Twilight of the Gods

There's nothing like going back, is there?

The thing that I love about the print versions of Doctor Who is how authors are allowed to go back and revisit their favourite episodes, re-examine the past events, and get that chance to see how the Doctor's presence influenced the lives of the people he touched. It's not always pretty, when you consider how he says he hates goodbyes and likes to run out as soon as the evil has been vanquished and leaves the survivors to learn how to clean up the mess. But, there are other times when everything is going just fine, the Doctor has truly shown them the way... and something else comes along.

Take Vortis, the insect world of The Web Planet. Freed from the influence of the Animus, the world is alive again, the forests and flowers are back, and the Menoptera have made good on their promise to live in harmony with the Zarbi and be watchful for another Animus. They did not, however, account for an interplanetary war and a territory struggle that would see Vortis being fought over by two races. It seems that the Gods of Light are on their side when the Doctor returns with a new face and new companions, but there is more at stake with the rise of a second Animus, and the revelation that Vortis may just be a huge ant farm, the Gods themselves just observers who have forgotten how their experiment works and cannot handle how it has evolved.

I suspect that author Christopher Bulis was one of those fans who found the world of Vortis just alive with possibilities, and was annoyed with the banning of Web Planet writer Bill Strutton from working on the series again. It's evident in his writing that he likes the world of Vortis, and in some kind of homage to the original story has the Doctor and Jamie captures by the darker forces and Victoria befriended by the Menoptera as Barbara was years before. Victoria gets to recover some of her dignity and demands that the alien agressors laying waste to the planet address her as a lady, bringing her back from the edges of terror she has been subjected to in the previous adventures.

Twilight of the Gods was published in the Virgin Missing Adventures range years ago, and is out of print. Copies still pop up on eBay at an okay price; if you're a fan without, try getting yourself one of these. You won't be sorry.

How's about another?

NEXT EPISODE : COMBAT ROCK

The Web of Fear

After regaining control of the TARDIS, the Doctor discovers that he has been trapped by a web in space and drawn back to present-day Earth. The TARDIS materializes in an Underground station where soliders are attempting to halt the spread of a fungus substance through the tunnels, and a killer mist in the streets overhead. With central London evacuated, the Yeti are found roaming the streets and the tunnels. 30 years after his expedition to Tibet, Professor Travers has accidentally reactivated a control sphere and allowed the Great Intelligence to return to Earth, and its plans are more thorough than before; this time it is ready for the Doctor and plans to suck all the knowledge and experience out of his mind for its own use. As with The War Machines, the Doctor is co-opted into helping the local military repel the invasion attempt, liasing with Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart of the army.

Episode 1 is all that remains of this story, which is as always a crying shame, but it is good that there is something to go on as opposed to no material whatsoever. There is a prolonged street battle with the army fighting the redesigned Yeti in episode 5, but it translates very poorly on audio; thankfully there is a short clip of it that cencors cut out of the original broadcast and it made its way to the Lost in Time DVD along with the intact episode itself. Other surviving material includes the Yeti roaming the tunnels of the London Underground and the bodies of dead soldiers covered in the Intelligence's web.

Placing the Yeti in such a familiar site as the Underground would have a profound impact on the viewers of the time, seeing something they recognize on televsion being overrun with monsters just like the London scenes in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Small children watching were suddenly afraid of taking the Tube for fear of running into them down there, resulting in more complaints against the show for being too frightening for small children. Indeed, the Yeti are much more fierce than they were in their debut story and this time have been given a roar to go with their new look. In an unusual move, perhaps out of concern over the level of fear in the show, the BBC aired a short trailer just before episode 1 of Patrick Troughton on the Underground set advising young viewers that the Yetia re making an appearance and they are much more frightening than before, so they might want to hold their parents' hands to keep them from getting scared. Ah if only they had found that trailer as well when they found the one for The Power of the Daleks.

