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!

The Time Warrior

Chapter The 144th, where the Doctor is back in time for a new companion.

Plot:

UNIT bring the Doctor in to investigate as scientists from a top secret research establishment keep going missing. Also investigating is a young reporter Sarah Jane Smith, who has blagged her way in by pretending to be her Aunt Lavinia, an esteemed virologist. The Doctor rigs up a gizmo which shows that someone is travelling through time to kidnap the scientists and steal equipment, dragging them back to the middle ages. He follows their time signal in the TARDIS, unaware that Sarah has stowed away aboard. A Sontaran, Linx, has crash landed and done a deal with a local robber baron, Irongron. In exchange for anachronistic weapons, Irongron gives Linx shelter, and Linx repairs his spaceship with help from the kidnapped scientists.

Sarah gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks the Doctor is the one helping Irongron. With soldiers from the nearby castle of a local nobleman, who fears attack by Irongron, they kidnap the Doctor. After the Doctor explains, they join forces to repel Irongron's attack, then sneak into Irongron's castle, drugging his men's food with a sleeping potion. They send all the scientists back to their proper time, but cannot stop the launch sequence of Linx's mended spaceship. Linx kills Irongron, and a stray arrow kills Linx in the ship, when it goes into the probic vent on the back of his neck - a Sontaran's only weakness. Linx collapses onto the lift-off button, meaning the ship's engines will fire and destroy the castle. Everyone else escapes, and the weapons Linx built get destroyed in the blast. Sarah Jane joins the Doctor in the TARDIS to travel back to her own time and place.

Context:

Back to random selection from the whole of the Doctor Who TV oeuvre, after a slightly more guided trip to the North Pole for Last Christmas. I watched this stripped an episode a day over four days in the Chrimbo Limbo, the days between Christmas and New Year's Day. All the family (the Better Half, boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) were up for it, and watched along with me. Everyone was on hols from school or work, and we took a break for 25 minutes every day from indulging in the usual preoccupations of the period: pondering over whether it's still acceptable to have the Christmas lights on (yes), to have the seasonal playlist still in rotation (that's a no apparently - I was outvoted), not knowing what day it is, and having the usual panic waking up every morning that one has probably missed a bin day and might have to wait two  weeks to have the mounds of wrapping paper, wine bottles and uneaten sprouts taken away. The Time Warrior is an apt story to watch at this time, as it was originally broadcast starting just before Christmas 1973, crossing into the New Year period of 1974 by its final episode. It was viewed from the DVD but with the - frankly unnecessary - updated CGI effects switched off, as nature intended. 

First time round:

Having been far too young to watch The Time Warrior on its BBC1 debut broadcast in 1973 / 74, this was one of very many 'classic series' stories that I caught for the first time on VHS. This release was more notable than a lot of those other tapes, though. It was one of the earliest, before distribution was reliable, before future releases were even advertised (or at least they weren't advertised anywhere the young me would ever have seen them). As such, back then, one stumbled across them - they were always a find. This particular find (on a Saturday in 1989 in the Bognor Regis WHSmiths) was particularly special, as a head-spinning three new titles hit the shelves at once. I've written about this moment in the First Time Round sections of the blog posts on the other two stories that became available that day, The Ark in Space, and The Daleks. The Time Warrior, like most of the stories released at that time, had its episodes stitched together into one feature-length omnibus. Most of those stories, though, were later re-released on VHS during the 1990s unedited; for some reason, The Time Warrior never was, so it was only when the DVD came out eighteen years later that I first got to enjoy the full Time Warrior experience.

Reaction:

Every story of Jon Pertwee's five year tenure in the title role of Doctor Who was deliberately planned to have a hook, a big audience-grabbing unique selling point. Each of these bagged the series opener the cover of that week's Radio Times. In the first year, it was a new Doctor, and the show being on TV in colour for the first time. In the following years, there was the launch of a new Master villain, the return of the Daleks after many years, and the first ever story to bring back old Doctors alongside the current model. For the eleventh season, which started late in 1973, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks must have felt hard-pressed to come up with another new idea. In the end, they went with the Doctor travelling back in time. Now, or in the early years, this wouldn't be seen as remarkable at all, but in 1973 time travel backwards hadn't been done for a while: a couple of brief interludes only in the previous seven years, no whole stories. Doctor Who was by then a show about space monsters - either the Doctor went to them, or they came to him - not meeting Kings and Queens and other historical personages. Whether reintroducing this was a sufficient hook for the new series is debatable (the Radio Times cover completely ignored this aspect of the story, for example), but it worked as a way to expand the canvas and allow different types of stories to be told.

