, I got the DVD with the two episodes replaced by animations; this was in the Summer of 2013. I took those shiny discs on a holiday that year (a couple of years before the start of the blog) and remember that at that time the youngest, still a babe in arms back then, was in the process of being weaned. There were a few four o' clock in the morning stints of rocking my grizzling wee daughter in my arms, accompanied by the episodes, volume low, on the living room TV of the cottage we'd hired in Shanklin, Isle of Wight. The theme music seemed to soothe her.

Reaction:

Briefly starting with the animation, the recreations of missing episodes two and three, married to the off-air soundtracks that still survive, are perfectly good at bridging the gap, covering narrative developments in the middle of the story. The simple style might have struggled to visualise more kinetic or climactic action, but there isn't much of such action in those two parts or, frankly, in the remainder. The visual design of the Warriors is a highlight, and they are equally as effective in cartoon form, a demonstration of the strength and distinctiveness of the costumes of Varga and the other Martians. They're a little bit unwieldy, but that isn't much of a problem as Varga and the other Martians don't do a whole lot, and certainly not much that's kinetic or climactic. They are an interesting complicating factor in the narrative, but most of their activity is just a lot of walking about. Bernard Bresslaw's performance - the breathy, whispered sss-ibilance that laid the foundations for how the creatures would be played forever after - is great, but it would be pretty much as great just vocally. The other performances are also strong, and it would be a bit of a shame to lose the facial expressions and physical touches, but the one thing that most struck me about the story this watch was that it could function perfectly well as an audio play. It is the least animated of any story that has had all or parts animated. There's only three significant locations (and you could probably lose one of them without too much trouble), and the question of how to defeat the nominal forces of antagonism is answered early on (they like it cold, and the base by necessity has a massive heat gun at its disposal).

What moves and develops in the story is instead at the interpersonal level. For this is a bromance tale, a weird semi-professional (but going beyond the bounds of professionalism in places) interaction between Clent, Penley and the Doctor. Penley has spurned Clent, leaving his important role on the base team to go off into the frozen wilderness; the Doctor is the replacement boffin who turns up and takes Penley's place. Ice Warriors and glaciers take second place for most of the running time to this odd platonic love triangle. Aside from Varga and maybe Storr (Penley's new partner, the exact opposite of Clent) none of the other characters has much of a look in. Victoria spends all her time as prisoner of the Ice Warriors, including a whole episode playing hide and seek with one in ice caves; Jamie spends a few episodes knocked out and then lying down; the other base staff are mainly bit parts and/or sonic cannon fodder. Instead, this is mainly a simple tale of who Clent will end up with, mysterious new man the Doctor, or will he tempt Penley back from the arms of the rugged Stoor, into which he was forced by Clent's uncaring robot heart? Yes, I'm taking the piss but only a bit - the plot never gets quite to homoerotic levels, but it does at times veer towards Mills and Boon. Many of the bases depicted in Patrick Troughton's time have brittle bosses in conflict with their underlings, but it's never normally played so emotionally. A clue might be that Peter Barkworth is playing Clent with a pronounced limp. Reportedly, he unsuccessfully tried to persuade the director to let him give Clent a stutter too. This seems to me to be a talented actor making a dull part more interesting. According to multiple lines of dialogue, Clent is supposed to be a robotic drone, but Barkworth just doesn't play him like that.

It may be that some adjustments in rehearsal meant the intended central dramatic question isn't very clearly delineated, but I don't think it can all be blamed on the actors - the script is contradictory in many places. As will be dwelt on a little more in the Deeper Thoughts section below, The Ice Warriors was being broadcast at the same time as the first run of another 1960s telefantasy classic, The Prisoner. Like the central character of that series, Penley has dropped out of a society that he has found to be dehumanising. Both these shows were reflecting fears / hopes in the wider world of 1967 about "dropping out" and there were no doubt some early-adopter hippies in the UK then attempting to create an alternate lifestyle to the rat race. But Penley has dropped out at a time of international crisis, and is neglecting his essential role in combatting that crisis such that the world is put at risk. His motivation for this is sketchy. Sometimes it seems that he's rejecting the computerised nature of the world; but it stretches credibility that he could have grown to become a scientific expert in this society without having used computers extensively, so what's changed recently (apart from the crisis)? In one telling moment elsewhere, he bemoans Clent using "scientists' craniums as stepping stones for his ambitions". So perhaps his reasons for going were more personal. This also muddles up Clent's characterisation some more - can he be both robotic drone and ambitious user of others? In the technologically advanced society as presented, it's hard to rationalise how there would be scavengers like Storr. The threat of societal collapse may have pushed people to abandon society and technology, but Storr is an expert hunter. Has he learned those skills since the ice age, or did he have them before? It seems like the former, but why and how would such skills be learned in the civilisation as presented?

No skills will be enough to keep Penley and Stoor alive anyway: their lifestyle is shown only to be sustainable if they steal supplies from the society they're denouncing (as seen in a couple of occasions in the story) and in a very short period they and everyone else is going to be frozen to death because Penley has abandoned his post. There's separate scenes where the Doctor and Miss Garrett implore him to come back as he's desperately needed, and Penley stubbornly refuses. He's no hero, and Clent's not exactly a villain either: he's someone with an exemplary record, is shown to care about his team (witness his consoling of Arden when the latter is beating himself up about bringing the frozen warrior to the base), is pretty brave in playing for time when the Warriors invade the base, and always has his focus on the important job at hand. When the crunch moment comes, the decision to be made is whether to go against the computer (which doesn't have enough information to give a decisive instruction) and use the ioniser, even though it risks a nuclear explosion. Dramatically, the logical person to make the final decision is Clent: the influence of Penley and the Doctor convince him to trust his instincts above the data, and he takes the risk, the culmination of the plot linking in to decisive character growth for him. This isn't what happens, alas. Instead Clent can't make the decision and Penley steps in. So, Penley is the ultimate protagonist and his journey is to end up working as the ioniser expert of the base, which was exactly where he started; the drop-out has dropped back in and there's no real character growth at all. At least Clent and Penley are reconciled at the end, sharing a few nice words as well as a hug and a kiss (I may have made some of that up).