Bringing back Travers after a few episodes but making the gulf many years was an interesting move. This time he has a daughter along with him, who is all grown up and has inherited her father's scientific curiosity. Travers makes an interesting observation that the Doctor and Jamie are all the family that Victoria has in the world, reminding us again of the grim circumstances surrounding her joining of the crew in the first place. After being menaced by Daleks, Cybermen, Yeti, Ice Warriors, human thugs and now the Yeti again, it's time to wonder how much more of this she is going to be able to take. The other character of note is Lethbridge-Stewart. A no-nonsense military man, he is keen to take charge of a situation and do what he feels he must to turn it around. He'll be back. So will the Yeti, but not for a very long time.

Time to take a break from the televised series and look a couple of novels; one from the Virgin Books range and a relatively new one from the BBC Books range. It's nice weather outisde right now, may as well go find a tree and do some reading.

NEXT EPISODE : THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

The Enemy of the World

Earth again. The future again. Only not as far flung as before. Once more though the Earth is threatened by natural disasters, but one man, a man named Salamander, is able to predict the disasters with amazing accuracy and had made great leaps in science to aid in the relief after the disasters strike. Through his benevolance, he has acquired great power and influence, and some suspect along with it he has become corrupt. When the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive on a beach in Australia, they are immediately enlisted by Salamander's enemies to help them bring him down and expose him. Jamie and Victoria are to infiltrate his headquarters and gather what information they can on his dealings, while the Doctor is asked to impersonate the man himself, for they are identical save for Salamander's Spanish accent. The ruse does not work as well as expected and Jamie and Victoria are exposed to the intregue of Salamander's inner court where assassination attempts and intregue are everyday events. But there is more going on than anyone can suspect, and it is revealed in time that Salamader is in effect behind the natural disasters with the help of a group of underground workers in a bunker duped into believing that the world has fallen under nuclear war and their efforts are to work against their enemies. When he is exposed, Salamander flees, but in a turnaround of events attempts to impersonate the Doctor and steal the TARDIS, which doesn't go so well for him.

The Enemy of the World tells a story of absolute power corrupting absolutely, bringing a harsh edge to the season. Here we have no obvious monsters towering over anyone and trying to exterminate people, but a man who is monsterous on the inside, working to perpetuate himself and add to his power over others. Salamander operates on many levels to get what he wants, either by blackmailing his political enemies, or by out and out having them killed. Despite the fact that the world loves him and is grateful to him for his aid, his own inner circle despise him for the most part, right down to his food taster, and those who are on his "side" merely seek to be there to bask in his power so they can indulge their own taste for bullying. Jamie and Victoria narrowly escape an interrogation from one of the worst, played oh so perfectly by Milton Johns at his snivelling scheming best (I actually want to hit this man every time he gets a role in Doctor Who).

In listening to the story (for only episode 3 exists, again on the brilliantly restored Lost in Time DVD collection, while the rest are on the BBC Radio Collection CD) one notices how minor the Doctor's role actually is this time. Patrick Troughton was playing both his regular role and that of Salamander, but the latter seems to see more screen time, with the emphasis on how the people around him are working to bring him down. The Doctor is cautious to get involved, wanting proper proof (how do you know a proof? a proof is something that is proven; it is a proof) before he interferes for a change, and sending Jamie and Victoria into the thick of it because they are the only ones he can trust to give him the proper information. His likeness to Salamander also means he cannot move very freely himself, or he will be mistaken for his doppleganger (and in episode 1 is almost shot in his place by extermists).

So with Salamander trying to operate the TARDIS, the ship is flung into the vortex with the doors open to the outside, and as we saw in Planet of Giants, that's a bad bad thing. Salamander is sucked out into the void, leaving the Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria desperately hanging on for dear life as the ship reels out of control...

NEXT EPISODE : THE WEB OF FEAR

The Ice Warriors

Somewhere in the future of Earth, mankind has mastered control of the elements and perfected a means of synthetic food to feed Earth's increasing population. As a result of this, farmland and open space are all but gone, every centimeter taken up by housing, aside from a bare minimum of plant life. And then one year there is no spring, and massive glaciers begin to move across the world, triggering a new ice age. To combat the ice, scientists build emergency stations across the world equipped with ionizers, but in the Britannicus (aka England) base, the systems are falling apart due to unrest amongst the staff. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive just as one of the scientists free an apparantly dead creature from the ice face. The Doctor is all but drafted into service to assist with the ionizer problems, and the creature returns to life. The monster is known as Varga, a warrior from the planet Mars, who crashed on Earth millions of years before along with his crew. Varga revives the rest of his crew and the warriors go on the rampage, attempting to extort fuel elemts for their stranded ship from the ionizer base, regardless of the consequences to the Earth.