What writer Robert Holmes makes of the brief is deceptively simple. It is probably the epitome of what fans refer to as a 'romp'. It's a slightly nebulous label, so there's room for differences of opinion, but to my mind a Doctor Who romp is one where the tone is quite light-hearted but energetic, the stakes aren't that high, and the main aim is fun rather than scares, action or drama. As such, it's a very difficult style to do well. Make it too low stakes and light-hearted, and it doesn't look like it's being taken seriously enough, which means people watching don't care, which means they don't have fun, defeating the point. Holmes was a craftsman, and well versed in writing Doctor Who by this point, having written one a year on average since Patrick Troughton was the Doctor, so finds the right balance. He creates an interesting enough premise: the present is being invaded by the past, because a futuristic space villain has crash-landed in Earth history. He thereby distills everything about Doctor Who into these four episodes, and introduces a new sub-genre. The pseudo historical, as it is called in old school Who fan circles, features an alien menace terrorising a historical setting. Like most story styles it was tried as a one-off experiment in an early William Hartnell outing (The similarly named The Time Meddler in Doctor Who's second ever season), but from this point on it gets used regularly, particularly by Holmes himself in such stories as Pyramids of Mars and The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

Not content with sub-genre innovation, Holmes also creates an enduring new alien race, perhaps the last great returning monster of the classic series, the Sontarans. A jingoistic species with an overriding passion for war is another deceptively simple premise, but Holmes makes it work because he writes it (and Kevin Lindsay as Linx plays it) straight as an arrow. The (excellent) design of the creature belies its nature, being squat and potato-headed, but not a figure of fun despite some taunts from the medieval bandit characters; the sense in the script is that Linx knows he may appear ridiculous to these primitives, and uses it to his advantage, taking Irongron by surprise, for example, and besting him in one scuffle. The subplot of Linx perverting the course of history by providing weapons to Irongron that are too advanced for the current undeveloped society is nice enough in itself, but is also interesting for how it illuminates the Sontaran's character. Even past the point where he no longer needs to bother, he still follows through on his side of the bargain - he has a sense of honour and integrity. Even though Irongron isn't particularly interested, Linx continues working on a fighting robot for him too, and it's clear that he's doing this because he loves it! He loves making weapons and stirring up conflict. It's an honesty of purpose that's never quite recaptured in the future Sontaran stories, until maybe the new series appearances.

As well as expertly treading the fine line regarding the tone of the story, and creating a new story type, and a new monster, Holmes has to introduce a new companion. And what a companion it is: Sarah Jane Smith. She doesn't quite arrive fully-formed, it's a slightly embryonic version of the character that will endure for almost forty more years, but it's still a very impressive debut. Sarah is self-possessed, clever, resourceful, indefatigable, and won't let anyone push her around. Elizabeth Sladen performs the role with gusto, managing to make every line seem lovable, even when the - middle-aged male - production team give Sarah material that's veering towards shrill and hectoring. Pertwee has an instant rapport with his new co-star; his performance here is charming and unforced, with all the irritating, patronising bits from previous years gone, either because they weren't relevant to this new relationship (unlike the more 'mother hen' role he took up with regard to previous companion Jo Grant) or perhaps because he was getting better at it after four years. The guest characters are all written and played perfectly for the romp style too; larger than life, yes, but still expertly calibrated. David Daker as Irongron, particularly, is having enormous fun, but so is the audience watching him. It's a shame he gets killed at the end. But everyone is great: Jeremy Bulloch as Hal the Archer, Alan Rowe as the pallid, worried Edward, and pre-Eastenders June Brown as his wife. My favourite is Donald Pelmear as Professor Rubeish, a wonderful comic performance.

Connectivity: 

Both stories were first broadcast starting in December. Both feature actors (Kevin Lindsay, Dan Starkey) who have appeared multiple times in the show as Sontarans, as well as occasionally in other roles.

Deeper Thoughts:

The end of 'The Tens'. The end of this decade, like the last one, has caught me by surprise. It's only very recently that I realised that the end of a ten year block - what to call it, the Teens, the Tens? - was fast approaching, and I remember the end of 2009 taking me similarly unawares. The end of the 1970s or 1980s seemed much more apparent, and much more celebrated, by comparison. I don't know if it's my getting older, or because we're still early in the century (making the naming convention a little tricky) that's the reason for this. As with everything we pattern-seeking humans consider, twentieth-century Doctor Who can get lumped together, and appraised in ten-year chunks; indeed, a very good trio of reference books were released in the 1990s that did exactly this for the previous three decades (The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties, each by David J. Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker; hard to come by now, but thoroughly recommended). Until now, twenty-first century Doctor Who hadn't been going long enough to be similarly treated. Now, it has reached the end of its first full decade, which can be compared to the stories broadcast between 2005 and 2009. You never know, similar books might start being published soon.

