The Invasion

Chapter the 328th, re: UNIT, and it feels so good.

Plot:

After narrowly avoiding a missile attack on the dark side of the Moon, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Earth sometime in the late 20th century (we could argue forever about exactly when). The TARDIS is on the blink and becomes invisible. To fix it, the Doctor needs to work on some circuits, and trying to get help with this embroils him in the machinations of a global electronics corporation, International Electromatics. The head of this company is Tobias Vaughn, and he's in league with the Cybermen planning an invasion of the Earth. The TARDIS team meet Isobel Watkins, an aspiring photographer in swinging 60s (or 70s or possibly even 80s) London; her uncle went to work for IE and hasn't been seen since. Investigating this, the Doctor and Jamie are picked up by UNIT, a military taskforce run by the Colonel Lethbridge Stewart that they previously met fighting against the Yeti in the London Underground, who has now been promoted to Brigadier. UNIT has been keeping tabs on IE and Vaughn: people who have gone in to IE headquarters have come out changed, under Cyber control. There are also mysterious extra circuits in IE devices, and the Doctor can't immediately discern their purpose.

Vaughn is planning to double-cross the Cybermen, and is using Professor Watkins for this purpose. The Professor has invented a prototype teaching machine that provokes emotions in the user; Vaughn kidnaps Isobel and Zoe to coerce Watkins into turning his device into an anti-Cyberman weapon. The Doctor, Jamie and UNIT rescue the two women, but Vaughn bluffs the Professor and he finishes the job. UNIT then rescue the Professor before Vaughn can mass produce the machine. The Cyber army are hidden in the sewer system of London, and Isobel, Jamie and Zoe almost get killed trying to get photographic evidence of their presence. The invasion begins when a hypnotic signal, boosted by the hidden circuits in IE equipment, takes over the populace (the Doctor, UNIT and Co have a method of resisting the signal). The Cybermen emerge from the sewers and attack. The Doctor goes to the IE headquarters and persuades Vaughn that he can't control the Cybermen. They use the Professor's device to fight their way to the IE transmitter, with UNIT battling the Cybermen around them. Vaughn is killed, but transmission of the hypnotic signal is switched off. There are a tense few minutes while everyone waits to see if a missile will destroy the Cyber ship on the dark side of the moon before it can launch an attack on Earth. It does. Later, after the Doctor has mended the TARDIS circuits, the TARDIS team leave for new adventures.

Context:

The random number generator that dictates the order in which I blog Doctor Who stories indicated that it was time to cover my final black-and-white 1960s story, my final story with episodes missing from the archives, and - potentially - my final Cyberman story. I watched the version from the DVD, which has animated first and fourth episodes paired with the surviving soundtracks. I viewed the story spaced out over about two weeks of early May, accompanied by the Better Half for the early episodes. As this is one of her favourite eras of the show, and she was intrigued by the animation, I was able to persuade her to watch at first. Once the animated episodes were over, she lost interest and left me to watch the rest alone. 

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 Doctor's televisual era, with the second Doctor joining the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors, to make it 11 on the 'done' pile so far. It also marks the completion of another season with 37 completed out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

I first saw The Invasion when it was released on VHS in 1993. It was the first tape released - in a range that had started a good few years before in the mid-1980s - that was presented as a self-contained story but had episodes missing because they were no longer in the BBC's archive. Starting a couple of years earlier, there had been tapes that collected together orphaned Who episodes within a documentary framing; these, though, had made no effort to contextualise the surviving material within the overall narrative. The Invasion plugged the gaps in the same way as the 1991 VHS release of Shada, which had sections that were unfinished rather than lost: an actor from the story (in the case of The Invasion, this was Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney) gave a brief to-camera precis of what the viewer had missed. It's fair to say that Courtney's links were not detailed (his material lasted three minutes, and that included credits and a preamble where Courtney introduces himself and the character of the Brig). My first opportunity to experience the two missing episodes fully (or as fully as then possible) was in November 2004 when their audio, alongside that for the other extant episodes, was released on CD as part of a Cyberman box set. Finally, I got to see the two episodes with moving pictures when the aforementioned DVD, with animation plugging the gaps, was released in November 2006.

Reaction:

Doctor Who is famously the show with the flexible format that can go anywhere and anywhen, telling any kind of story. Equally famously though, it is a show that exists to serve a broad audience (it was brought into being in 1963 to keep all ages amused between sport and pop programming on a Saturday night, and was still performing this role in mid-May 2025 when one Ncuti Gatwa episode nestled in the BBC1 schedules between the year's FA Cup Final and Eurovision Song Contest). Throughout its history, the programme has thus swung between the experimental and the crowd-pleasingly formulaic. The Invasion comes during such a swing. Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, who were effectively co-producers by this point, had taken over gradually from the previous producer / script editor team of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. With input from a scientific advisor Kit Pedlar, Lloyd and Davis had hit upon a successful formula for Doctor Who that had been used increasingly throughout Patrick Troughton's time as the Doctor: a base under siege by a monster of the week. By the season before The Invasion, this template was used for all but one story, with Yeti, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and sentient seaweed all getting a chance or two to kill or take over members of isolated, locked-in communities one by one before the Doctor defeated them. The formula had served its purpose and then some, and it was definitely time for a change. The first two stories of Troughton's third and final season preceding The Invasion were wildly different, both from what went before and from each other. But with experiment comes risk. Sherwin and Bryant wanted to create the certainty of a new winning formula, and The Invasion was a trial for an approach that they wanted to apply to every story from the next season onwards.

Though the storyline for The Invasion came from Kit Pedlar, and there are a few links to the most recent previous Cyberman adventure The Wheel In Space (the metal meanies use of a signal to control humans, and our heroes use of depolarisers worn at the back of the neck to combat this, are callbacks to that story), it is much more focussed on the future shape of Doctor Who than the past. The action doesn't take place on alien planets or in space, it's set on Earth, with the monsters coming to us; the characters aren't stuck in one base represented by a big set in Television Centre, but able to roam to many different places, many of them outdoors and filmed on location. The Doctor has a team to support him in banishing large-scale invasions too big to be handled just by him and the couple of friends with whom he tended to travel: UNIT was born. Leading this team was the Lethbridge-Stewart character, promoted to Brigadier, reused from a popular story of the previous season The Web of Fear. The Web of Fear - directed, like The Invasion, by Douglas Camfield - was very much a base under siege story, but had one key action sequence (the attack by Yeti in Covent Garden) that inspired many similar set pieces in The Invasion. Like in Web, there is a significant military presence in terms of both soldiers and hardware. The story world is expanded beyond the parochial, though: rather than the troops being from the British army as they were in Web, these are a United Nations taskforce (the story even involves an offscreen Russian missile team) with an investigative remit that allows for some espionage as well as shooting and blowing things up. The set-up has lots of potential, and would serve as the model for a lot of the Jon Pertwee era stories. It's not without drawbacks, though.

The importance of the Doctor and his companions is diluted by being part of a bigger team. Jamie is missing throughout the latter part of the story; part of this is because the actor was on holiday for an episode, but even when Fraser Hines is present in the studio, his character spends the best part of a whole episode asleep. His usual role of being the Doctor's minder isn't needed when the Doctor has the assistance of his own army. Early on, though, when the protagonists are more in investigative mode, there's some fun to be had in the sequences where Jamie and henchman Packer (played mostly for comedy by Peter Halliday) indulge in one-upmanship, squabbling like a pair of children. The Troughton Doctor too seems a bit diminished by becoming part of a professional investigation outfit; his usual schtick is to lure his enemies into a false sense of security by appearing to be bumbling and absent minded, but he can't really do this when he's in a role of expert advisor. There's the odd nice moment smuggled in - the Doctor undercutting tense sequences by stopping to play cards with Jamie, or posing for photographs - but in general, he just has to be serious and professional, which doesn't fit well. The series would struggle for quite a while in the Jon Pertwee era to square the circle of finding the fallible, human element in a serious establishment organisation: if its creator Sydney Newman was right, and Doctor Who needs a kid to make mistakes and get into trouble, why would UNIT hire such a person? Nepotism was the answer they finally decided upon, with Jo Grant having secured a job at UNIT because of a powerful relative.