This is the first time we see what will be known as the Ice Warriors. As species go they should be called Martians, but their dependency on cold weather lends them the nickname which will become legendary in Doctor Who, even if they do only appear in four adventures. Physically they are very tall, once again adding to the theme of huge monsters for the season. With Patrick Troughton's Doctor being a bit on the shorter side, his confrontation scenes with them are made all the more tense, with him glaring upwards and them looming over him impassively. And they're green. Of course. They are armoured but visibly reptillian, speaking in a menacing hiss which is actually very effective. There appear to be different breeds of Ice Warrior as well; Varga and his lieutenant, Zondal, are the only two capable of speech, and both are of the classical design of the moster, while Turoc, Rintan, and Isbur are silent giants with the same body build but differently formed heads - a bit of cultural diversity that has not been seen with the likes of the Cybermen or the Daleks (the Cybercontroller and the Emperor Dalek aside).

Victoria spends most of the adventure as a prisoner of the Ice Warriors, being positively terrorized first by Varga, and then by the rest of his crew as they return to life. Her escape attempt from their ship and through the glacier's caverns is an incredible sequence, her fear and panic plain to see as she attempts to get away from the lumbering Turoc. The whole adventure is shot with incredible precision, with effective close-ups and a unique musical score. Even the opening credits after the normal title role are customized, with the title of the show and writer's credits superimposed over scenes of frozen desolation. Unlike the other adventures of the season, the episode numbering is done with a simple overlay of the the word, rather than the numeral, with "Episode 1" simply replaced by "ONE" and so on.

This is, alas, anotehr incomplete adventure, but it is not as decimated as others of its time. The Ice Warriors, like Tomb of the Cybermen before it, was completely missing from the BBC archive for years until episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6 were all found together. 2 and 3 still elude us to this day, but the BBC home video release comes with not only the CD audio version of the missing episodes (although with no linking narration, as with The Crusades) but a reconstructed presentation of the episodes in a 15 minute segment called "TWO and THREE" to bridge the gap. What images were available are used along with the audio clips to preserve the integrity of the adventure, and, of course, to make the tape more marketable. Don't expect this one on DVD for a while though; there are plenty of complete stories still waiting for release and hey, TWo and THREE might turn up one day. Still, it would be great to see these stylish classic episodes restored through the magic of VIDfire.

Every now and again, though, Doctor Who fails science. In this episode it is stated that the act of removing all the plants from Earth depleted the atmosphere of its supply of carbon dioxide, and thus there was no heat retention and the glaciers began to advance. Right. Last time I checked, plants actually produce oxygen and consume carbon dioxide, so realistically a world without plants would see the residents dying from asphyxiation rather than freezing under the ice. Indeed, with industry churning out all those new housing units and making synthetic food, there would be more CO2 than ever before, triggering a greenhouse effect and melting the polar ice caps. Of course there's also that science from The Day After Tomorrow where the melting ice caps redefine the ocean currents and weather patterns suffer as a result, and scientists snarked at that as well, so who's to say.

And who cares really. The story is not about the science of keep the Earth green and happy, but of a group of stranded aliens, desperate to get away from the humans, who they know will capture them and keep them prisoner as scientific curiosity. It's about how ruthless those aliens will become in order to survive, and, of course, how the Doctor will defeat them and save us all from another alien menace.