The decade started with new Who firmly established after its re-launch five years earlier. The years from 2010 to 2019 would then be about it enduring as that established show once its first major phase came to an end on the very first day of the decade, January 1st 2010, which saw the final David Tennant / Russell T Davies episode, part 2 of The End of Time, broadcast. The departure of such big hitters both in front of and behind the cameras could easily have been the end of the show altogether. But the show carried on to the end of the decade, with the final two years seeing another new phase, with eleven stories broadcast starring Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, under the showrunner-ship of Chris Chibnall. These were bookends, though: the responsibility for the lion's share of the 2010s fell on one man: Steven Moffat. He was the main reason that the show was still on air ten years later. He cast two new actors to the starring role, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, and produced three successful seasons of stories for each. He wrote an astonishing eight Christmas specials, every year from 2010 to 2017.

In this time, the show built on the reach it had had in the previous decade to become a truly global phenomenon; this maybe came at the cost of the size of the UK TV audience - Doctor Who rarely made the ratings top ten as it had the previous decade. TV was increasingly consumed in new ways in the last decade, though, and Doctor Who embraced this, becoming a huge streaming hit (all of the twenty-first century episodes are still available on BBC iplayer). Another new way in which Doctor Who could be consumed during this decade was on the silver screen, with cinema releases for a couple of big episodes. This was all kicked off by the 50th anniversary in 2013, one of the most significant and successful times for Doctor Who in the decade, and a triumph for Moffat on every level.

Doctor Who on home media also evolved over the course of ten years. The regular classic series releases from the previous decade (like The Time Warrior) were coming to an end by the early years of the 2010s. By the end of 2013, all complete stories had come out, the range only running until then because of multiple re-releases. Three more semi-missing stories - two in 2014, and the final ever unreleased scrap in 2015 - stretched things further, but it looked like the days of the shiny disc as distribution method were over. A new all-animated version of The Power of the Daleks was released a year later, but the physical format version seemed secondary to its launch on the BBC Store, an archive streaming service. As it turned out, though, that streaming service was pretty short-lived, whereas the idea of animating stories for physical release looks set to run and run. This, together with the Blu-ray box set range (a well-planned and budgeted attempt to produce the definitive collection of classic Doctor Who) means a shiny disc renaissance, and opens up the possibility of releases for many years to come until - by the end of the next decade, perhaps - every single classic Doctor story might be available for the home shelf, with visuals for all the missing stories. This, of course, can feed in to other platforms too: the recently launched Britbox subscription streaming service put up hundreds of Doctor Who episodes, including some animated ones, on Boxing day, and they are already proving very popular.

On a personal note, the last ten years has seen one final addition to my family (a girl, currently 7 years old), and seen her and her two brothers grow up. They are all still interested in watching Doctor Who with their Mum and Dad, sometimes reluctantly, but usually with joy. Tomorrow, the first episode of Doctor Who in the Twenties will be broadcast, and I hope they'll all be joining me to watch it. In 2020, new Doctor Who stories will still be showing on TV, and innovations will still continue to be made in presenting the old stories for purchase. That's something to celebrate in dark days. So, to you and yours: Happy New Year, and Happy New Decade! 

In Summary:

Simple (deceptively simple), honest-to-goodness fun, in 25-minute long bursts - what a nice way to end the year!

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

Chapter The 93rd, is one that just might be from a golden age.

Plot: 
The Doctor, trying to get new companion Sarah Jane Smith back home, arrives in central London only a few weeks after they were last on Earth, but the city is deserted: Londoners have fled after some menace has spread, and the area's under the control of the military. The two time-travellers get arrested suspected of looting, which is the biggest problem in the evacuated area (with the exception of all the giant lizards that keep popping up only to disappear again). Eventually found and rescued by the Brigadier, the Doctor and Sarah help UNIT to investigate what's causing the dinosaur invasion. Unfortunately, seemingly everyone involved in the investigation except the Doctor, Sarah, the Brig and Benton are part of a conspiracy.