In The Invasion, it is left to the character of Isobel Watkins to trip up herself and others into jeopardy, but she isn't sympathetic enough to provide the necessary heart. Her romance with a UNIT captain isn't given much air time, and doesn't convince when it is. The script also tends to patronise her and the other younger characters. The Brig casually disregards Isobel's evident knowledge of photography, and later refers to her, Zoe and Jamie as "crazy kids" when they venture into the sewers to secure evidence of the Cybermen. The Brig has only been involved in one and a half alien invasions, whereas Jamie and Zoe see off monsters every week; he should show them more respect. A lot of the early part of the story focusses on the fate of Isobel's uncle Professor Watkins, taken captive by Tobias Vaughn; once he's rescued, though, he disappears from the narrative - he's last seen early in the penultimate episode after having been shot in the leg, and - unless I blinked and missed it - he's never mentioned again. It's an odd paradox; The Invasion has too much going on to fully complete all characters' subplots, yet there is only six episodes worth of story here stretched to fill eight. On VHS, as mentioned above, it was reduced to a six episode story; annoyingly, the missing two episodes are from early on when the plot's put together fine. It's in the latter half that it falls apart. The ending is structured oddly, with the climax of the fight against Cybermen in the IE factory, including main villain Tobias Vaughn's death, happening too early. There's then a lengthy sequence of characters standing around waiting to hear about whether a missile has destroyed the Cybermen's ship in orbit. The sequences should have been swapped around, or - better - the missile could have been dispensed with altogether. The Doctor and Vaughn have a device that emits a Cyberman-destroying signal, plus a big transmitter to beam that signal into space; it would make more sense for that to be the mechanism that saves the day.

There's a lot of good stuff in here too, even later on: for example, the famous sequence of the hypnotic signal taking people over across London, and the Cybermen then emerging from manholes and strutting about near St. Paul's Cathedral. The special sound created for that signal and for other sequences like the revivification of dormant Cybermen is perfect, as is Don Harper's score. Little touches too, such as the repetition of Packer being summoned and appearing on a monitor, only for this to be twisted: the final time Vaughn calls for Packer, the scary blank face of a Cyberman appears on the monitor instead. This design of the Cybermen is probably the best of the 1960s, and the decision to hold them back for the first half of the story is a good one. The character of Vaughn is a joy to watch. Kevin Stoney creates a silky smooth psychopath, with occasional flashes of hysteria and anger. The way he says Packer's name is so fun, and so easy to imitate. Many a villainous character in Doctor Who's history has tried to ally themselves with the Cybermen, thinking they can turn the tables on them; Vaughn comes closest to pulling it off, with only Professor Watkins dragging his heels meaning Vaughn runs out of time to mass produce a machine to kill Cybermen (I was almost rooting for him to succeed). Though not a part of the original presentation, of course, it's worth noting that the two animated episodes are gorgeous, the art in character designs and backgrounds is probably the best ever created for a Doctor Who missing episode animation project. I had a slight twinge of disappointment both times the story returned to live action.

Connectivity:

The Invasion and Lux both feature the antagonists using entertainment technology to assist them in invading Earth: Lux uses movie projection equipment to corporealise, the Cybermen and their ally Tobias Vaughn use circuits in products like Jamie's transistor radio to send a hypnotising signal, quelling any resistance from the population. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Animated Meanderings. The Invasion started something by creating UNIT in 1968, and then started something again in 2007 - it was the inaugural story using animation to represent episodes that were missing from the story (because they were missing from the archives). As mentioned in the First Time Round section above, Doctor Who initially made do with brief linking synopses delivered by actors from the original story, specially filmed many years later. Sometimes these were in character, sometimes not. Occasionally, things got a bit more sophisticated with surviving audio recordings and off-screen photographs put together to form reconstructions of missing episodes (as happened for The Ice Warriors and The Tenth Planet) but often they fell back on that original approach of brief linking material (The Crusade, The Reign of Terror) even to the very end of the VHS range. These approaches were also only felt to be viable to replace two episodes of a story maximum, and usually only if the surviving episodes outnumbered the reconstructed / summarised ones. The Crusade VHS release in 1999, with the story split 50/50 between two surviving and two missing episodes was the only exception - this was because an episode of the story had been recently discovered, so half the story was felt to be enough of a draw (even then, though, it was released in a box set with the adjacent complete story The Space Museum). After the UK animation company Cosgrove Hall Studios (who had produced Doctor Who webcast Scream of the Shalka) created animated episodes one and four of The Invasion for its DVD release, the sky was the limit. Animated visuals of missing episodes matched to those surviving soundtracks were much more watchable than a reconstruction, and much more faithful than an actor's brief summary.

Though more possibilities had been opened up, with even the potential for a wholly missing story being released in 100% animated form one day, what happened next for the DVD range and animations was... nothing, for a good long while. There were still plenty of intact adventures to release, and it was six more years before another story had episodes animated, by which time Cosgrove Hall had alas closed down. There were other companies, though. In 2013, either because the range was running out of other classic series stories to release, or because the costs of animating episodes had become more affordable, or both, three stories came out: The Reign of Terror (two episodes animated) in January, The Ice Warriors (two episodes animated) in August, and The Tenth Planet (one episode animated) in October. With its recovered episode old news by 2013, The Crusade did not get similar treatment (it has loads of different characters and locales too, which would make the animation a challenge), but a different 50/50 story was done instead. In early 2014, The Moonbase was released on its own shiny disc. Parts one and three were animated, parts two and four live action. It was the first story that animation allowed to have a release on DVD that had not been a title on VHS. To date, thirteen stories have had their own moment on DVD or Blu-Ray that never got to be centre stage in the video tape days; for only one of these - The Enemy of the World - was this wholly down to the live action episodes being recovered. The remainder have had some or all of their episodes animated for release on disc. Nearly three years on from The Moonbase, The Power of the Daleks was the first wholly missing animated story; a couple of years later, it was followed by The Macra Terror.

By the 2020s, two different teams (one led creatively by Gary Russell, the other by AnneMarie Walsh) were working away, with The Faceless Ones, Fury from the Deep, Galaxy 4, The Evil of the Daleks and The Abominable Snowmen being released between 2020 and 2022. Many of these included episodes that had been animated even though they existed in the archives, to allow the cartoon version to be watched as one consistent piece. Animating episodes you didn't 'need' to would have seemed the height of extravagance even a short few years earlier. Beyond the five new stories released in that period, there was also an improved version of Power of the Daleks, and a new version of The Web of Fear with its single missing episode (part 3) animated; the initial vanilla DVD edition had used a reconstruction. By the end of 2022, a source of funding from BBC America had dried up and there was a worry that the animations would go on hiatus. This situation didn't last long, though. Towards the end of 2023, The Underwater Menace was released; in 2024, there was The Celestial Toymaker, and in 2025, The Savages. Those of us who've been collecting home video Doctor Who since the VHS days can only boggle at the things that have been achieved that we wouldn't have thought of as feasible back then. To pick just a couple of examples, there are now only three - three! - Patrick Troughton stories left to be released (his era amounted to a pitiful handful of video tapes); and - bar a five-minute introduction at the end of an adventure where she was otherwise not present, every moment of companion Dodo's time with the Doctor (from The Ark to The War Machines) is available to buy on individual shiny discs.