A few other points of note: the story has a special title sequence for all the episodes, with some interesting music by Dudley Simpson (including vocal performances - eat your heart out, Murray Gold). The TARDIS materialises on its side, for I think the first time ever in the history of the series, and there are a few chuckles had from the regulars extricating themselves from their mobile home (shame that this orientation is forgotten about by the time of the dematerialisation in episode six). The whole running reference to people being shipped off to Africa as if that's the worst fate imaginable is pretty dodgy. Also dodgy is the dialogue at the end of episode one where Jamie leeringly discusses short skirts and attempts to persuade Victoria to wear one (also a minor continuity error as she has already worn a minidress two stories earlier, with comments arising on the length thereof). The ioniser base is not the only workplace with overfamiliar colleagues: Varga seems to spend the whole of one episode chanting Zondal's name. Troughton has some great bits of business with the Doctor using stink bombs against the Warriors, or using a chemical machine to get himself a drink of water. The sets of the icy areas aren't too bad; the movement of the glacier is effectively sold by sound effects and the actors' conviction. One other personal note: the hotel where me and the family stayed had a foam party in the swimming pool during our stay (it's a weekly occurrence apparently). It was fun for the kids particularly, but it had extra resonance for me: what could fit better with the Troughton era story I'd taken with me than the ubiquitous foam machine. It isn't used in The Ice Warriors (it would be in its sequel story The Seeds of Death and many other stories around this time); you can't get away from it!

A foam machine in Fuerteventura

Connectivity:

Both The Ice Warriors and 73 Yards feature snow, and the TARDIS landing in a cold environment with the Doctor wearing a big coat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to Life, Back from Gallifrey. We were away in Corralejo, Fuerteventura for 10 days at the start of August 2024; the weather was hot during those days but it was the UK that we'd left behind that seemed to be on fire. As explored in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post for Hell Bent, which I posted after our holiday there two years ago, somewhere in the dunes and volcanic hills of Fuerteventura is the shooting location for Gallifrey as seen at the end of Heaven Sent and for a lot of Hell Bent. Those episodes, and indeed every reference in Who's long history to the Doctor's relationship with his people, align with the - slightly muddled, see Reaction section above - themes of The Ice Warriors about the freedom of the individual versus the compromises of collectivism. By coincidence, such themes were also prevalent in one of the holiday reads I took with me to enjoy poolside, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. The book is a thoughtful and sometimes breathtaking overview of recent politics as illuminated by the ongoing situation where Klein gets confused with another writer with a not dissimilar background who has covered similar subject matter to her in the past and shares the same first name: Naomi Wolf. This was a manageable inconvenience for many years, but got more and more difficult for Klein as Wolf delved into more and more extreme conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines. This culminated in Wolf being banned from Twitter in summer 2021, around the time that she was opining that vaccinated people's urine and faeces should be separated from the rest of the general sewage system until the impact of the waste on unvaccinated people through drinking water could be ascertained. She's back on the platform now, having been reinstated when it came under new management.

Klein is generally empathetic towards her namesake throughout the book, believing that conspiracy theories are based on a kernel of real, understandable feeling, but with the response to that feeling wildly misdirected. The book brings back to mind a period one could easily forget. The first time we went to Fuerteventura in 2022, less than two years before this latest visit, we needed to bring proof of vaccination status with us, and spot checks were made as passengers disembarked and made their way to passport control. At the time, we didn't see this in any way as a restriction on our freedom, nor as a scheme by some shadowy cabal of world governments and big pharma corporations to monitor us. On the contrary, it seemed like the important latest step of many collective steps, lockdowns and social distancing and masking, that had to be taken to break the virus's hold on individual freedoms. Unfortunately, a vocal minority felt very differently about the vaccine (and lockdowns and social distancing and masking). Klein eruditely sees that a cultish focus on the individual can come from many places. Unexpectedly, the anti-vax conspiracy was bought into not only by the usual rabble-rousing suspects like Steve Bannon but also a good deal of online wellness and workout influencers who had previously seemed apolitical in their content and outlook. The belief in the power of the individual to shape their own health overpowered everything else, and Klein gives examples of such people making some dodgy statements along the lines of letting the weak go to the wall. If there's one thing that demonstrates more than anything else that healthcare must be a collective and universal endeavour it's surely a pandemic. If everything that happened with Covid-19 didn't manage to convey that message, then I worry about the future of the human race.

The Doctor as lone wolf outside of his society?

I can't get too high and mighty about this of course, because my favourite TV programme, Doctor Who, a programme I've spent nearly ten years documenting, championing its politics and philosophy, has at its heart a character who has rejected his own society and become a lone-wolf individualist. The programme was born in the 1960s, and it's a particularly 60s theme, though still lingering in our collective unconscious many decades later. It's not that simple, though, as the Doctor separated himself from the Time Lords because they weren't interventionalist enough. He champions science, so could never be an anti-vaxxer - he's definitely shown as different to the resolutely anti-science character of Storr in The Ice Warriors, so blinded by his hatred of big science that he's driven to attempt to ally himself with forces that have no interest in his wellbeing. Even the 1960s programme The Prisoner (which, as mentioned above, was first being broadcast at exactly the same time as The Ice Warriors) is not all it seems. It appears to be the epitome of individualist cheerleader, with it's central character's repeated cry of "I am not a number, I am a free man", something one can imagine Penley in The Ice Warriors saying; but, in the final Prisoner episodes (broadcast a few weeks after The Ice Warriors had finished) it's shown that the individual, no matter their achievements on their own, cannot necessarily make significant changes outside of society. The protagonist of the programme is literally shown to be his own worst enemy. If even a genre drama like Doctor Who or The Prisoner is complex, then reality is even more so, and it would be wrong to trust anyone - of any political stripe - that says there are easy answers, or even easy problems. The misinformation keeps on coming, though.