The Doctor goes on the run after being framed as the monster maker (despite there literally being zero evidence against him, except his being caught near a dinosaur, which - given they are popping up in London at random - doesn't amount to a hill of beans smoking gun-wise). Sarah ends up imprisoned in what appears to be a spaceship three month's out from Earth. Benton ends up having to arrest himself. The conspiracy is led by an MP, Sir Charles Grover, who plans to revert the whole of the planet and its population, reversing millions of years, so that he and a group of people (those he's duped into thinking they're on a spacecraft to a new world, when in actual fact they're in a bunker under London) can start humanity off again along a better path. The Doctor stops the plan, just in time, and reverses the polarity on the time manipulation equipment, so Grover and the mad professor helping him are sent back in time on their own.

Context:

The Better Half and I watched from the DVD an episode an evening every so often. For some reason, we kept getting interrupted by other priorities, and this stretched to a number of weeks all told. In the middle of the watch, I squeezed in 10 episodes of The War Games in one evening, before spending another week or so finishing eps. 4-6 of Dinosaurs. Although it was ages ago now, I can remember that we chose to watch the first episode in colour: the DVD uses the clever technique applied to a few other Pertwee episodes that only exist as black and white film of recovering the colour information somehow burnt into each frame. This was the least successful attempt at the process, so the colour version of episode 1 is presented on the disc as a non-default option. To my eye, though, it's perfectly serviceable and doesn't detract (although episode 1's bleak abandoned London lends itself well to a black and white presentation anyway, so one can't really lose).

First-time round:

I missed any showings of Invasion of the Dinosaurs on UK Gold, so it was left to home video to allow me to watch it for the first time. By the time of Doctor Who's 40th anniversary late in 2003, the VHS range was approaching its end. The next range, re-releasing everything on DVD, had already got underway a few years earlier, but the BBC had decided to reward / exploit the loyal fanbase by completing the run on tape nonetheless. Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the final full story released in October of that year, probably left until last just in case they found the first episode in colour, or found a way to colourise it. In the end, it was released with the first episode in black and white. Then, by the time that DVD range was starting to peter out in 2012, Dinosaurs came out in DVD with the aforementioned option to watch it all in colour, and that completed the experience for me. The first season box set of what may turn into a full-blown range of Who Blu Ray re-releases has just come out, but they're starting with season 12, Tom Baker's first, the year after Invasion of the Dinosaurs. This is undoubtedly because that's the first year that is trouble free in terms of missing episodes or missing colour. So, it may be that I've collected my last ever version of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. What a thought!

Reaction

There were many sniggering schoolyard criticisms one could level at the many different series of cartoon franchise Scooby Doo, but the thing that always got me more than anything was a frequent plot standby they used where the baddies invented a photo-realistic holographic technique, but instead of exploiting this for commercial gain, they just used it to scare people away from a minor league smuggling operation based in the abandoned funfair. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, the villains don't just have bleeding edge time manipulation equipment, they also must have engaged some very good set designers and visual effects artists to mock up their pretend spacecraft fleet. And they presumably have invented some kind of workable suspended animation technology too. What a waste of effort just to use all that for a monumental misdirection, while they do an insane scheme to reboot life of Earth.

The first episode famously is titled merely 'Invasion', which was intended at the time to preserve the surprise; watching now, though, it's tempting to think it was just because they didn't want anyone to get their hopes up. The dinosaur models used in this story, and all the different methods of integrating them into the live action, produce results on a scale from 'risible' all the way up to 'laugh out loud funny', but crucially it doesn't harm the action as they are - literally - a side show. It may even enhance it: the dinosaurs are victims, after all, just minding their own business when wrenched out of time. It's quite apt that they are more cute than frightening.

A much bigger problem is how many holes there are in the villains' plot: how did they get everyone, even those who weren't in suspended animation, into the pretend spacecraft without anyone twigging, for example? How were they planning on getting them out again without spoiling the illusion? That this doesn't matter either, really, is testament to the writer Malcolm Hulke's skill in creating character. Everyone has solid enough motivation to keep things on the right side of credible, just about. He pulls the rug out from even the long-term watchers of this era, by making the bad guys motivated by what previously had been the series' number one good guy priorities: the anti-pollution, anti-nuclear, anti-war characters are on the wrong side of the argument in this one. Is is too grand to compare this to Animal Farm? Hulke was none-more-lefty, but he could still write a parable where the world reshaped by those with good intentions rapidly deteriorates to include sinister 're-education' of the individual, and even the threat of execution to weed out the disruptive elements. Just like his work in The War Games and elsewhere in Doctor Who, Hulke is gleefully anti-establishment, whatever that establishment might be.