There now remain only nine stories that haven't had a dedicated disc release. One of these is the longest story (The Daleks' Master Plan at 12 episodes) but one is the shortest (single episode prologue to Master Plan, Mission to the Unknown), so it evens out. Of the remaining stories, most are historical stories (Marco Polo, The Myth Makers, The Massacre, The Smugglers, The Highlanders), which might be more challenging to animate, and might be a harder sell. The other two (The Wheel in Space, The Space Pirates) are science fiction tales with metallic monsters and / or spaceships, so might be an easier proposition. Additionally, The Crusade  - which had 50% of its running time represented by reconstructions for its Blu-ray release alongside the rest of the second classic season - may be animated before the end. If two teams continue working at the established rate, and with technological advances still gathering pace in parallel that could be brought to bear, all these stories could be out in as little as five years. Exciting. 

In Summary:

Massively successful as a reusable formula, slightly less successful as a story in its own right (mostly because it's a couple of episodes too long). 

The Krotons

Chapter the 268th, where brain power meets acid (it was the Sixties, after all).

Plot:

The planet of the Gonds. Generations ago, a Kroton ship crash-landed on the planet, and after a brief battle the crystalline Krotons used a weapon of mass destruction, creating a wasteland. Since then, the Gonds have avoided the wasteland and served the Krotons without question despite never seeing them again. Their culture and even part of their city is built around the Kroton ship, including a learning hall where the Krotons pass on selective knowledge to the populace remotely, but never come out. Every so often, a ceremony is held where the two brightest students go in to the inner section of the ship and are never seen again. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive in the wasteland just in time to witness one of these valedictorians ejected from the back of the ship and killed. The Krotons need brain power to launch their ship, and because two of their four-strong crew were destroyed, they are only at half strength and need two more "high brains". All the pairs of students killed over the years were not clever enough to enable the escape. In order to investigate, the Doctor and Zoe have to take a test in the learning hall, and are accepted into the Kroton ship. After many scrapes, with the Krotons even coming out of their ship and trying to destroy the TARDIS, and after some navigation through the machinations of Gond politics, the Doctor and friends with help from some Gond allies attack the Krotons with home-brewed acid and destroy them.

Context:

This is a story I've been anticipating coming up (see First Time Round section below for why). My enthusiasm wasn't shared by any of the family such that they would want to watch, though, so I viewed it on my own from the DVD, an episode a night during some time off from the day job for half term in late May and early June 2023. After the watch, I poked around on the DVD and watched a great documentary about the whole of Patrick Troughton's time, Second Time Round, that's included on there. There's no documentary about the making of The Krotons, though; the nearest is a filmed fan discussion in a strand called The Doctor's Strange Love, which appeared on a handful of stories towards the end of the range, reserved for those stories that are mostly unloved or felt to be 'so bad they're good'. My enthusiasm for The Krotons, it seems, isn't shared by many people.

First Time Round:

This story is close to my heart, as it was the first ever Doctor Who story I watched. It's my Doctor Who fan origin story. As mentioned on the blog passim, I took a while to get over my fear of the programme in my early years, though I caught the odd glimpse here and there. I then stumbled across a repeats season of vintage Who stories on BBC2 in an early evening slot during the autumn of 1981. More details of that stumbling can be found in the blog posts for An Unearthly Child (which was the first story shown, and which I joined partway through) and Carnival of Monsters (that followed The Krotons, and was the first colour story I ever saw). By the time The Three Doctors and then Logopolis rounded off the season, I was well and truly hooked. Having now blogged them all, it's a significant milestone. For me, I mean. I acknowledge it's likely not significant to anyone else! My love for Doctor Who may not have been quite at first sight, but it was definitely love at first story. 

Reaction:

The Krotons is the first of a short run of stories I like to think of as Doctor Who's 'Scooby Doo Where Are You?' period. The Doctor and friends land in a new setting, from a varied and eclectic parade of places after having been stuck mostly indoors or underground in besieged bases for all the previous year, they then sort out a mystery of some kind (they even break up a smuggling ring and reveal the unsuspected person operating it in The Space Pirates), and it ends either on a corny joke (The Space Pirates again) or else on the trio's signature move of sneaking away before anyone starts asking who they are or how they came to be there. I have written on the blog before about some of the key differences between season 5 and 6 (see The War Games post for more details), but one detail I hadn't highlighted was the more free-standing nature of the stories. For a year or more before The Invasion, stories mostly flow into one another, the end of one leading to the beginning of the next to a lesser or greater extent - a singular adventure in space and time. After The Invasion and before The War Games finale, the stories The Krotons, The Seeds of Death and The Space Pirates do not link into one another, and could be shuffled into any order without causing issues. Behind the scenes, the reason for this was that the production team had to abandon commissioned stories or scripts for different reasons, and rush to create replacements. Overarching storytelling was not a luxury they had.

Why were so many scripts falling through? It may have been the relative inexperience of producer Peter Bryant and script editor (but by this time effectively co-producer) Derrick Sherwin. From writings about that time, and from interviews with Sherwin and others since, I get the impression they didn't really want to be there, and would have been more than happy to produce a different show altogether. Also on the team, though, was someone who fit with Doctor Who much more snugly, to the extent that he would thereafter make a lifelong creative contribution to the programme in one form or another, Terrance Dicks. Dicks had started as assistant script editor, but was more and more being credited as sole script editor as Sherwin's role changed. While other scripts for season 6 were going nowhere, he'd been off to one side working up a story with a writer new to Who, who would go on himself thereafter to make a lifelong creative contribution to the programme, Robert Holmes. The Krotons came to the rescue to plug a gap. As the first collaboration between these two titans, it probably seems a bit underwhelming, but it still has a lot of great parts that make it more worth celebrating than I think most of fandom gives credit for. One thing that is great about The Krotons is that the plot isn't arbitrary and instead arises from the characters of the regulars. The story wouldn't work for any other TARDIS team, with two of them being very smart and the other (Jamie) being, erm, talented in different ways. The script uses this for drama and for comedy.

The Krotons themselves come in for some stick, but I think they're great. The great concept of a crystalline creature that can return back to a vat of liquid when not actively monstering, the designs (which are great, particularly the spinning heads, even below the waist where the skirt section wobbles a bit when they walk isn't that bad), the voices with their South African accents and little catchphrases - "This is a warning" "Direction point". On location, director David Maloney gets some impressive long shots of barren landscapes including the great initial TARDIS materialisation. The plot and characters are pretty generic - the leader, the usurper, the hothead, the romantic couple, the professor - but the cast give it their all nonetheless (with Philip Madoc particularly good as Eelek - they should definitely ask him back). Holmes might have been writing slightly down to his audience, not quite finding the right tone for a programme to which he was new; his characters would be much more interesting in his next script and would get better and better thereafter. The story includes some honest to goodness schoolroom science too, with its Tellurium compounds and their nasty smells. Add to this some witty lines, and a set of regulars absolutely at the top of their game, and you've got a very entertaining way to spend four times 25 minutes. It's one of my favourites, and I honestly can't work out why more people don't love it.