So the "monster season" rolls along. But the next monster is not an alien monster at all. He is human. He just looks like an alien, an alien we all know very well by now.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD

The Abominable Snowmen

A small camp on a high mountain is attacked by a massive furry creature, and one man is left for dead. The other stumbles blindly into the night, running for his life. In the morning, the TARDIS materializes nearby and the Doctor reveals that he, Jamie, and Victoria are in Tibet, and he knows the locals as he is in posession of one of their holy relics entrusted to him years before by the Monks of the Det-Sen Monastary. Returning the small bell to the monks, however, does not prove to be the celebration the Doctor hoped for, and he is accused by an explorer named Travers of attacking his camp and murdering his colleague. The monks of Det-Sen are suspicious of the Doctor as well, for with his arrival and Travers' accusation has come the recent attacks on them by the Yeti - the fabled abominable snowmen of the Himalayas. The truth is that the Yeti are in fact robots, being controlled by the Great Intelligence, a non-coroporeal entity from deep space that found its way to Earth through the meditation of one of the monks. The Doctor faces the perils of fighting a foe that is controlling an old friend, and fending off the attacks of the Yeti against all in the monastary. The Intelligence craves a physical form of its own and needs the Yeti robots to serve as its hands until such time as it can make its plans come to fruition, but it does not take into account the presence of the Doctor, and is defeated, leaving burned-out Yeti littering the Tibetan slopes.

More hints to the mysterious past of the Doctor here, in the form of his involvement with Det-Sen during its hour of need. The master monk, Padmasambahva, recognizes the Doctor when he sees him but makes no comment about his physical form having changed, so the Doctor appears to have been here before in this incarnation, perhaps an untold story with Ben and Polly at his side. Jamie is drafted into service with the monks to help defend the monastary, and Victoria screams a lot, which is something she is going to become famous for. The Doctor plays things cool even when he is locked up on the strength of Travers' accusations, sitting in a cell playing his recorder, but when the time comes to fight the Intelligence, he is there and ready. The Yeti are not as frightening as one would expect; they make no sound in this adventure, just lumber about in silence. Only episode 2 of the 6-part story exists, along with some colour location footage detailing the shooting of the serial in 1967, but there is enough to show the sheer size of the monsters, and how they could be terrifying to a small child as they rampage down a mountain in pursuit of Jamie and Victoria. Still, what kind of monsters are these that can be put out of action by removing a silver sphere control unti from their bodies? Okay, this is Doctor Who where the Daleks are foiled by a flight of stairs, but come on.... the sphere is easily knocked free when a Yeti is ambused and attacked by Jamie and the monks, and in episode 4 the Doctor casually opens a Yeti and pulls its sphere out. Some argue that the Great Intelligence did not consider the presence of someone smart enough to figure out that the Yeti were robots, but that doesn't make for intelligence as great as promised. Small point, though.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ICE WARRIORS

The Tomb of the Cybermen

Her father is dead, and Victoria is now being hosted by two men she barely knows: the Doctor was apparantly working with the Daleks to buy time, and then managed to destroy them, and Jamie risked his life to sneak through a Dalek-infested Victorian estate home to rescue her. And now she is alone, save for these two men who travel inside a police box. Victoria accepts the nature of the TARDIS eventually and seems to adjust fairly well to the events around her, if not to the notion of wearing a skirt that ends above her knee. She also will have to get used to the Doctor's habit of landing in danger, for the TARDIS lands on Telos, a planet taken over by the Cybermen after the destruction of Mondas. It is some time in the future, and there hasn't been a Cyberman sighting in 500 years, and a group of archaeologists financed by some shady logicians and their big burly muscle man servant are looking for their remains. The Doctor immediately joins the group, as he knows well enough the dangers of Cybermen. A traitor in the midst of the group has ambitions of reviving the Cybermen and gaining influence with them, but once the Cybermen are active again it becomes obvious that the Cyber City on Telos is not exactly a tomb but a trap to lure people in and convert them to Cybermen to prop up the numbers of their dying race. As with the previous Dalek story, the commander in chief of the menace is revealed, in this case it is the Cybercontroller, who is more imposing than his underlings and is styled slightly differently. Here we first hear the new mantra of the Cybermen : "We will survive," (cue Gloria Gaynor).