However one rationalises the holes in the spacecraft subplot, it does give the story its best cliffhanger (episode 3's) where Sarah has woken up and may be three months into deep space. And not just because it's the only cliffhanger that doesn't involve an entire suspension bridge of disbelief on the audience's part that the rubber toy dino on screen is real - it wrong-foots everyone, and comes out of nowhere, though it will be satisfactorily explained later. It doesn't matter either that footage of the Doctor and UNIT is intercut with the spacecraft scenes (a move that has been criticised in the past): we're supposed to see early on that it's all a con. Elizabeth Sladen's performance is very good in the second half of the story, doing her best to wake up the underground sleepers to the truth. In fact, all the performances are top notch: Peter Miles, Martin Jarvis, Noel Johnson; best of all for me is Carmen Silvera's icy turn as Ruth. Director Paddy Russell gets the best out of her cast, and also makes the most from some guerrilla filming in the early hours of the morning, providing episode one its remarkable deserted London scenes.

Connectivity: 

Like The War Games, this one has scripting duties contributed by Malcolm Hulke (writer of Invasion of the Dinosaurs) and Terrance Dicks (its script editor). Also, it's the third story on the trot (including Turn Left) to feature soldiers, an area visited by our heroes that's under martial law, and a plot involving the abuse of time travel.

Deeper Thoughts:
It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Sir Charles Grover, famous environmentalist, author of Last Chance for Man, admired even by the Doctor, let's everyone down. I've often wondered how I would feel if a famous person I really admired, like someone from TV's Doctor Who, was embroiled in some scandal, present or historical. There hasn't been a shortage of questionable Television Centre-based activities by certain persons reported as happening during my childhood in the 70s and 80s, but so far it hasn't involved anyone I really cared deeply about, certainly nobody from Who: mostly, it has to be said, the alleged perps were hardly surprising news at all to anyone who lived through TV of that era, a lot people on the box back then exuded a less than healthy vibe.

The day has now sadly come: it is not a hero of my childhood but of my older years who has besmirched his reputation, such as it was. That person is Steven Patrick Morrissey. His pronouncements have got more and more reactionary of late, but his latest crossed a line, defending as it did the indefensible, and supporting the insupportable. Heaven knows I've stood up for him in the past, like many an obsessive fan (as another hero of mine from that time, Sean Hughes - whose own  reputation took a hit when his obituaries came to be written - said: everyone gets over their Morrissey phase; except for Morrissey, of course). The Moz was misquoted, he was misunderstood, he's playing a persona, it's irony - I trotted out all those lines. Maybe he too always exuded a less than healthy vibe, and I just didn't see it back then.

So, what do I do now? Ignore it? The work is not the same as the creator, of course; but, Morrissey's modus operandi was always to include a lot of himself in his art. Should I get rid of all my albums as Stewart Lee advises? That seems unfair to the people who wrote the music, particularly Johnny Marr. All I can therefore do is feel foolish for my past; but maybe I shouldn't feel too bad. It's only empathy, after all, taken a little too far. Like any bad direction or decision, excessive hero worship starts with something natural, good... or at least understandable. This is why a plot like Malcolm Hulke's Dinosaurs story, despite its being OTT nutso sci-fi, still resonates - the bad guys don't know they're bad guys; they started with a desire to create a better world. Even nationalism, to pick one example, starts off from a desire to protect the ones we know or associate with most. The only way we can understand or counter these dangerous directions is by being open to empathy. If the price of that is that sometimes we feel foolish for singing the praises of a person or idea which turned out not to be as good as we first thought, that's probably a price worth paying.

In Summary:
All in all, it's something of a (temporal) paradox: a story with loads of big flaws, but it's still absolutely excellent. Final word on the matter: KKLAK!

Death to the Daleks

Chapter The 51st, in which the Doctor faces gun-totin' Daleks and a psychotic hose beast.

Plot: 
The TARDIS is forced to land on a seemingly dead planet, where the Doctor and Sarah are confronted by a petrified creature immediately on leaving the ship, and shortly after are stalked by mysterious cloaked locals, one of which manages to get inside the TARDIS. A lot of this is familiar if you’ve ever watched a Terry Nation Dalek story, but the TARDIS team haven’t had that pleasure, so they act surprised. They meet a military team, who have similarly suffered a power drain in their space ship, and become trapped there. They are looking for a rare element to help cure a space plague. Daleks arrive, just in time for the end of episode 1, claiming to be on a similar mission. A member of the military team is called Tarrant. (Regular Terry Nation Dalek story watchers are shouting “Bingo!” at this point.)

The twist is that with no power for their energy guns the Daleks have to enter an uneasy alliance with the humans. But then they work out they can fit themselves instead with bullet guns, and the twist is forgotten about. The Doctor and Sarah Jane defeat the Daleks, destroy the source of the power drain and everybody leaves. There’s also some Von Daniken-esque stuff, and a trek through a set of booby traps (including a floor… of Death!).