Connectivity:

Both The Krotons and The Infinite Quest involve the use of corrosive agents by the Doctor and friends in their battle against the baddies (acid in the Troughton story, a fungus stored in a spoon in the Tennant animation).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Fourteen (ish) Faces of Doctor Who. It's so close to my heart because of its involvement in making me a Doctor Who fan (see First Time Round section above for more details), so I have to step back, distance myself and concentrate on it to see how unobvious a selection of stories the Five Faces season was. Obviously certain criteria were forced upon Doctor Who's 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner in putting it together. Each story had to be four episodes long to fit the stripped across Monday to Thursday weeknights scheduling, and - of course - any story had to exist in the archives. In the early 1980s, that meant only The Krotons fit the bill for a Patrick Troughton story. In order for there to be a glimpse of the fifth titular face, the most recently broadcast story Logopolis, in which Tom Baker regenerated into Peter Davison who then appeared for the final few frames of episode four, had to be there too. As a counterpoint to the most recent story, also including the first ever story An Unearthly Child must have seemed irresistibly symmetrical. It's also an excellent story, is four episodes long, and - luckily - existed in the archives in 1981. The other no-brainer decision was to include The Three Doctors, the only anniversary story where multiple versions of the Doctor team up that had been created at that time. The only real choice left was which solo Pertwee story to choose. Here - though there were still archival challenges - there were at least a few options.

It's intriguing that they didn't choose a Dalek story from Pertwee's time, but there may have been other restrictions. Archive repeats in those days required a lot of additional contractual paperwork; the intended inclusion of The Masque of Mandragora as a stand-alone Tom story fell through. Perhaps the Daleks were too expensive to sign off. Whatever the reason, it meant that the selection of stories contained no returning monsters, and featured only one returning villain in the Master (although in a brand new incarnation that had only just debuted the previous year). Apart from the last few minutes of Logopolis, there were no significant instances of game-changing lore (The Three Doctors doesn't qualify, as it's really just a fun runaround). The season instead showed off what the series can do in self-contained stories with interesting concepts, that feature journeys to the past, alien planets and sideways moves to weird scenarios (and that was all just in Carnival of Monsters). It did this without leaning too heavily on its greatest hits history of Daleks, Cybermen, etc. That was perfect for hooking in people like me and getting them to watch the next series when it debuted, which is all the producer must have wished. Perhaps it was more by luck than judgement though (Nathan-Turner dipped into the series history and lore more in that next series, and would increasingly thereafter).

As I'm writing this in a 60th anniversary year, I can't help but speculate on which stories I'd choose for a similar set of repeats this year, to lead into the three specials to be broadcast in November. If I follow the same restrictions, I'd only be looking at four episode stories or the equivalent. For the new series, that would mean splitting longer-length episodes or specials into 25-minute chunks and introducing unplanned cliffhangers (as has been done to the feature-length The Five Doctors, or the double-length Colin Baker stories in years gone by). That sounds like fun, to be honest, and if I check on youtube I think it's probable that someone out there has done such an editing job already. I'd also stick with the restriction of not including anything that doesn't exist in a state close to its broadcast format in the archives, which means no modern animations of stories, as fun as that might also have been. I would probably go with the same format as in 1981 for the beginning and end: start with first ever story An Unearthly Child, and finish with most recent The Power of the Doctor, split into four, to show the regeneration into the fourteenth Doctor in the final scene, and ensure the Fugitive Doctor is represented. I'd then need at least one for each remaining Doctor. For Patrick Troughton, the only new choice within the criteria that's opened up since 1981 is The Tomb of the Cybermen, and that would make a good inclusion. I'm assuming that my fantasy budget can take the inclusion of more famous monsters. For Pertwee, The Time Warrior is nice conceptually, and showcases the Sontarans.

For Tom Baker, there's an embarrassment of riches (self-contained four-parters forming the majority of his seven year run); for sheer quality alone, I'd make it City of Death, so everyone can enjoy the Parisian location footage and witty one-liners. It's just personal preference, but I'd go with Kinda for Peter Davison's pick; people love The Caves of Androzani and Earthshock, but we've already got one regeneration and one Cyberman story in the mix. For Colin Baker, it's a bit of a cheat, but I'd go with the version of Terror of the Vervoids prepared for Blu-ray that removes the overarching elements about the Doctor's trial. When made stand-alone, it's the most fun of any Colin story, and it's not bogged down in excessive lore. We haven't had a proper Dalek story as yet, so I'd select perhaps the best ever one, Remembrance of the Daleks, for Sylvester McCoy's story. The TV Movie edited into 25-minute chunks would follow for Paul McGann. Then, we're onto the new series. Assuming that we're avoiding regeneration stories, there's two choices for Christopher Eccleston. I think The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances edges it over the Slitheen two-parter. I guess an edited version would have to be called The Empty Child parts 1 - 4 rather than The Empty Child part 2 being followed by The Doctor Dances part 1, as that would just be too confusing. Tennant is another with a solid set of two-parters that work as standalone stories; the best one is probably Human Nature / Family of Blood, I think. Matt Smith had fewer two-parters, and they're all pretty lore-heavy; probably his very first one The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone is the best fit.

That just leaves Capaldi, and I think Under the Lake / Before the Flood is nice and stands alone, though the first episode's title is a little prosaic to cover the story as a whole. Throw in all the anniversary multi-Doctor meet ups too, which would ensure the War Doctor is represented, and you get the following: An Unearthly Child, The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Three Doctors, The Time Warrior, City of Death, Kinda, The Five Doctors (1-4), Terror of the Vervoids (Trial-Free version), Remembrance of the Daleks, The Enemy Within (or whatever, 1-4), The Empty Child (1-4), Human Nature (1-4), The Time of Angels (1-4), The Day of the Doctor (1-4), Before the Flood (1-4), The Power of the Doctor (1-4). A nice selection; though it would take four months to get through the season. At the time of writing this in mid-June 2023, they need to get a move on and start the season on BBC4 asap, or we'll run out of time before the big anniversary (don't hold your breath!). 

 

In Summary:

Even though this is essentially my 'love at first sight' story, I still think I'm objective when I state that it is unfairly underrated.

The Dominators

Chapter The 230th, when life gives you lemons... take your name off the finished production!

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe materialise on a nuclear test island, a space Bikini Atoll, on the now peaceful and pacifist planet Dulkis. Also recently arrived are a couple of Dominators, Navigator Rago and Probationer Toba, ruthless alien warmongers with cute robot assistants, the Quarks. Their ship uses radioactive material for power, and once they have absorbed all the fallout from the island, they set about drilling through a thin part of the planet's crust to deploy a bomb in a shaft, to turn the planet into radioactive magma that they can use for fuel. They are also investigating whether any of the indigenous lifeforms are suitable for slave labour. Elsewhere on the island are a survey team doing the annual check on the island, and Cully, the rebellious son of the head of the Dulkis government, who's been running unofficial tours of the island in a craft that looks very like a lemon squeezer (it really does - one of his party even talks about their illegal activity adding "a bit of zest" - they know it!). Cully is stranded on the island when the Dominators kill the rest of his party and destroy his ship. Luckily, the Dominators waste a lot of time bitching at one another and conserving the power of the Quarks, so by the time they are ready to plant their bomb, everyone has teamed up and dug a cross-shaft intersecting with the bomb tunnel. The Doctor catches the bomb, then sneaks it aboard the Dominator spaceship, slipping out before they take off. They blow up in orbit, the surviving Dulcians set off in an automated transporter back to safety away from the island, and the TARDIS team rush into their time ship before a localised volcanic eruption engulfs them.