The Prisoner

As well as depicting Gallifrey, Fuerteventura was site of some location filming for the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion, earlier in the same season, its - slightly muddled, see Reaction section of the Zygon post - theme being immigration-related paranoia leading to stand-offs and violence. This is another topic covered in Doppelganger, and sadly at the end of July and start of August, while me and the fam were unaware enjoying a holiday many hundreds of miles away, it was re-enacted in cities of the UK. There were riots, initially sparked by one terrible act of violence by an individual. It was another case of feelings misdirected that were stirred up or harnessed by other people acting in bad faith (misinformation online connected the wholly unconnected topic of immigration to a terrible tragedy that was not being treated as any kind of terror incident and whose suspected perpetrator was born in the UK). Again, there was the desire for easy answers to problems: it would be less difficult to believe that these were some kind of anti-immigration protest, rather than an excuse to have a racist riot, if it was clear exactly what the protestors wanted: more budget for quicker processing of arrivals on UK shores? More agreements with France for processing centres on their side of the channel? Or a magic barrier around the country that protects a nation state as defined imprecisely in each individual's own prejudiced head? The story didn't end there, though. Hearteningly, for an overseas observer (the news where we were having caught up), the plan for a rolling wave of violence overreached themself, and the wave collided with a wall of counter protest. A much hyped rally in Brighton ended up with four - four! - 'anti-immigration protestors' versus thousands of anti-racist counter protestors. It made me worry just a little less about the future of the human race.

That's still not the end of the story, though. Doppelganger urges a collectivism within class lines, ignoring distractions like race being pitted against race, to fight against the excesses of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. I would like to see such a collectivism exist, and I still have hope (even though sometimes it feels like I'll be waiting until the next ice age).

In Summary:

A cool mess, but not without some good points (though they're buried a bit and might need digging out).

The Wheel in Space

Chapter The 250th, thank goodness the Cybermen are ruthlessly logical or else their plan here would be even more ridiculous.

Plot:

The Future. The Cybermen want to take over the world, as ever, and believe that an Earth Space station, nicknamed the Wheel, will be useful as a navigational beacon to guide their fleet. They take over an Earth rocket and pilot it to near the wheel, far off its original course, so that it will intrigue the Wheel crew. They fire space-balls (yes, really) at the Wheel from the rocket that are small enough to get through its shielding. These contain Cybermats who then destroy the Wheel's supply of a metal vital for the operation of its laser cannon. The Cybs cause a meteorite shower that will collide with the Wheel. They believe that, under threat, the crew will be curious enough to check out the rocket and see if it has any of the metal onboard to fix the cannon to blow up the meteorites. Two of the Wheel crew spacewalk over, are taken over by the Cybermen, and then go back with a crate of the metal that has a Cyberman inside in a hidden bottom section, smuggling it into the Wheel. It then starts taking over other crew members. Now, I think they probably could have simplified that plan a bit, but they have a Cyber-Control device in charge that likes to say things like "Phase 3 complete" and has obviously created too many phases in the plan because of this.

Earlier, during the early phases of the Cyber-plan, the TARDIS malfunctioned causing - because this is a script by David Whittaker - mercury vapour to fill the console room, so the Doctor and Jamie materialised and escaped to take shelter in the rocket. Brought over with the Doctor to the Wheel after managing to signal to the space station, Jamie sabotages the cannon to avoid the Wheel crew blowing up the rocket with the TARDIS still onboard. This is lucky for the Cybermen as the Wheel's commander Jarvis Bennett (who's having a nervous breakdown, by the by) had ordered for it to be blown up, which would have stopped the Cyber-plan as early as phase 2. Anyway, the Doctor and Jamie help the crew, including brainy Wheel librarian Zoe, to repel the Cybermen, but alas many of the crew - including Jarvis - are killed. Zoe stows away on the TARDIS with the TARDIS team, to broaden her rigid outlook (instilled by the education methods of her time). The Doctor tries to put her off by telling her all about the dangers of creatures like the Daleks.

Context:

As a treat for reaching the 250th story blogged, I thought I would override the randomiser and pick a story from the remaining (and now quite small) pile of stories yet to be done. My first thought was to watch The Krotons. A Patrick Troughton story is always a treat, and it was the first full Doctor Who story I ever saw, when it was repeated in the UK in 1981. I then realised - such is my progress through the black and white stories, and the progress of the animation teams in creating new visuals for stories with lost episodes - that 2022 was shaping up to be the first full year since the blog began that I wouldn't cover a story comprising an audio and slide show affair. I'd watched wholly extant monochrome stories all year, plus one new animation. Long before animation was an affordable option, reconstructions were made by talented people used the surviving soundtracks matched with off-air photographs to recreate as closely as possible the original viewing experience of episodes no longer in the archives. I remembered when watching The Edge of Destruction that I'd seen a reconstruction of The Wheel in Space on Britbox, so decided to watch that instead. I also tried something that I'd never done with a classic series story for the blog before, and watched each episode a week apart, just as it was originally broadcast. The experience of watching The Wheel in Space over six weeks is much more rewarding than watching it all in one go, but I'll get onto that in a moment.

First Time Round:

I first saw the surviving episodes (three and six) on a VHS compilation of orphaned 1960s episodes featuring the Cybs called Cybermen - The Early Years, when it came out in July 1992. These compilations never made any effort to explain the missing narrative between the existing parts, but - purely by the whims of the archive gods - it happened that of the two stories represented on the tape (the others episodes were two and four of The Moonbase) had a bit present from the middle and the denouement. As such, it was possible - just about - to construct a plausible plot from these sections. A full audio release of all six episodes' soundtracks came out on CD in May 2004, and I can't remember a thing about that first listen. I'm clearly a visual learner; even with three times as much material, I still remember the pictures more than just the words.