Jay joined me for this viewing once more, and he was quick to spot the updating of the Cybermen from the last time he saw the in The Tenth Planet. The design has not changed since The Moonbase, nor have the voices, but a few of the costumes end up a bit worse for wear by the time episode 4's cedits roll; witness one Cyberman's face almost fall off while trying to fight its way out of the tomb area, and then on its descent back down the ladder its suit it torn right out under the arm. The direction of Tomb is quite sharp by comparison to other episodes, with its freaky Outer Limits music and some fades between scenes to show the passage of time, even some crafty pans and sharp zooms that Jay found impressive. As for the development of the regular cast, Jamie keeps getting better and the Doctor makes some interesting comments about his family, implying that they are dead but he can remember them any time he wants. He also makes a rather moving speech to Victoria, telling her that their lives are different than anyone else's in the universe, and nobody else can do what they are doing. This perfectly sums up my own love of the show; no-one else does what the Doctor does, no-one else is the Doctor. I showed that clip to Parker, my wise cracking 7 year old nephew, and he nodded and said that's how he feels when we go places together, giving me my own little bit of Doctor euphoria.

Tomb of the Cybermen has some cool nostalgia attached to it. Okay I was not even born when it was broadcast, but until 1992 the whole serial, all four episodes, did not exist at the BBC archive, and there were always these fans going on about how good Tomb was, and Doctor Who Magazine did a whole special on it, and there was a script book published. And then one day I was at my friend Mike's place working on the fanzine our then-fanclub put out, and the call came from another friend, Luca, who had just gotten his Doctor Who Magazine with a stop-press insert announcing that Tomb of the Cybermen had been FOUND, all of it, in Hong Kong. There were many cries of delight, seeing as the classic series had been off the air for a few years at that point, and hey, old episodes that many of us had never seen were just as good as brand new ones. It's the sort of moment every Doctor Who fan dreams about, when their favourite missing episode finally comes home. My own is Marco Polo. There are some pessimists in the fandom community who consider themselves the authority on the odds of a missing episode turning up again, and they love to make statements about the slim odds of any more turning up. One in particular waved his well-fed jowls about it in a documentary attached to a "missing years" tape released a few years back, and shortly after that came the return of Dalek Master Plan episode 2, proving that when it comes to Doctor Who one never can tell for sure.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN

The Evil of the Daleks

With Polly and Ben rushing back to their normal lives, the Doctor and Jamie set about tracking down who has stolen the TARDIS. Their investigations lead them to an antique shop owned by one Edward Waterfield, who is in fact a scientist from the 1800's brought forward in time to trap the Doctor and Jamie and deliver them into the hands of the Daleks. To ensure the co-operation of Waterfield and his eager partner Theodore Maxtible, the Daleks have taken Waterfield's daughter, Victoria, as a prisoner in Maxtible's house. The Daleks want something called "the Human Factor" which they think will fill in the blanks in their knowledge and enable them to finally conquer Earth for good, and they force the Doctor to help them by subjecting Jamie to a series of tests to isolate the emotions that they are looking for. The result backfires, and the Doctor manages to create three friendly playful Daleks who begin to question orders from their commanders. Everyone is taken back to Skaro and the Doctor finally confronts the Emperor Dalek, and the truth of the Dalek ambition is revealed. The Human Factor spreads amongst the Daleks, though, and rival factions beging to fight amongst themselves, even taking out the Emperor in the end, a carnage the Doctor refers to as "the final end" of the Daleks.

Wow. Out of the whole 7 episodes, I found the last two to be the best of the bunch, when the action returned to Skaro and there was a futher revelation into the "culture" of the Daleks - which is to say the inclusion of the Emperor Dalek. The earlier episodes seem to take their time getting to where they are going; Jamie's trials in Maxtible's house as he tries to rescue Victoria seem to take a while, and the slow pursuit around London looking for the TARDIS seems a bit like padding. Episode 2 exists on the Lost in Time disc so while we don't get to see as much of the Daleks as we would like, we do get to see the Doctor react to their presence. The otehr episodes are all on CD, narrated by Fraser Hines, who finally gets a chance to let Jamie shine. Free from the shadow of Ben and Polly he emerges as quite the hero in his efforts to rescue Victoria. The Doctor has to play it very cool this episode, risking alienating Jamie in his efforts to deceive the Daleks by appearing to work with them willingly. The thing is, they threaten to destroy the TARDIS if the Doctor does not help them, but in The Chase they blasted the hell out of it and nothing happened, so why is he worried? And the Emperor. Huge booming Dalek voice. Huge Dalek! It obviously doesn't go anywhere. There does exist a montage of footage of the final Dalek battle in the Emperor's chamber, so we get to see it briefly, and in its original form, before it returns in Remembrance of the Daleks looking a bit like an egg. Victoria joins the crew after the battle is done; her father died in the Dalek revolution and the Doctor and Jamie adopt her as their new family member. The Doctor at one point ponders returning to his home planet and taking Jamie and Victoria with him should Earth fall to the Daleks, bringing up the question once again of exactly who the Doctor is and where he comes from.