Context:

Seven years ago, almost to the day as I write this, I finally decided to start something I'd been considering for a while, and created this blog. In one place, I could write Doctor Who story-by-story reviews, mini-essays of Doctor Who opinion, and a fragmentary almost-memoir of how Doctor Who has been there as part of my family's and my life since I started watching it as a nine-year old in 1981. It was a modestly ambitious endeavour, particularly the decision not to differentiate between new and classic Doctor Who stories, meaning that I would always - as long as the show remained on air - be presented with a moving target. In the very first post where I set out my stall before covering my first story I noted that it would be "My howlings into the void, tangentially connected on that particular day to, for example, The Dominators".  As I wrote that, I don't suppose it occurred to me that it would be seven years before I reached that particular story, nor that I'd have at least three more years worth to get through before I caught up. Today's howl into the void is just to say that I didn't even try to interest any of the family in a five-episode long black-and-white story with a reputation for being dull. Instead I watched on my own over two evenings; for the first sitting, it was the weekend, so I had an accompanying beer. The second sitting was on a work night, so I did parts 4 and 5 stone cold sober. I will leave it to your imagination which night had the better approach for experiencing The Dominators.

 

First Time Round:

In September 1990, I was starting my Third Year Sixth, a grand label for my situation, which was returning to college for another year to retake the A-levels I'd completely screwed up in the spring. I have mentioned before on the blog that, during the period when I was supposed to be revising for those exams, I was instead rekindling my Doctor Who fandom after a period of relative cool towards the show. I never stopped watching on TV or collecting the sporadically released VHS tapes, but earlier in 1990 I started reading the official magazine again, invested in back numbers from John Fitton - a retailer that provided Doctor Who merch by mail order at the time - and even joined the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, reading their regularly posted publications too. This was a symptom rather than a cause of my flunking, though; I was clever, and wasn't even afraid of work, I'd just become completely dissociated from the whole process. I remember one multi-hour A-level maths exam where all I wrote was "I wonder where Salman Rushdie is right now; he's probably having a better time than me". I thought this disproportionate comparison - the fatwa against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini had happened the year before and he was still under effective house arrest for his own protection - would give the examiner a giggle, and I'd get at least one mark in sympathy. Of course our situations could not be compared, but I was intrigued to read that being under 24-hour guard had created in Rushdie, in his words, "a curious lethargy, the soporific torpor that overcomes", which very well describes how I was feeling at the time for different reasons.

This had lifted by September, though, and I was in good spirits, looking forward to the coming year. That third year turned out to be one of the best of my education; I edited the college magazine, got involved with college theatre, started other writing - sketches, plays and poetry - in earnest, and eventually passed my exams and got in to a good university (where I'd meet many more Doctor Who obsessives, with whom I'm still close to this day). Accompanying this were more and more releases in the Doctor Who VHS range, which had established a regular release pattern in 1990 that would endure for the first half of the decade. For some reason, almost all the releases in 1990 were black and white stories, brought out every couple of months in pairs - one each for the first two Doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. The Dominators was one of the last pair released that year, accompanied by The Web Planet. These are two stories - if not the two stories - with an immense reputation for being the most boring the series had to offer. They may as well have called it the Soporific Torpor box-set. For me in 1990, though, any Doctor Who was a novelty, and I enjoyed both on the first watch.

Reaction:

This story is one of the rare times in the history of Doctor Who where the author (or authors) asked for their name to be taken off the broadcast episodes. Credited writer of The Dominators Norman Ashby does not exist; the scripts were originally written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who had delivered the two very popular Yeti stories for the previous season. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Dominators is not as successful, certainly not they themselves; they disagreed with the rewriting done by script editor, and future Who producer, Derrick Sherwin, and therefore asked for their writing credit to be replaced with a pseudonym. What was in the original scripts is lost to the mists of time, but one fact that is indisputable is that the commission was for six episodes. One of the acts that Sherwin did in editing was to condense the action down into five. If Haisman and Lincoln's basic plotting and characters are reflected in what made it to the screen (and it's hard to believe that any busy script editor working on Who in this era would have the time to change things so radically that there isn't at least the blueprint there), it is very hard to come to the conclusion that the original writers should have been left to create their own vision, let alone to have it drag on for another whole episode. It's not exactly that the story is short on incident; things happen in the Dominators, it's just that they're mostly the same four things over and over: less experienced hothead Dominator Toba gets mildly provoked by some shenanigans (Jamie throwing a small rock at a Quark, say); Toba shouts at his Quarks the order to "Destroy" repetitively and histrionically; more experienced sneery Dominator Rago rushes in to belay that order and tick Toba off for wasting the precious energy levels (which, he reminds us for the nth time are dangerously low); Toba says "Command Accepted" in a passive aggressive way. Rinse, repeat.

I counted up, and Toba says "Command Accepted" 19 times in the story, that's almost twice as much as is mentioned the phrase "Contact Has Been Made" in Tom Baker story The Invisible Enemy, to take one example of a supposedly ubiquitous refrain. Just because something is repetitive doesn't necessarily mean it's dull, but there has to be progression. The Dominators' plan though doesn't go up a gear until late in the final episode, when they drill a shaft down which they want to drop their bomb, and our heroes dig a tunnel sideways into the shaft so they can intercept it. There's an obvious joke to be had about how at this point everyone in the cast is literally boring, but at least these scenes have a bit of momentum, and the dramatic question of who will be first to break through does engage to a certain extent. In the four and a half episodes leading up to that there isn't any progression, and instead the dullness is leavened by cutaways to scenes away from the Dominators' main operations, bits of fun amidst those repetitive story beats. The regulars of this period are all wonderful, and there are some great comic Troughton moments (his pretending to be stupid to fool the Dominators for example), new girl Wendy Padbury is settling in nicely too; mostly, though, this episode belongs to Frazer Hines as Jamie. He gets to partner with Cully in lots of on-location antics, knocking Quarks over and blowing them up. The film work is good, the location looks good, and the pyrotechnics of exploding Quarks are fun; models and optical effects are variable but the good outweighs the bad.

The bad guys may not be dramatically up to snuff, but how do they fare design-wise? The Dominators' outfits are striking, but not very practical. Plus, Ronald Allen as Rago can curl his lip disdainfully so well that he could probably curdle milk from ten paces. They aren't the main bad guy focus, though - this story is all about introducing a new metal monster that could endure like the Daleks previously had. The Quarks are a distinctive design - a simple enough shape that they could be drawn by any youngster no matter their artistic ability, and recognisable from a rough doodle - that's very important. Their movement, and how an actor fits inside them, is a little easier to discern than with the Daleks, but nonetheless it is still a little bit of a mystery at first glance. Nice touches like their retractable arms that fit snuggly back into their box-like bodies stand out too, and I feel sure they would have made fine toys for 1960s kids. As it was, disagreements between the BBC and the writers about the merchandising of the Quarks killed any chance of that, and meant that Haisman and Lincoln declined to work on the show again. An alternative universe exists where the Quarks returned in colour to menace Jon Pertwee the following year, and I'm not saying I would want to live there but it might be nice to visit. The only major issue that I have with the Quarks is with the voices; clearly they wanted to do something different to the Daleks, but the childlike sing-song voices used just don't work for me, and their dialogue is sometimes very hard to hear. The effect on film where someone is zapped and goes freeze-frame then bursts into flames is quite interesting, but isn't an effect they could do in the studio, so we only see it once.