Reaction:

The Wheel in Space marked the end of the "base under siege" era of Doctor Who. A couple of years earlier, the production team of the time had hit upon this formula, which allowed budgets to be used cleverly to set up tight and claustrophobic horror-inflicted tales. The base would usually be a futuristic one, usually crewed by an international group of spacemen (and more rarely one or two spacewomen too) with a boss who would generally disbelieve the Doctor's warnings about aliens, and complicate his efforts. The base would have one large area (in this case, the wheel operations room) that would look impressive and allow for different camera angles, plus a little studio space would be left for smaller rooms where the monsters of the week could creep in and loom over people and whatnot. It was an efficient way to structure scripts to get a lot out of a little, but it did become overused. In season 5, the 1967/1968 run for which Wheel is the finale, there's only one story that doesn't conform to the template. This is also the second time in the run that the Cybermen have terrorised a group of people locked in a particular location; in fact, all four of the Cybermen stories in Doctor Who up to this point have seen the silver giants, surreptitiously or otherwise, taking over a futuristic base. Other stories in season 5 had tweaked the formula a bit - what if the base was a monastery, or the tunnels of the London Underground?  Even The Tomb of the Cybermen, the previous effort for these monsters at the start of the season, innovates - it is the Cyber-base that's the setting, with the humans infiltrating as they think the metal meanies are long dead. The Wheel in Space though, is strictly made to the formula. It's set in space rather than the South Pole, and the monsters arrive on an intriguing rocket rather than an intriguing planet, but otherwise it's essentially the same story shape as the very first Cyberman story, The Tenth Planet.

Does the story have anything that raises it above the level of generic? Is it a selling point that the villainous plot is one of the most illogical these supposedly logical creatures have come up with in Doctor Who's long history? Wheel's story has to fill up two more episodes of running time than The Tenth Planet, so the Cybs can't just walk in and take the space station by force. Instead, there's a lot of activity to gradually move them into position, and it doesn't make any sense when you look back on it as a whole. The Cybermen deliberately create a meteorite shower that might destroy the place that's strategically important to them - this seems risky. They sabotage the Wheel's laser cannon, then have to repair it again for the latter stages of their plan. Everything hinges of the humans being curious enough to search for laser cannon parts on a mysterious craft that they were within seconds of blowing up earlier in the story. Why can't the Cybermats that the Cybermen successfully get onboard just kill everyone (it's shown to be a possibility when Rudkin is killed), then they could just walk aboard. The Cybermen aren't the only people behaving with hard to explain motivations, of course: their plan hinges on a crewmember of the Wheel not raising the alarm when he finds a Cybermat, but instead keeping it as a pet. The curious thing, though, is that none of this mattered to me on this watch, as I was viewing it as it was intended to be seen, one episode a week. In 25-minute chunks, the absurdities of the plot don't show up as they would if watching the story all in one go. I can't really complain if the story works as originally intended (home video releases of Doctor Who were as unlikely as laser cannons in 1968). In the gaps between, I was no word of a lie eager to watch each next episode, not something I've ever experienced with The Wheel in Space before. It was only at the end that it fell apart just a little - all the silly ins and outs of the ludicrous plot are just to allow the Cybermen to use the Wheel as a navigational beacon; a stronger motivation might have sold the whole plot better.

The plot isn't the only reason, and perhaps not even the main reason, that The Wheel in Space exists, of course. The big deal is the introduction of the new female companion. Wendy Padbury as Zoe fits right into the existing team, and is brilliant from the off. These three are instantly what they remained until they all left together a year later: one of the very best TARDIS teams to watch. The pattern of the Doctor with one male and one female companion had worked for many years, so a replacement was obviously going to come in immediately. The production team going the opposite way to last companion Victoria, though, creating someone from the future rather than the past, means Zoe can still be naive but allows for a more sparky relationship, particularly with Jamie. This is better than the somewhat cloying protectiveness he displayed to her predecessor; they are friendly rivals - her book smarts versus his street smarts. Like many stories around this time (The Dominators and The Krotons, for example) programmatic rote learning - that Zoe has been put through - is a plot point, but that's soon forgotten when she's a regular and she just becomes the bright brainy one without any angst. Apart from the new girl, the performances of the actors playing the rest of the Wheel's crew are all fine, with some nice character touches (like Leo and Tanya's flirting), but the international nature of the crew is achieved by everyone putting on accents, of varying degrees of accuracy. This is either a bit naff or insensitive and insulting, depending on how forgiving one feels. Michael Turner as Jarvis Bennett has a good stab at showing someone undergoing a mental breakdown in a stressful situation, doing some heavy lifting as the script doesn't do much to help him to justify such extremes. The new design of Cybermen and their new voices are good developments, and would be further finessed in their next appearance.

The choices in the first episode intrigue me. For a start, David Whittaker plays his Greatest Hits in the first few minutes (use of the fault locater, random images appearing on the TARDIS scanner as a warning, mention of fluid links and mercury). Thereafter, it's almost a bottle-ish episode (see here for more details of what I mean by that) or prologue, with the Doctor and Jamie exploring the rocket and tussling with a cute servo robot. The Wheel crew turn up only towards the end, which is odd - I would expect either for the focus to stay with the Doctor and Jamie for the whole episode, or to get them on to the Wheel sooner. It's something different at least. There's a bit of contrivance to engineer Jamie and Zoe to be out space-walking during a meteorite shower (Jamie has to drop a vital component on the rocket that they must go back for because it's somehow important to defeat the Cybermen) but I'll forgive that because the space-walking scenes are done most effectively (it's luckily a sequence that falls within an existing episode). There's no music, but Brian Hodgson's special sounds make up for this and fit the spacey locale of the story. There's also some nice dialogue too: "Proper little brainchild - all brain and no heart!", "Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority", and a nice exchange between a sceptical Zoe and Jamie about the Doctor: "Well, is he a physicist, biochemist, astronomer, biometrician?" "Yes, he is". Overall, it's not perfect, and unlikely to be anyone's favourite story of all time, but it's still very enjoyable (particularly when watched an episode a week). It was also a good thing, whether it was intended or not, to kill off the 'base under siege' format and let Doctor Who explore a bit more - season 6 might not be as popular as season 5, but it's much more varied in terms of setting and story structures.