Context:

Watched on DVD, an episode a time spread over several evenings, with all the kids (boys of 10 and 7, girl of 4) interested, but the Better Half, not so much. A lot of criticisms of the music from eldest boy, but he kept watching. I expected mockery of the lame cliffhanger at the end of episode 3 where, because of the episode under-running, the show ends at an arbitrary point when the Doctor spots a pattern on the floor of the Exxilon city; but, at least in my younger son's case, it unexpectedly created some tension as he chanted "Don't step on the floor, it's a trap, it's a trap" and then satisfaction as he exclaimed "Told ya!" when the credits rolled.

First-time round:

The blog’s random travels are slowly picking off the stories that formed the milestones on mine and the BBC’s gradual path towards a Doctor Who VHS collection. Before my family owned a VCR, the original few Doctor Who videos had been released, each with a wince-inducing price tag; but later, once we had the necessary machinery, they began to be re-released within my budget. The first to be re-released in this way was Revenge of the Cybermen, then a couple more including Pyramids of Mars. The fourth release at the affordable price of £9.99, the first to debut at that price, and the fourth one I ever purchased, was Death to the Daleks. It's release was felt important enough for a launch event at the Virgin Megastore in August 1987 where Jon Pertwee was pictured surrounded by some frightening Doctor Who fans who had made themselves look less frightening by dressing up as fun Doctor Who monsters.

Reaction:
This story has a bad reputation, but you don't need to even know that for your judgement to be coloured: if the leading man acts though he's irritated by proceedings, as Pertwee mostly does here, then it's hard not to be affected as a viewer. But it's really not fair, as the story isn't half bad. Pertwee is well known to have disliked doing Dalek stories, and he's not gelling that well with new girl Liz Sladen as companion Sarah Jane, who is sidelined through most of the action and replaced by a one-off supporting character, a little grey fellah (with whom Pertwee has much better chemistry); plus, the writer Terry Nation was famously frugal with story elements, reusing the same tropes over and over again, as if they were rationed; nonetheless, some interesting ideas and visuals do slip through.

Some judicious decisions made by the director Michael Briant lift the location from being just another quarry: the day-for-night beginning sequence where a spaceman has an 'arrowing experience, the Exxilons' outfits being colour-matched to the terrain, allowing for some nice moments where they pop up unexpectedly from a camouflaged niche. The modelwork of the city isn't too shabby either, particularly with the ever present throbbing radiophonia of the pulsing beacon. Even though it's barmy, the scene with the claustrophobic Dalek that when crowded by a few extras self destructs (!) is worth it for the following scene where the natives dance round the burning prop like it's the Wicker Man. There's one tiny moment too when Pertwee forgets he's having a terrible time: his face lights up with joy as he watches the Dalek and Root battle, as if it's the Wimbledon Men's final or Act V scene II of Hamlet.

Another divisive element that I love, is the music. I love it: both the saxophone quartet stuff and the chanting, it's all great. Carey Blyton was an eccentric genius, and every one of his three scores for Doctor Who is a favourite. If only the characters were as excitingly different. But no, they are straight out of stock,and it's knock-down stock at that. The MSC team are the most effete bunch of marines you're likely to meet, and their personalities range all the way from A to A flat: the solid dependable old one, the solid dependable young one, the solid dependable older one, the woman. And Galloway. Clearly, the script, actor and director are trying to make something interesting out of the untrustworthy character of Galloway, but his behaviour is too inconsistent, and the subplot is never given sufficient room to explore what makes him tick.

The biggest narrative question that occurs is: why don't the Daleks kill the humans once they have guns again? They tried to shoot them on sight when they first landed, and there's no sneaky deal they do thereafter that requires their grumbling bipedal partners. At a push, being generous, I suppose that the Exxilons are too primitive to set the bombs that the Daleks need to blow up the beacon and restore power, and these Daleks can't fly up and do it themselves: it truly is a lot less bother when they can hover.

Connectivity: 

Both contain metal foes, at least one soldier, a grey haired Doctor with one female companion, and… that’s about it.

Deeper Thoughts:
Malfunctioning tech as metaphor for the Arab Spring or something. Even though it was a stretch to think of any connections between it and The Caretaker, the last story covered by the blog, Death to the Daleks has some remarkable similarities to the latest (at the time of writing) TV offering, Smile. Both focus on a futuristic and possibly sentient city, built for inhabitants that it has out-evolved, which becomes self-sustaining, employing defence mechanisms that turn on those intended inhabitants. The main difference was stark, though, and that was how each city was treated by our hero: Capaldi's all for accepting this colony of bots both nano- and emoji- as a new species, and encourages the humans to negotiate a peace with them as equals; Pertwee says "I think the time has come to do something about this city", rolls up his sleeves, and kills it.