The other main point of interest with this story is the attempt at satire. Eschewing the action adventure approach of their two Yeti stories, the writers wanted to do something a bit different, and they had the 1960s hippy counterculture in their sights. If the purpose of their script was to critique that current youth movement and its pacifist tendencies - as is generally accepted, though I've not been able to find a solid citation online to either of the writers confirming this - the main issue is that there aren't any hippy characters in The Dominators. Maybe Cully (a trust fund rebel, if ever there was one) and the group that he brings to the island at the beginning are supposed to represent 1960s long-haired youth. They are shown to be languid pleasure seekers, that's for sure, but there were young, languid pleasure seekers in the 1920s, in the Victorian era, and doubtless all through history. They aren't a precise enough distillation of the Haight-Ashbury peacenik. It isn't just the young who are being skewered in the story either. The leader of the survey group Educator Balan is shown to be a credulous duffer, accepting of contradictory data without question or thought. Balan's not a hippy, and neither is he a student; criticisms of the un-worldliness of liberal intellectuals and higher educators in ivory towers are common and perfectly fine, but again that isn't specific to the 1960s. Finally, the government of Dulkis are shown to be duffers too, talking themselves into paralysis and focussed on the details of process and procedure, ill-equipt to deal with any violent action. Maybe this was an attempt to depict the logical extension of pacifist ideals, the sort of society that would grow out of the hippy movement, but the result is too varied and the targets too scattered for the satirical barbs to hit home.

Perhaps this muddle in the central theme came about through the rewriting, and the original script was more focussed. Even so, though, the satire wouldn't have worked because The Dominators was a product of 1968 not 1967. It is an endemic issue with classic Doctor Who that ideas take so long to reach the screen that any attempt at something contemporary will inevitably look out of date. Here, though, it's very problematic, as the youth movement had more or less abandoned pacifism and become much more revolutionary early in 1968. The Beatles song Revolution, released as the B-side of Hey Jude during the weeks of The Dominator's broadcast, sees John Lennon wrestling with his personal decisions about peace versus violence, and even he was behind the zeitgeist; protests in Paris were underway as early as May. The later Troughton story in this season The Krotons, which shows a student uprising, was much more in line with the times. Ultimately, and unfortunately, The Dominators ends up satirising something that barely existed anymore. It's probably best to just take those scenes as fun local colour specific to Dulkis, and not representative of anything wider; plus, any scene that gets away from the leaden bickering of the Dominators is to be welcomed. Overall then, the story wasn't as dull as its reputation, but is one of the less successful Troughton stories.

Connectivity: 

Both The Dominators and Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks are set on an island. Both feature monsters that are wholly or mainly metal, led by at least one biped wearing slightly ridiculous clothes. In both, the baddies are toying with making the locals into a slave labour force, and press-gang a few into immediate back-breaking toil.

Deeper Thoughts:

Chibnall era pre-retrospective. [Note: this has nothing to do with The Dominators as I had to port it over from its originally planned position in the last post's Deeper Thoughts section to make way for reactions to Ncuti Gatwa's casting (not that it has much to do with the Manhattan Dalek 2-parter either); I think I've said enough connected to the Dominators anyway.]

Maybe one reason that Legend of the Sea Devils didn't perform that well (see Deeper Thoughts section of two blog posts ago for more details) is that people already think Jodie Whittaker's era is over. She did farewell interviews when launching Flux in 2021, which seems such a long time ago now, and there was lots of publicity about her finishing filming and the wrap party. This is as well as lots of publicity earlier than that, then more again very recently, about the regime change with Russell T Davies returning to run the show. Is the average TV viewer, not an obsessive like me following every scrap of information, going to know that Jodie's still got tenure and her finale is not actually being broadcast until October 2022, a year on from her appearance on Graham Norton's chat show telling him she was finished with the role? I don't actually know any average TV viewers, so I can't canvass opinion on this. Because of a couple of accidents of timing, Chris Chibnall and Jodie will be in the Doctor Who equivalent of a lame duck presidency, as showrunner and Doctor retrospectively, for a very extended period. It's going to be a long goodbye, and there will be a fair few retrospectives, I'm sure, in the weeks and months to come, even as the next era's location shooting and publicity happens in parallel. The first big retrospective has already happened, it was published in the most recent (at time of writing) issue of Doctor Who Magazine. Chibnall gave a big interview covering his entire era to date. Like every article in Doctor Who Magazine in the Whittaker era it is so anodyne as to almost cause offense just because of its lack of offensiveness. I wouldn't have thought anybody could get worked up enough to have negative opinions about the piece, but I was wrong.

Boy, was I wrong. I had to mute a couple of people on twitter (damn twitter's algorithm deciding things I "might be interested in"; I'll decide that for myself thanks very much) as they just kept on moaning about certain things that Chibnall had said. These weren't the usual haters either, but people who are normally even-handed. One issue is that, in a somewhat uncharitable mischaracterisation of his words, people claim that he has no idea of where the 'fugitive Doctor' played by Jo Martin exactly fits in to continuity, and also that he has not ever worked out the exact origin story for the timeless child version of the Doctor, found by her adoptive mother all those years ago. He didn't say this; he did intimate that he wouldn't reveal it in the show, but that's not the same thing. It may be frustrating to people who expected to get all the answers, but it's been obvious from the beginning that part of the reason for introducing this plotline is to create an enduring mystery. In typical self-effacing manner, Chibnall stated that he expects returning showrunner Russell T Davies to ignore all of that backstory anyway. Some of the criticisms online were at such a fever pitch that even Chibnall's honesty around screwing up his first season finale - it was only a first draft as they ran out of time - led people to complain that other showrunners' hastily put-together scripts when things had fallen through were much better than Chibnall's. He can't win, I don't think; he's already yesterday's man, and nothing he can do is right anymore (at least for a small subsection of the fanbase).

It's not just Doctor Who that suffers from this. My middle child at 12 years old is finally exactly the right age for enjoying the Netflix series Stranger Things, and has recently binge-watched the three previous seasons of episodes in a short period of time, He is pretty obsessed, consuming every fan video he can find online, and eagerly anticipating the fourth series that is landing soon. When new episodes were last available, it was a big, popular show and there was a lot of positivity around it; in the lead-up to the new series, though, I'm seeing more evidence of a backlash. Nobody can know the quality of the new episodes, as they haven't been shown yet, I just think there's an automatic negative reaction in some quarters when something popular has the temerity to be off air for a while. Stranger Things has been away for a couple of years, Doctor Who's only been off screen for a month - what's it going to be like by the time the final Whittaker / Chibnall special airs in October? I hope the retrospectives and post-mortems can be held back until then, as it only amplifies the issue. Doctor Who with Jodie Whittaker starring is still a going concern, and her (90 minute long, if rumours are true) last blast is only a stepping stone to more Doctor Who after that. Unlike a show with an ageing child cast like Stranger Things, Doctor Who has revolutionary change built in. While we wait for Jodie's finale, episodes for 2023 are being shot on location, with all the hype that brings. Only our favourite time-shifting, regenerating show could bless us by being not one but two going concerns all at once.  

In Summary:

Nothing with Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines in it could ever be truly dull, but the script for The Dominators - whoever's to blame for its final version - comes closest to making it possible.

The Seeds of Death

Chapter The 160th, which is a milestone chapter, for a couple of reasons.