The whole point to the Daleks seeming to wipe themselves out here is for Terry Nation to take them away from the series and try to sell them as a show in their own right. At the time it was decided there would be no more Dalek shows, but as it happened, the Daleks did return eventually in 1972's Day of the Daleks. The season closed, however, with the future of the Daleks in doubt, their return uncertain.

But someone else's return was just around the corner...

NEXT EPISODE : THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN

The Faceless Ones

The TARDIS arrives at Gatwick airport, creating a major stir on the runways and landing the Doctor, Jamie, Polly and Ben right in the thick of trouble. Sought by the airport police, they separate to hide, and Polly witnesses a man being murdered with an alien weapon. Polly is soon abducted by the murderers, who are operating under the guise of Chameleon Tours; a discount airline offering inexpensive vacations to young people. Ben vanishes next, leaving the Doctor and Jamie to convince the airport staff that there are alien beings in their midst. The Chameleons are just what they sound like; creatures capable of assuming other forms in order to survive. In their raw form they are shapeless, barely humanoid, as a result of an accident on their home planet, and they have found a means to remodel their bodies into the shape of others. With the airline cover they have systematically abducted 50,000 young people and taken them to their orbiting space ship, intent on returning to their home planet with them and beginning the rebuilding of their race.

Creepy. It's very Invasion of the Bodysnatchers with and edge that only Doctor Who could add. Visually only episodes 1 and 3 exist out of 6, but it's enough to set the scene around Gatwick airport and show the fun location footage of the serial's opening minutes, and to convey the threat of the disguised Chameleons. Polly and Ben are gone for most of the story, and when they do finally return in episode 6, they're done, and they leave the Doctor. Perhaps it's the widening gulf between them and their friend that makes them want to leave, or maybe they're just not cut out for time travel after all and when the chance to leave comes up, they take it. The added perk for them is that the TARDIS has returned them to Earth the very same day they left, so Ben won't miss his ship and be court-martialled, and Polly can... well, she's out of a job with WOTAN having blown up in the Post Office Tower so it's back to the swinging Inferno Club to hang with Kitty and cruise other patrons. The whole adventure unfolds over the course of a day, so the War Machine crisis is over and normal British life has resumed. In episode 2 the Doctor and Jamie hide behind newspapers to avoid the airport police; wouldn't one of those periodicals have some kind of report on the events of the previous days? I personally love it when adventures come close to overlapping like this one does; at the time I suppose no-one was thinking along those lines but in future episodes when storylines come close to crossing (as with 1963's An Unearthly Child and 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks) the production team have fun with it, and drop a few visual references and continuity hints for the link back.

There is also the notion of continuity from one episode to the next. There are very few of the early adventures that end without leading directly into the next one. Each adventure ends with the title of the next one right after the credits, but almost all end with a few seconds of introductory material to get the next one started. The Faceless Ones is no exception, and the Doctor announces that the TARDIS has been stolen. With Jamie in tow he sets off to find it, but who would steal his ship?