Does this difference reflect changing feelings about the threats posed by technology? I don't think so. In the nearly 40 years between the two shows, it's become more possible that something akin to the events depicted could come true. Automation has already turned my regular bank clerk or supermarket checkout cashier into a robot, and the Internet of Things has made anything from one's fridge to one's lightbulbs hackable. It's not too far-fetched to conceive that right now a Silicon Valley billionaire is somewhere building a self-protecting robot-maintained mansion that will one day eat him. If we don't anticipate nervously a future coexistence with some Artificial Intelligence, perhaps already in development, then we probably should. Or our children should.

The robots won't necessarily want to kill us; closer to the mark is the threat connoted by that emoji-bot's pixelated eyes cha-chinging into dollar signs. How's the economy going to have to be shaped to sustain billions of unproductive humans while the machines do all the work? Maybe we ought to start prepping the Space Arks after all, but to escape our tech competition, not to take it with us. [Death to the Daleks scores better re: plot holes, though, with it's typical 1973 obsession with power cuts helpfully explaining where the self-sustaining technology gets its energy supply, drained from passing spaceships; no such explanation is forthcoming for the 2017 bots - who was paying their lecky bill?]

So, if it's not any dent in the technical feasibility, what is it that's changed? The Doctor of Death to the Daleks is very sure that the city is a drag factor. He's certain that humanity will flourish without its malign influence (alright, not humanity, but a close enough analogue); he doesn't stop to think that the city might flourish without people's malign influence, wandering round it, swapping circuits and making it go all nail varnish on expanded polystyrene. Faith in humankind to be the good guys has become much less the default since Death to the Daleks. It was already far from absolute in 1973, and most of the regular writers in Pertwee's time (Robert Holmes, Barry Letts, Robert Sloman and particularity Malcolm Hulke) were much more questioning of man's primacy than Terry Nation, for all the hard-boiled cynicism to which he seems to aspire. In 2017, it would be impossible to be so idealistic. Neither story, though, can take the final imaginative step - the malfunctioning tech in both stories is codependent: obsessed with our happiness, or grooming us to take over as its ultimate control node. I fear it's too much to hope in real life that the machines will care about us that much, when they eventually rise up and take over. 

In Summary:

More fun than a power cut.

Planet of the Spiders

 Chapter The Fourth, the first (and last) of the Pert.

Plot:

Washed-up salesman C. Lupton, bent on power, dabbles in Buddhist ceremonies at a meditation centre, opening a route to Earth for some giant psy-powered arachnids from Metebelis Three. They seek a blue crystal the Doctor once stole from that planet to aid them in their domination of the universe. The Doctor has to face up to his fear of bad green-screen and ends up regenerating due to radioactive 'fringing'. 

Context:

This was the longest story for the blog so far, so I watched the DVD an episode or two per day over about a week, with different members of the family joining me at different times. The idea was to give everyone a break, but my two eldest, after watching the final episodes, begged to see the ones they'd missed.

No plot holes were spotted as such, but my better half was incensed that Mike Yates got off scott free after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. I can see her point: he was part of a conspiracy to wipe out almost every human being in existence; being sentenced to a couple of weeks in a hippy retreat doesn't cut it.

First-time round:

The VHS came out early in 1991 on the same day as City of Death - my first time seeing either of them, and - excitement alert - Spiders was the first double pack video case; prior to this, for longer stories, you got two single boxes Sellotaped together. From memory, I bought both stories on their first day of release at Volume One in Worthing (the very same place that nearly spoilt the TV Movie for me five years later), and raced home to put them on, probably at a time I was supposed to be at sixth form college learning something. I can't remember which of the two I watched first, but I imagine I agonised about it.

Reaction:

I thought I knew Planet of the Spiders. Before I even pressed 'Play' I had my clever-clever summing up line ready ("Eight legs = good, Two legs = bad, Six episodes = two too long"). Then, I started watching. Admittedly this was spread out a bit, but still compressed compared to how the serial was originally shown. I was waiting for the moment where it dragged or came to a standstill or went pear-shaped. And I'm still waiting. Yes, the chase in episode 2 is a bit silly, but it does sum up the Jon Pertwee era nicely (i.e. it's got a comedy tramp and a helicopter in it) and when we finally get to Metebelis Three, it's a bit cramped and drab; but these are quibbles, and neither section was as bad in reality as it was in my preconceptions.