Connectivity: 

The Wheel in Space, like The Ghost Monument, begins with the TARDIS team escaping imminent danger to end up on a spaceship (or two in the Jodie Whittaker story); they also both feature non-speaking robots. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Meaningless Milestones. Having reached the 250th story mark, and it being towards the end of 2022, it feels like the right time to do my annual stock take. I have already randomly chosen one of the remaining Doctor Who Christmas special episodes to watch next, as there won't be such a thing on TV. (I know that technically there has been a festive special in 2022, on the very first day of the year, but this coming festive season, i.e. 12 days of Christmas / Double-length Radio Times period, will be the first without a new Who offering since December 2004 / January 2005, and that makes me feel a little melancholy; luckily, it looks from recent announcements like it'll be the last Christmas for a while to be so bereft.) I have also run the random number generator to select a story to watch in the Chrimbo limbo period when I'll be off work (and it's a cracker). Assuming that I post both of these before year end, my total blogged this year will be 36 stories. This isn't my highest annual total ever, but it's up there. At this rate of blogging, anticipating only four stories to be shown next year, and the promised full series of eight episodes plus a festive special the year after, I will catch up with ongoing production by the end of 2024. If so, then I can still blog new episodes as they come up thereafter, of course, but it will trash the random order concept. I may soon have to start looking for some 'extended universe' offerings to drop in occasionally. Be ready for my feelings on Scream of the Shalka any day now, you lucky things! Anyway, examining the stories covered this year, I see that there was a three-way tie for the most blogged per Doctor between Tom Baker, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker. It's all random, of course, but this makes sense to me. The Doctors with more episodes left are more likely to get picked more often. The two recent Doctors are those who've accumulated stories produced after the blog started, and Tom Baker started with a large number as he was in the role for a record-breaking seven years.

As I blew a number of Jodie Whittaker episodes in one go last year by covering Flux as one serial, I decided at the start of the year not to override the randomiser to blog any of the three 2022 specials as they went out. One did come up randomly, though, albeit my least favoured of the year, but that's the way the random numbers go. I managed to cover a spread of Capaldi's stories including his first and last (well, if you don't count Twice Upon a Time, and I try not to). The next highest Doctors in terms of stories covered this year were Matt Smith and David Tennant, jointly on four stories blogged each. Again, this is understandable, as they have relatively high totals (mostly because the majority of their stories are only one episode long). The 1960s black-and-white Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton) were both on three stories blogged. For Troughton, with a little bit of fixing as mentioned above, I covered pretty much all the myriad ways one can experience one of his episodes: one story - The Dominators - was fully intact as originally broadcast, another - The Abominable Snowmen - was wholly animated (though one episode exists), and Wheel in Space was a mixture of full episodes and reconstructions using audio plus stills. For Hartnell, amazingly, I got three full stories (12 whole episodes) in their original format, with no gaps having to be plugged. Next, on two stories apiece, were Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison. Again, it's all random: if I had a choice in the matter, I might have held off on covering more than one of the latter's, as there are very few left; in fact, only three now. Neatly, though, there is one left in each of his seasons. On the subject of seasons / series, I have completed a couple more this year, bringing the total to seven so far. Many more, like all three of Davison's, only have one story left to do, so I expect some more to get completed in 2023.

I've still not completed any Doctor's whole era, unless you count Paul McGann (I covered his single TV outing as lead actor in the blog's first year, but now he's appeared in another Doctor Who story as a guest actor, of course). The ones likely to be completed first, apart from Davison, are the three for whom I did one story blog post each this year: Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Christopher Eccleston. McCoy has three stories left to do (again, one per season - I don't plan it this way, honest), Baker and Eccleston, just two apiece. The other Doctors have a healthy handful to half a dozen left each; nobody's in double figures now. There are 53 stories left in all (not including any new stories expected to be broadcast in 2023), split pretty evenly between classic and new series (26 and 27 remaining, respectively), with no particular decade or producer / showrunner tenure favoured. There are nine monochrome stories remaining, five for Hartnell, four for Troughton. Of those, only two are wholly missing (one each - Marco Polo and The Highlanders) with no known plans for either to be animated anytime soon. Nothing is necessarily getting animated soon as things are, but both stories have challenges that mean they'd be amongst the last ones to be tackled ever anyway - I will most likely cover both for the blog before any new pictures are drawn for them. The remainder either are fully intact or have animated episodes to plug gaps. Marco Polo is also now the earliest story I have yet to watch, and the most recent is the Power of the Doctor. Little did I ever imagine when I first started this endeavour that the earliest and most recent stories remaining would share a cast member; Doctor Who still has the ability to surprise me.

In Summary:

It's Wheel-y good (if you watch an episode a week, and don't think too hard about it!).

The Abominable Snowmen

Chapter The 240th, the abominable finally became animatable. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in 1930s Tibet, the TARDIS landing on a Himalayan mountainside near the Detsen monastery. The Doctor has been here before many years previously. Four monks have recently been killed, as has the expedition-mate of a Professor Travers, who is trying to discover the elusive yeti creatures believed to live in the area. The yeti are suspected of the killings. The Doctor and his friends, helped by the monks, manage to capture a Yeti and find it is a robot, with a gap in its chest for a control sphere. The spheres can move on their own to fill the gap in the robot Yeti and activate it. The Doctor rigs up a device to track the transmissions controlling the spheres, while Yetis menace people inside and outside the monastery. The master Padmasambhava is behind the Yeti plot; a floating bodiless entity called the Great Intelligence has been communicating mentally with the master for years, keeping him alive; Padmasambhava has built a glass pyramid, which is taken to a cave and starts to change the Intelligence into a physical form there. Travers witnesses all this but goes into shock and can't remember it until it's dramatic to do so later in the story. The master orders that the monks abandon the monastery as the Yeti are too powerful. The Doctor tracks the control signal transmissions to inside the monastery itself. Padmasambhava struggles against the Intelligence's control. The Doctor confronts the Intelligence in a secret room behind the throne in the sanctum, and they battle mentally. During this, Jamie and the others destroy the control equipment including another pyramid. The Yeti are deactivated and the old monk is released from the Intelligence's power and dies. The TARDIS team leave the monastery accompanied by Travers; he spots a real yeti and rushes off to track it.