Plot:

Sometime in the 21st century, the Earth has become dependent on a instantaneous matter transportation system for goods and people called T-Mat. Space exploration has ceased and humans have traveled no further than the moon, upon which there is a base from where T-Mat is controlled. The Ice Warriors - led by an Ice Lord - invade this base as part of an Earth invasion plan. They kill most of the crew, but not before one of them knocks T-Mat out of action. Helped by cowardly Fewsham, the assistant director of the Moon's T-Mat operation, who just wants to save his own skin, the warriors work to repair the system. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive at a space museum run by Professor Eldred. Eldred yearns for the lost days of rockets and astronauts, and to this end is working on a secret rocket project. His old colleague, Radnor, now in a senior management position on the T-Mat programme (which Eldred sees as the ultimate betrayal) arrives, with T-Mat expert Gia Kelly. The world is in turmoil because of T-Mat going out of action, meaning disrupted delivery of needed supplies (this is the problem with Just In Time supply lines). They want to use Eldred's rocket to go to the moon and investigate what's wrong. The Doctor Jamie and Zoe agree to be the rocket's three-man crew.

Despite many upsets and malfunctions on the way, the rocket reaches the moon but is too damaged to travel back again. Miss Kelly is also enticed up to the moon; when Fewsham finishes repairs on the emergency T-Mat link from Earth to Moon, she travels up and repairs T-Mat properly, only to find that the Ice Warriors have tricked her. She escapes and joins up with the Doctor and his companions, while the Ice Warriors send seed pods by the now fully-functional T-Mat to various population centres around the world. The seed pods burst and spread gaseous spore clouds into the atmosphere that create a foamy fungus that spreads across the Earth's surface, eventually to change its atmosphere to something more amenable to the Martians. The fungus is susceptible to water, so a Warrior is dispatched to London to attack the Weather Control Bureau there, to prevent the humans making it rain. On the moon, the Ice Lord has gone back to his ship to liaise with his invasion fleet; our heroes turn up the heating and incapacitate the remaining warriors. Fewsham sends Gia and the TARDIS trio back to London by T-mat, and says he will continue after them, but does not come. Instead, when the Ice Lord returns and turns down the thermostat, he pretends he was overpowered by the other humans. This is a ruse to allow him to broadcast the Ice Lord talking about his invasion plans, including the homing signal the Martians will use to guide their fleet to the moon

Fewsham gets killed for his troubles, but the signal has been recorded. Eldrad, Radnor and Kelly work on sending a satellite into space that will broadcast a fake signal to draw the invasion fleet off course. The Doctor follows Jamie and Zoe over to the Weather Control Bureau where they tackle a warrior and fix the rain-making machine it has damaged. Then, the Doctor, followed by Jamie, T-Mat up to the moon to ensure the Martian's signal device is deactivated. The fleet veers off course into an orbit around the sun, and the Doctor and Jamie manage to kill the last couple of Ice Warriors left on the moon. Rain comes, washing away the fungus, and the TARDIS team make a quiet exit, returning to the TARDIS and dematerialising off to adventures new.

Context:

Watched stripped across a week, an episode a night, from the 'Revisited' DVD edition. The whole family (The Better Half, and three kids, boy of 14, boy of 10, girl of 8) joined me for most of the episodes, each one of them missing one part here and there (they have no staying power, honestly!). The Better Half likes this story and imitated John Witty's distinctive computer voice when she first heard it "Moscow sending now, Tokyo receiving now, dispatch completed". She and the middle child were particularly obsessed with the sonic guns mounted on the Ice Warrior's claw hands, as they were - to their delight - just pen torches sellotaped to the costume. Other points of note for the fam were around the behaviour of the Ice Warriors, mainly that they could not possibly hope to ever win at a game of hide and seek, as they're so very slow to move they couldn't catch anyone, and anyway they have no peripheral vision; various characters escape capture by them by just standing nearby very still.  As this seemed to be the obvious secret of survival in The Seeds of Death, many of my viewing partners got a bit irate at the many characters during the story who make a pointless break for it only to get zapped by the sonic gun of an Ice Warrior and go all wibbly. Finally, the Better Half was bemused throughout with male fashions of the 21st century as depicted here, particularly the penchant for tailors of the T-Mat era to add gaffer tape detailing to everyone's standard issue boiler-suits to give the illusion of underwear worn on the outside.

First time round:

It's apt that The Seeds of Death happened to come up at this significant point (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details) in my random and directionless journey blogging my way through the Doctor Who back catalogue. For this is the story where that journey started (sort of). I'd caught glimpses of the odd story here and there before the autumn of 1981, but never sat down and watched it. I'd enjoyed a curated set of repeats of stories towards the end of that year (the 'Five Faces of Doctor Who'), and had then watched avidly from 1982, Peter Davison's first year on the job. But all this was programmed for me, and I had no choice to follow along prosaically, story after story. It wasn't until home video recorders became affordable that one could set one's own schedule in some minimal way. The order of events was as follows: late 1985, my Mum purchased the first VCR our household ever had; about a year later, I taped (with various degrees of aptitude and success) the episodes of the latest series of Doctor Who off the telly, to save and rewatch ad infinitum. Alas, this was the year of The Trial of a Time Lord, so none of the stories were fully self-contained, and the latitude for peripatetic wandering of viewing was limited.

Sometime towards the end of 1986, or possibly early 1987, my school friend Dominic bought a copy of Revenge of the Cybermen on VHS, the first ever Doctor Who release on video. We watched it together many many times. It had been out in different versions for a few years, but this was a repackaged release at an affordable price, and it was at this point that building up a collection started as a possibility for those that weren't rich (i.e. me). I ended up buying that tape from Dominic eventually, but before that, I bought my first ever tape new in a shop with my own money. And it was The Seeds of Death. This was early in the summer of 1987, as best I can date it. My parents had been divorced a few years by then - they'd managed 20 years of marriage by the year before Doctor Who reached it's own china anniversary, but then they went on a rather more permanent hiatus than Doctor Who managed shortly after. My sister and I would visit my Dad every other week, travelling from Worthing to his place in Bognor Regis. The sliver lining was that this gave me two towns to regularly scour for Doctor Who purchases. Finding copies of novelisations or videos in those days was pot luck; nowhere I knew of in Worthing stocked the videos at all, but one day on a weekend visit I found that they were being stocked in W. H. Smiths in Bognor's high street.

They only had Revenge of the Cybermen and The Seeds of Death, and so I bought the one I hadn't seen already. I couldn't watch it straight away, though, as my Dad didn't own a VCR. I must have read the blurb on that video box a hundred times over that weekend, and examined every photo on the packaging until I could draw them all from memory. The goodies within remained locked up until I got back home on Sunday evening, when I'm guessing, as I can't remember, that I would have run into the house, put the tape into the slot without so much as a Hello to my Mum, and watched the whole thing before going to bed late (it's six episodes, so even edited together as an omnibus as it was, it was still around two and a half hours long). A few months later, though it seemed like years, I got Pyramids of Mars. A few months after that, though it seemed like forever, I got Death to the Daleks. The journey had begun, bouncing from Doctor to Doctor, era to era. I'm still on that journey now: 160 stories blogged, and counting...

Reaction:

This is an apt story as a first (both my first one to own, and the first black and white video release right at the beginning of the range), as it is the epitome of a particular type of Doctor Who story, common in the 1960s but one that has appeared throughout its history, the no-nonsense action adventure story. Exactly right to entice the curious would-be collector like my younger self. These tales channel large amounts of Jules Verne, and have lots of episodic scrapes as our heroes battle against environmental forces, or evil adversaries. They don't have much in the way of interpersonal drama or deeper subtexts to confuse the issue. Even the horror inflections that were part of the house style of Troughton's stories the year before are mostly gone. The odd scare moment in The Seeds of Death is more on the level of a Scooby Doo cartoon. In fact, this period of Doctor Who has more than a bit in common with the adventures of the Mystery Machine gang: fun characters, simple but engaging plot, a moment where the crazy kids investigate putting themselves in danger (Jame and Zoe going off to the Weather Control Bureau on their own), and a lot of slapstick shenanigans including a lame joke at the end. Every story couldn't be like that, but Who got into this groove for a few stories in 1968 and 1969, from The Invasion through to The Space Pirates, and it's a period I like very much.