The rest is absolutely cracking stuff: episode 1 draws together themes and plots from the last few years expertly, with just the right amount of knowing humour, and then throws the viewer into this final exciting stretch to tie it all up. The regulars are all served well by the script, and give their best. Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier is on particularly sparkling form, eyeing up belly-dancers and getting bashful about his activities in Brighton hotels. Jon Pertwee avoids the arrogant and irritating lapses he could sometimes be guilty of in this period; he doesn't patronise his companion or any member of the mostly superb guest cast.

Of those, highest glory goes to John Kane as Tommy; there's still (perhaps deliberately as misdirection) a hint of standard-issue Pertwee comedy yokel early on, but ultimately the writing and performance go far beyond that, and create with sensitivity something rare for 20th Century Doctor Who: a true emotional centre to the narrative. One can't help but care for Tommy and what he goes through more than anyone in, say,  Arc of Infinity. His line "Tommy's learning to read, my Mum bought me a book" gets me every time.

A Buddhist theme works for a regeneration story much better than the Christian imagery of the TV Movie, with the Doctor literally being reincarnated as a new man after coming to terms with his bad karma. It also gives the story a unique visual identity, and intriguing actions and motivations for its villains. John Dearth is excellent, as are all the Spider voice artists. The scene where Lupton turns the tables on his spider, confounding our expectations, is another highlight.

As a Russell T Davies fan, it's perhaps not surprising that I enjoy this; the Barry Letts / Terrance Dicks years are the prototype for RTD's new Who. No other era in the 20th century had season finales that built on plot and character arcs, but it's all here, and young Russell was clearly watching back then and taking notes. I'm consequently led to musing idly whether K'anpo/Cho-Je was called back to Gallifrey to fight in the time war. Big Finish have probably covered it. (K'anpo/Cho-Je is an awfully clumsy way to have to refer to the character; given that he was the Doctor's teacher he should have been called The Professor or The Lecturer, or something similarly aligned to the naming convention of Time Lord academic rankings.)

I'm not saying there aren't flaws: Sarah's involvement in the plot hinges on meditation being hip enough for her to write about in Metropolitan magazine, but it's 1973 (or even 1980) and really TM's popularity had peaked in 1967 around when John Lennon and George Harrison did The Frost Programme. The cliffhangers are mostly awful - they went to great lengths in editing to keep the ending of episode 5 intact, but it's pretty humdrum, and there must have been the option to end on the much more dramatic reveal that Sarah is under the control of the Queen Spider. There are quite a lot of opportunities to play spot the unconvincing stand-in for Pertwee. And an ending with the Doctor having to react alone to a big green-screen (probably actually yellow, but you know what I mean) never works, even with New series resources (cf. The Satan Pit and The Rings of Akhaten).

Connectivity:

Another regeneration story with a big chase scene; and some more tasteful use of people's deeply held beliefs as set dressing for camp sci-fi nonsense.

Deeper Thoughts:

Does the Doctor really have a greed for knowledge? I don't have extensive awareness of Buddhism, I'm only going on what is in this story, so forgive me if I offend. While it works for Planet of the Spiders, in general it seems a lousy credo for Doctor Who. From what is presented to us, the Doctor must accept that his greed for knowledge, so called, has directly instigated the events of the story, and so he must sacrifice himself to put things right. It's neatly done, as the Doctor returns the original crystal that he 'stole', and in so doing defeats the big bad and closes the circle. Meanwhile Tommy is the only person who seems impervious to the spider zapping, because his "innocence [is] his shield".

I'm not convinced, though, that the Doctor has a greed for knowledge. Greed suggests excess, and can there be such a thing? The Doctor may have been overzealous taking the crystal in the first place, but it subsequently helped many people, and was instrumental in saving the day a couple of times. Even the death of Professor Clegg was not just research for its own sake, but part of an experiment aimed at helping him and others with latent psychic powers (poor Clegg, destroyed after communing with blue power - there's a lesson there somewhere).

And taken to it's logical conclusion, the story seems to promote something deeply anti-intellectual; according to this philosophy, Tommy would have better off as he was - a pure innocent. This goes against the grain of the programme's original educational remit and its development as a story of exploration, engagement and - unavoidably - picking sides. Staying true to the season 11 finale, season 12 would have found Tom Baker doing nothing but meditating alongside Mike Yates and The Lecturer, the Giant Robot would have nuked Earth after only 4 episodes, and that would have been terrible... imagine a season of Doctor Who only lasting four episodes. Even in the darkest of days we got 14.

In Summary:

After some meditation, I realise it transcends its reputation.