Context:

Before the BFI screening of the new animation (see Deeper Thoughts section below for full details), I thought about first listening to the audio version, but I decided against. Instead, I watched the surviving episode two on DVD from the Lost In Time box set (on my own one evening, with a glass of wine). The Better Half came in briefly, and watched for a while without making any sarcastic comments (so that's got to be a plus). To me, the episode was as fun and engaging as I found it on first watch (see immediately below). On the day of the 3rd September, I arrived at London Bridge station and then walked along the waterfront to the BFI; the sun was shining, the Southwark Cathedral bells were ringing, people were happy and smiling, buskers were playing nice tunes. I was in a very good mood, and meeting up with friends; what could be better? I met up with David, Trevor and Alan at the BFI. Scott and Chris were intending to attend also, but had to drop out at the last minute. When I enquired at the box office about whether anyone might want these tickets, I was surprised to find that they still had some left themselves. These events are usually sell-outs. That may not have been a reflection on the story. There were two other fan events going on during the weekend (Whooverville and Collectormania) and the panel that accompanied the BFI screening didn't include any stars of the show. Still, the auditorium was pretty full as we all sat down to watch what documentary maker Chris Chapman described in an on-stage interview later as "Doctor Who does Black Narcissus with teddy bears chasing people".

First Time Round:

Only the second of the six episodes of The Abominable Snowmen is present in the archives. The rest are not known to exist, though audio recordings of all the episodes are held because young fans in the 1960s taped them off their tellies. These audio recordings of course allowed for the animation to eventually be made as shown at the BFI, with images matched to those home-made soundtracks. Before animations were feasible, though, releasing these 'orphaned' episodes and mostly pictureless soundtracks presented a challenge. John Nathan-Turner, former producer of the show in the 1980s, worked as a consultant on the BBC Doctor Who ranges in the 1990s, and attempted to tackle these challenges. He was responsible for the first official audio tapes of various story soundtracks with linking narration; from that start a full range on CD (with better source audio and restoration) became a reality later, after his time as a consultant had ended; The Abominable Snowmen came out on CD in 2001. A decade earlier, in June 1991, a time when the Doctor Who VHS range was just getting going, there was a release called The Troughton Years. This was one of an initial brace of 'Years' tapes that provided a way to get the orphaned material released. The presentation style did not catch on as well as narrated audios eventually did. As was probably inevitable based on his style, Nathan-Turner presented the episodes within an inexpensive framing documentary about the lead actor of the show; it was showbiz biography and a little dash of trivia, but little attempt was made to present the wider story either side of the episode shown. With less availability of plot synopses in those days, it was tantalising and somewhat frustrating to get these 25-minute glimpses into stories, but then no more. I defy any Doctor Who fan to watch the surviving episode of The Abominable Snowmen, with its intriguing set-up and fun interactions between the regular cast, and not want to see what happens next. Curiously, when I finally experienced the full story 10 years later as an audio experience, it was not nearly as engaging as a whole.

Reaction:

The Abominable Snowmen doesn't have any music, just special sounds and background atmosphere tracks, which in the exterior scenes is mostly whistling winds and in the interiors, the chanting of monks. This might be why I struggled to engage with the story on audio - deprived as I was of the energy boost of music or much differentiation between the voices - apart from Victoria and the half-ethereal half-raspy performance of Wolfe Morris as Padmasambhava, it's just the sound of a lot of earnest blokes. If you're able to know which of the lamas dies midway through when just listening to voices - is it Rinchen? is it Sapan? - then you've got better ears than me. As such, it's negatively impacted more than other stories by the absence of visuals, and so was a good candidate for what was confirmed at the BFI to be the last animation, at least for a while. A few people who were lucky enough to watch the episodes first go out in the 1960s will know how the story worked with visuals, and how closely the cartoon version captures the feel. It must have gone down well at the time, though, as the writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were rapidly commissioned for a sequel that was broadcast after only two stories had gone by in the interim. The Yeti were probably the main reason; they clearly struck a chord with the audience, even though they are cuddly and unthreatening. In that sequel, The Web of Fear, the Yeti design is tweaked to make them more monstrous and less teddy bear, and the animation succeeds with a very slightly tweaked design in that direction too.

Another thing that probably appeals to audiences is all the paraphernalia that comes with the creatures - the mini-Yeti that can be moved around a map to remote control the full-size versions, the control spheres with their distinctive beeping, the mysterious pyramids of power. I suspect that there have been some tweaks to how some of these are depicted in the animation, but I haven't seen any offscreen pictures of the original for a while. Despite any changes, and there a more emphatic changes that I'll cover in a moment, these new visuals still feel pretty faithful. The paraphernalia, effective though it all is, does create some implausibility in the story, though. One poor ageing monk working away over centuries has apparently built all this, and several fur-coated robots, and potentially excavated a cave (it's not 100% clear): no wonder he's secretly wishing for death. It would have been a lot more efficient for the Great Intelligence to commune mentally with someone who owned a factory, Nestene-style. Nevertheless, the Tibetan (well, ish) style is original and engaging. With the new visuals those watching are taken more nimbly through a plot that - if one stops to think about for even a few seconds, or if one is just listening to the sparse audio where it's more obvious  - is slight. There's lot of walking back and forth between places to pad out the running time, and suspicion falls on different people pointlessly as the audience have already been clued in to who's behind the plot. On stage later, animation exec and director Gary Russell was a cheerleader for the original story, saying that nothing repetitious happens in The Abominable Snowmen, and that every moment propels the plot along. His comments were definitely heartfelt, but I can't alas agree with him completely.