NEXT EPISODE : THE EVIL OF THE DALEKS

The Macra Terror

At the very end of The Moonbase, the Doctor uses something called the time scanner, which allows him to look ahead at where the TARDIS will next land. A giant claw appears on the screen, warning the crew that there is something nasty waiting for them when they next land. The TARDIS does not appear to land in the tick of danger, though, and it brings everyone to an idyllic colony that appears to be run like a holiday camp. Everyone in the camp is extremely happy, there is a constant stream of music to keep up morale, and the Doctor sums it up oh so politically incorrectly by saying "Well, this is gay!". The crew are treated to a wash and scrub (Polly gets her hair cut really short) and are welcomed by all, and by night they are subjected to the sleep-teachings of the colony. Ben proves most affected by the voices he hears in his sleep, probably due to his military background of obeying orders, and he becomes one of the colony's workers, but the Doctor, Polly, and Jamie discover the truth: the place is a front, all being run from behind the scenes by the Macra - massive land-crabs that depend on a lethal gas the colony slaves to process for them. With everyone so brainwashed to believe and obey the voice of Control, it is up to the Doctor to show them what is really in control and free them and Ben from the Macras' power.

The planet the colony is situated on has no name, and there is very little information given to determine what time the story takes place in (obviously it's the future, but no real date). A similarly-run state will be featured in 1988's adventure The Happiness Patrol, so for the sake of continuity we could place The Macra Terror in the same bit of future history. There is also no real sense of how the Macra got in control of the people of the colony and now they managed to create the elaborate gas workings to keep them alive. Maybe we're not meant to delve that deep, and should just enjoy the creepy atmosphere of the show, heightened by the eerie incidental music. There's no visual record of this episode aside from a few clips of Ben and Polly battling a Macra from episode 2, and that episode's cliffhanger moment of the real Control being dragged off screen by the same massive claw seen on the TARDIS scanner. A clip of the opening titles of the show, however, provides a clue to the evolution of the series itself; the opening title sequence, which had remained the same since An Unearthly Child, had changed. The music was more or less the same, but the sequence itself was redone to include the Doctor's face, and a new logo. Why the production crew waited this long to change things is unknown but one theory is the original opening was retained for a while to keep the show familiar in the wake of William Hartnell's departure earlier in the season.

So with very little visual to go on, I obviously listened to The Macra Terror on another CD set. This time the linking narration was provided by Colin Baker, who would eventually become the sixth Doctor in 1984, and not by one of the original performers from the serial itself. The audio version was released on a cassette tape in the early 1990s, before the full potential of the audio range was realized, and the narration is a bit less than previous discs, perhaps due to Baker not having actually been in the series at the time to remember information that a cast member might have known.

Onward....

NEXT EPISODE : THE FACELESS ONES

The Moonbase

After leaving Atlantis, the TARDIS is caught in a gravitational field and makes a rough landing on the moon in the Earth year 2070. The crew discover a massive base on the moon equipped with a Gravitron, which is a device used to control Earth's tides and in effect control the weather, but the base is under seige from some kind of disease which is slowly rendering the base staff catatonic and riddled with black veins. The disease is the work of the Cybermen, who have returned 84 years after the destruction of Mondas to attempt to take over the Earth by destroying its weather. Polly, Ben and Jamie manage to fight off the initial occupying forces using chemicals to attack the weaker spots of the Cybermen's bodies, and a full invasion force begins a march across the moon before the Doctor realizes that the Gravitron holds the key to defeating his foes.

Magnificent. I loved The Moonbase despite only being able to watch episodes 2 and 4. The Cybermen return in style after an update and facelift, getting rid of the human hands and the visible parts of the human bodies they once had in favour of their new standard look of a metal body, chest panels, and the helmet with the blank eyes and mouth. The voices have also changed to be more like that which would come out of a synthesizer, giving them an overall effect more like a robot than ever. Rather than being vulnerable to radiation as in The Tenth Planet, their new heart and lung chest plates are made of plastic and are rendered useless when spracyed with a combination of acetone, benzene and alcohol from the base's stores. And when the Cyber army makes its march across the lunar surface, okay sure, we see the laces on their boots, but they manage not to cast shadows on the backdrop walls and there are so many of them... at least 10 that I counted on screen at one point. And they are more lethal with their weapons; both Polly and Jamie are zapped with some kind of energy ray projected from a Cyberman's hand, and they are also armed with blaster weapons and a large energy cannon that is fired very effectively in episode 4.