This is not to say that the story is just archetypal and average, mind. There's lots of interesting ideas and moments in there to keep the interest up over a long running time. In an echo of writer Brian Hayles's story from the previous Troughton season, The Ice Warriors, which introduced the Martian meanies, there is a sci-fi exploration of impacts of technology and impacts to the environment. It's a little scaled down here compared to that earlier story, but it's quite clever to cover something as topical as a rocket trip to the moon in 1969 while simultaneously depicting this as something that's old hat in the world of the story. Also similar to The Ice Warriors is the subplot about professional interactions and intrigue. The  subplot about Radnor and Eldred is like the Clent / Penley interactions in the earlier story in miniature. More interesting for me here, though, is Fewsham's story. Terry Scully does impeccable work with the character: palm-sweaty desperation to avoid death early on, gradually turning to a resolve to redeem himself, with a brief and magical moment of sheer panic and terror midway when he thinks he has killed the Doctor. (The eldest spoilt this a tad by pointing out that the Ice Warriors have no way of checking that Fewsham has T-matted the Doctor into the vacuum of space, as they ordered, so he could have just sent him safely to New York or Tokyo or somewhere.) Frankly, Scully's performance is a bit too good compared to the exciting but somewhat superficial surrounding action, and the character is definitely my favourite part of the story.

A close second would be how the story sounds. The music and special sound for this story (by Dudley Simpson and Brian Hodgson respectively) are so distinctive, I think I'd be able to name the story from only a five second blast of either. Rather than score the episodes, Simpson has provided a library of cues to use and reuse through the story as a whole, which means there is much repetition, and occasionally the music could fit the action better, but each one is such a belter that even a few episodes of hearing them again and again is enough to seed them into your mind forever, Martian fungus style. Hodgson's bleeps and bloops are great too, with the homing signals for the human and Martian ships to follow being particular stand-outs. Director Michael Ferguson and the production team do not let the visual side down either, with some great shots, particularly those of the lone Ice Warrior stalking around London parks with the sun behind him.

Combine this with one of the most charming set of regulars in Troughton, Fraser Hines as Jamie, and Wendy Padbury as Zoe, and you have a great though undemanding tale. It isn't without minor flaws - it's a little unsettling, for example, given that future stories will delve deeper into their complexity, honour and nobility, to see how bloodthirsty is the script - and the Doctor - towards the Ice Warriors. Every single one is blown or burnt up without a second thought, and the mass murder of the fleet, as this cold-blooded group faces an unfortunate fate in an orbit close to the Sun, is pretty much laughed off at the end. Earlier in the story, many Ice Warriors are sent off to find the stragglers on the Moonbase and quite a few of them don't come back thanks to the efforts of our heroes, but the Ice Lord in charge doesn't seem to miss them. The story makes a big deal about how T-Mat has replaced all other forms of travel, but an automobile and satellite-carrying rocket are too conveniently found towards the end. These are mere quibbles, though, the main problem is that there just isn't quite enough material to stretch to 6 episodes without a few moments that drag. Troughton's last year was plagued with script troubles, planned stories falling through necessitating others to bulk up, adding extra episodes to meet the quota. One story after another from this era is a big, lumbering beast. The Seeds of Death comes close to managing to be fleet of foot despite carrying a lot of baggage, but it doesn't quite make it.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature a space vessel that has some trouble just after take off, and both include other-worldly warriors in armour.

Deeper Thoughts:

One Hundred and Sixty High and Rising. Reaching my 160th randomly shuffled story for the blog marks an interesting stopping point on this long journey. If I'd decided at the outset to watch Doctor Who in broadcast order, the 160th story would have seen me complete the classic series, up to and including the final story of that run, 1989's Survival. Instead of the Patrick Troughton Doctor, Jame and Zoe rushing back to Professor Eldred's museum and taking off in the TARDIS, my latest scene watched would have been the Sylvester McCoy Doctor and Ace walking off into the sunset arm in arm, while he gives it the full elegiac voiceover treatment about fighting injustice and not letting the tea get cold, etc. etc. There is a little room for interpretation in terms of story numbering within the classic series. so I better show my working. The first 15 years or so are straightforward and generally agreed upon. The Stones of Blood is number 100. A planned but eventually cut scene in that story was going to see the Doctor and Romana celebrating the former's birthday, but this was really a codified reference to the programme reaching its story centenary. The chunks that the episodes of Doctor Who up to that point had been grouped into (episodes, lest we forget, that didn't always have an overall multi-part story title, and that had cliffhangers between as well as within) were all generally agreed upon, and the commercial releases of Doctor Who (videos, CDs, and DVDs) followed this pattern, with individual stories, not episodes or groups of stories, being the standard unit of delivery.

A year after The Stones of Blood, though, and a story is half-made but never broadcast (Shada), a couple of years after that and a spin-off story is shown (K9 & Company), and a few years after that The Trial of a Time Lord is broadcast, nominally a single 14-part story, but also considered a collection of four stories under an umbrella title. How does one account for them? When Dragonfire was broadcast in 1987, some pre-publicity - I remember a Radio Times advert, but it may have been mentioned elsewhere too - described it as the 150th story. It's not legally binding or anything, but it must have been in someone's head, so what exactly did it mean? Probably that they, whoever they were, were discounting Shada and K9 & Company, and counting Trial as 4 stories. That then promotes Dragonfire to the 150 spot. I seem to remember an alternate fan theory expressed by maybe a letter writer into Doctor Who Magazine at the time that it could be that they, whoever they were, were counting Trial as only one story but including Shada, K9 & Company and... Slipback, an inconsequential radio thing starring Colin Baker that had aired on Radio 4 during the 18 months Doctor Who was off the air for its Michael Grade imposed hiatus. It is a bit of a stretch, though,  that Slipback would have been on their mind, whoever they were.

I am certainly not counting Slipback, as it wasn't on the telly. I didn't at first intend to cover Shada or K9 & Company for the blog either, but circumstances dictated that they came up, which is fair enough, as it's all supposed to be random and unplanned. And I've counted Trial as four different stories, or else I'd have burned my way through Colin Baker's era even quicker than I have done (he only stars in eight stories in total if Trial only counts as one). The extra two stories bump Dragonfire to position 152, and the eight further stories in Sylvester McCoy's reign leading up to Survival take the total to 160. That puts me just over half way through after five years of blogging, as I make it 140 further stories remaining. The post-2005 batch is not without its points of contention over story groupings either, and there's no option to follow the DVDs either, as they were never released as single stories. Suffice to say, I count Utopia as part of an epic three-part story along with The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords, but Turn Left is standalone. I also don't count Scream of The Shalka, even though it got a DVD release in the official range. By my reckoning, that means that The Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children is story 300.

Notwithstanding the new stories that will be produced (whenever filming will next be able to take place), I should catch up in roughly five years. What a prospect! Of the stories I currently have left to cover in that time, there's a reasonably even split between classic and new series stories, 68 to 72 respectively. Of the older segment, there are 21 remaining stories in the black and white format of the first two Doctors, and of them 10 have some or all of their episodes missing (though some have animated versions to plug the holes). It's probably going to be too packed a schedule for me to change my mind about Scream of the Shalka or Slipback, but give it five years, and you never know!

In Summary:

A fun, solid space adventure story that has loads of good stuff in it, almost enough to fill six episodes. Almost.