The plot works - albeit slowly - but the structure of the plot is just to delay the inevitable confrontation between Doctor and master (with a small 'm'), and it is easy to get frustrated when experiencing the story that the obvious final act is put off so long. Russell and all the talented people involved have succeeded in putting off the point where I got restless and annoyed as late as humanly possible, but it did still occur. Maybe somewhere around the time that the Doctor said he needed another bearing when using his gizmo; if the Doctor thought about it for a second, he'd realise that the only reason that Padmasambhava would want to evacuate the monastery is if the control centre was in there somewhere. Anyway, the audience have known since episode two who the bad guy is, and scenes of him hypnotising people left, right and centre are continually being intercut with the actions of the good guys.The writers tweaked the structure for next Yeti story The Web of Fear and held back from revealing who was under the Great Intellignece's influence until the end, and that worked a lot better. When the confrontation happens, it is greatly enhanced by the new visuals. The Scooby Doo look (in a good way) for Padmasambhava is nice for a start. (This is just one of some great character redesigns including the guest cast's ethnicities being updated to be more in keeping with the Tibetan setting; this story - probably because of the visuals mostly being missing - doesn't come in for as much criticism as The Talons of Weng-Chiang for 'yellowing up' white actors, but it really should do.) In the final scenes, the master of the monastery can levitate and his eyes glow, and it's very impressive. All the sanctum scenes, when Padmasambhava is at first hidden behind a gauze curtain, then gradually revealed, are effective too, but they held back some animated spectacle for this final confrontation.

The sequences of Jamie wrecking the machinery in the background also work, and this is itself a minor triumph; this style (and time and budget) of animation finds scenes with rapid movement a challenge. This has been most often obvious when characters have to run in previous animations, but most of the running scenes in The Abominable Snowmen animation work perfectly well. There was one moment of audience mirth when Jamie shouts "Come on!" at Victoria as they escape a Yeti followed by the animated characters moving very slowly out of frame; but, these moments of pacing (as explained by Gary Russell later) are inherited from the soundtrack source material, and the purists in the target market don't like anything to be cut. Action sequences that go beyond running were mostly successful too, well at least for me. The scene where the Yeti is caught in a rope trap and prodded by various warrior monks' spears worked really well, but got a huge laugh from the assembled fans in the BFI, ungrateful so-and-sos. The intended moments of comedy also went down well for the audience, like Troughton's line "I think this is one of those instances where discretion is the better part of valour - Jamie has an idea" and many other moments. The background pictures of all the locales are grand and give the story more scale than could be achieved in a television studio. There's also a nice background Easter egg tying this first ever Yeti story to the new series appearances of the Great Intelligence. Most of my quibbles are with the original material rather than the animation. The script seems to contradict itself as to how long it's been since the Doctor and Padmasambhava last saw each other. It should be three hundred years, but it's sometimes stated to be two hundred. There's a few too many instances where the Yeti just stand in place not doing anything; for instance, the Doctor is allowed to go up to one and remove its control sphere. As they already look cuddly, having them be static does remove any last vestiges of threat. Overall, though, the plusses of the original outweigh the minusses, and this new version makes it even better. 

Connectivity: 

The Doctor finds himself in a place surrounded by mostly men in silly robes in both The Abominable Snowmen and Hell Bent. In both stories, someone gets their memory selectively wiped too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Professor Travers's 1935 Expedition Journal: BFI screening of The Abominable Snowmen, 3rd September 2022. The structure of the day was similar to previous BFI screenings. Our hosts were as ever Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, Johnson joked early on that Dick had come as the aged Professor Travers from The Web of Fear and that he himself had come as a Yeti. The session kicked off with a quiz and a cheeky round-up of the social media comments of people attending, there followed the first three episodes, then an onstage interview, the final three episodes, another onstage interview and a sneak peak at some of the Value Added Material from the disc release of the animation, then the final panel. Before all that, as has become a tradition, Fiddy paid tribute to one of the Doctor Who family who had sadly left us all recently - Bernard Cribbins. Johnson knew Cribbins from a Bafta committee, and told an anecdote about Elaine Page unexpectedly calling him (she was wanting to sort out BFI membership for a relative), and Cribbins being in the room with her. They were at the time both working on Russell T Davies's BBC version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Tell Justin I'm in my pants!" Cribbins shouted in the background. Another scoop (which someone tweeted during the showing of the first episode, which Johnson comically upbraided them for at the intermission) was the reveal that the next BFI screening would be The Time Meddler on the 29th October 2022 as a tie-in for the next Blu-ray boxset release of season two (William Hartnell's second year). The prizes for the quiz were all general - rather than Doctor Who specific - Abominable Snowman tat, so I didn't 'shout for Dick' (Johnson: "Some of you are more used to shouting that than others") despite knowing most of the answers. One social media comment Johnson read out was someone asking if any gay people would be attending - huge laugh from the crowd - Johnson: "Statistically speaking, maybe one or two"; another tweeter didn't know what the BFI was and speculated that it stood for "Best Friends' Institute".

Fiddy (L), Johnson (R)

Throughout the opening, Johnson kept referring to the story as The Abominable Snowman, effectively reducing the threat level by three quarters, and I just thought he was having an off day; but, Alan, who was sitting next to me pointed out to me that it was a typo on the screen-saver behind him, so maybe Johnson was persuaded by this mistake that it was the correct name for the story. In the break between the two halves of the story, the interviewee was Jess Jurkovic. He is a New York based fan and pianist who has an interesting youtube account where he works out, transcribes and then performs Dudley Simpson incidental music from Doctor Who. Simpson was the most prolific composer for the classic years of Doctor Who, but very little of his music survives as isolated tracks or sheet music. Jurkovic looked ecstatic just to be in London, let alone on stage; he talked about how he became a fan in 1982 watching stories on PBS, jokingly teased the Brits in the audience saying that he got The Five Doctors a few days before them across the pond (it's true!), and talked warmly about how the videos he's made have reconnected him to the fan community; he'd attended the Gallifrey One convention in the US recently, thirty years after attending his first convention as a youngster. A grand piano was set up in one corner of NFT1, and we were treated to a brief tinkle of the ivories. This started with a rather funny tribute to the music of The Abominable Snowmen (a story famous for having no music). The "first movement" of this was a snatch of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which the Doctor plays on his recorder when imprisoned in the monastery in episode two). The second movement was just two notes played over and over, to replicate the sound effect of the control sphere. This was followed by Jurkovic playing a memorable cue from later Troughton story The Seeds of Death. Support his Patreon, people.

Jurkovic at the piano

After the second half of the story had finished, Chris Chapman was welcomed onto the stage. He has been responsible for many documentaries on Doctor Who DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, and has made one called Troughton in Tibet (the title inspired by a Hergé Tintin book) for the disc release of The Abominable Snowmen. This involved taking presenter Toby Hadoke and Jamie actor Frazer Hines to the area of Snowdonia used for the original filming. He did a recce with Doctor Who locations expert and researcher Richard Bignell, and his first impression was that this should be a site of pilgrimage for Doctor Who fans. A shot of the same place is also coincidentally a backdrop used behind the logo on every episode of Countryfile (a series that Chapman works on). This was obvious when the opening shots of the documentary were shown after Chapman left the stage. Fiddy mused that it will probably surprise the Countryfile producers when next week's episode gets a spike in viewers. Chapman detailed that despite there being not many people still alive from the original cast or production, they managed to get eight new interviews and also used five archive interviews from people no longer with us. One of the new interviews was with last surviving Yeti actor from the story John Hogan, who has sadly died since the filming was done last year. Chapman paid him a brief tribute from the stage. The first six minutes of the documentary were then shown, and it looks amazing: some stunning drone shots of the vistas of the mountain and valleys. As in another of Chapman's Who documentaries, they took a TARDIS prop to the location to recreate an image from the original story, and Hines's reaction when first seeing it is lovely to witness.

Fiddy (L), Chapman (R)

The final panel featured three people involved in the animation: Gary Russell (executive producer and director), Rob Ritchie (3D animator) and Ioan Morris (Concept Designer). It's fair to say that it was the first of these three that did most of the talking. The animation has been in production for sixteen months, and Morris's work is all up front doing the first drafts of character designs. He said that when watching the screening his was a surprised reaction of "Oh yeah, I worked on this". Ritchie modestly said that his contribution was merely to send over to Russell "Four renders of a TARDIS". Russell explained that Ritchie works for "the other team". Gary Russell's animated productions are Fury from the Deep, the Web of Fear episode 3, Galaxy 4 and The Abominable Snowmen; the other team led by AnneMarie Walsh created The Macra Terror, The Faceless Ones and The Evil of the Daleks. The two teams do occasionally collaborate; Russell thought it was important for the range as a whole to have consistent elements and not reinvent the wheel, so Ritchie's season five TARDIS and his beginning credits sequence was shared. The decision to change the ethnicities of the monastery inhabitants was a deliberate one, which Russell and Morris worked on early on in the process. Russell talked passionately about this, disagreeing with the usual line that there weren't sufficient actors of the correct ethnicities to play the roles back then, and saying it was his one big bugbear with original director Gerald Blake's work; "We were going to rectify that decision from 1967 because frankly it's bloody insulting".

(L to R) Johnson, Russell, Ritchie, Morris

For the warrior monk costumes, even though no monk in history has ever worn such a design or colour combination, the designs used in the animation stayed faithful. For the lamas' robes, which were a bit dull in the original, they took inspiration from another Doctor Who story featuring Buddhism, Jon Pertwee's swansong Planet of the Spiders: the colour scheme is based on the costume worn by the character Cho-Je in that later story. Script and designs are sent to Digitoonz Media & Entertainment, the animators based in India, and they create the finished product in small chunks (you might get 15 seconds a day if you're lucky according to Russell, although the longest sequence was the 1.5 minute section where Victoria feigns being poisoned to escape from a locked room, and that took ages to download, the file size was phenomenal). There was a brief to everyone working on the animation not to view the surviving episode two for reference. The six episodes of the animation had to all be of a piece and work as a coherent whole; anyway, the approach and techniques of animation are very different to live action. Part of the reason why it took so long to get The Abominable Snowmen finished was that the same team were asked to do Galaxy 4 simultaneously, to which they couldn't really say no. Russell said that it was accomplished at the cost of only one nervous breakdown, which he counted as a win. He was generally quite dismissive of  Galaxy 4 as a choice for an animation because of the quality of the story ("Who would want to make that? Who would want to watch it?!"), but Russell and his team created something more than adequate (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this post for more details).

Note the typo

There was time for only a couple of audience questions. Doctor Who historian Jeremy Bentham asked a question about the new look for Padmasambhava. Russell said his inspiration was EC Comics character the Crypt Keeper, rather than from Scooby Doo as I'd thought. He believed that the actor Wolfe Morris's build wasn't right for the script's description of the desiccated guru, so they diverged from faithfulness at this point. They may also have embellished with the scene towards the end when the artificially long-lived Padmasambhava, freed from the Great Intelligence, disintegrates. The surviving off screen photos don't confirm either way, and memories differ as to whether the scene was excised from the final version in 1967 or not. Russell's memory from originally watching the story is that the disintegration moment was in there, and Bentham, also of an age to have seen it first time round, agreed with his recall. The final audience question was niche, but to be fair the questioner prefaced his question with a disclaimer about its potential to invoke a rolling of the eyes. Why do Gary Russell's team's animations show Patrick Troughton with green eyes when he had blue eyes in real life? Russell explained that he'd asked all of Troughton's co-stars what their Doctor's eye colour was, and was told by all of them that they were blue-green. This was research long before the animations for his novel Invasion of the Cat People ("It's terrible" its author added as an aside, sotto voce), where the eye colour was a plot point. He chose the green rather than the blue end of the range in the animations because it would make the Doctor seem more alien and would stand out from the rest of the cast that would be mainly blue and brown-eyed. Earlier in the panel discussion, Russell confirmed that this is their last animation for now, and they're not working on any more. This was expected, but still a shame. He did add, though, that the animated releases to date have come in waves with gaps in between: "These things are cyclical". On the evidence of The Abominable Snowmen, and all the wonderful animations of recent years, I hope the next wave isn't too long.

In Summary:

It's not abominable. It's mostly pretty bominable, actually, particularly now one can see it move.