Still the victim of being a last-minute addition to the crew, Jamie is sidelined for the better part of episode 2 with a head wound, and when he does recover he's not given enough to really work with. Ben and Polly are still very much the prime companions for now. The Doctor has a delicious dark moment when he sums up the Cybermen in episode 2: "There are some corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things. Things that act against everything we believe in. They must be fought," but he returns to his clowning ways soon enough.

I'll say this about every episode of Doctor Who at some point, but I really wish I could have seen all of this one. The existing 2 episodes were restored brilliantly on the Lost in Time DVD so there is at least that much to enjoy.

NEXT EPISODE : THE MACRA TERROR

The Underwater Menace

The TARDIS takes the new crew on their first adventure, landing them on an island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Jamie is baffled but impressed with the new adventure he finds himself experiencing, and he begins to form fast bonds with his fellow companions. Within minutes, however, they are all captured and taken to an underground temple to be sacrificed. The island is actually the top of a volcanic vent, and at the bottom is the lost city of Atlantis where the survivors of its demise into the sea are counting on famous scientist Zaroff to raise them back above the waves. Zaroff has already performed a miracle by creating new a food source and creating a workforce of "fish-people" to harvest it underwater, so raising a sunken city should be nothing. The Doctor realizes that there is no way to physically raise the sunken land, but Zaroff's plan is not to raise the city so much as to lower the water level by draining the ocean into the Earth's core. Yes, Atlantis will be above the waves again, but only in little bits when Zaroff's plan blows it up.

There are three references to Atlantis in Doctor Who lore, this being the first. Atlantis gets dragged up as a plot device in a lot of series, but the location is always in dispute; this time it is in the Atlantic Ocean, but a future adventure will ignore this story altogether and place Atlantis somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. These Atlanteans do not bear a heavy cultural similarity to the Greeks as is commonly done; here we see a beleagured people worshipping a fish-god named Amdo, with fish motifs everywhere, but they exist side by side with the lunatic science of Professor Zaroff. The Doctor notes that Zaroff was a world famous scientist who disappeared in a storm of contorversy and caused a great deal of blame to fly back and forth between the East and West political theatres of the modern world. The fish-people are a slave race, made up of troublemakers and lost seafarers who have been surgically adapted to living underwater. Some of the fish people effects are a bit hard to take, with actors slowly swinging around on strings against a backdrop of coral and bubbles (I was reminded of some of the less successful shots of the Menoptera from The Web Planet). Polly herself comes close to becoming a fish person but is saved by a friendly Atlantean who does not trust Zaroff. Jamie and Ben get the sexual exploitation treatment once more, showing up clad in tight rubber wetsuits disguised as guards (oooh more body contours! Gary Russell must be thrilled!). While his companions are roughed up and menaced, the Doctor gets cose to Zaroff by pretending to admire his work and be enthusiastic about it, until he realizes the truth and must work to stop him. And Zaroff is just plain mad. Not only does he have this kooky science-fictiony mad scientist name but he's also got a mess of white hair and wears a cape at times!

As the decision to make Jamie McCrimmon a regular to the series was a hurried one, The Underwater Menace was subjected to a lot of hurried rewrites to accomodate him, and some of the lines that would normally have gone to Ben or Polly went to him instead. Must be hard to share out all those "What's going on, Doctor?" utterances between three young people. Still, they were doled out enough so that everyone does indeed have something to say, so when I listened to episodes 1, 2 and 4 on CD I knew everyone was on the set, and no-one was lurking around without anything to say. Episode 3 exists on the Lost in Time DVD set so there is still something of the adventure to look at and get an idea of what the whole serial looked like. Maybe it's Jay's influence with these viewings but I have gotten good at spotting the clumsy editing between scenes, and lo there are some in this. Interestingly enough though, some of them are in the non-existant episodes and can actually be heard. What can also be heard is the psychedelic syntheiszer soundtrack for the show which was very different from any of the scores of any episode at this time, even the warbling sounds of The Gunfighters. Now of course we have all sorts of musical treats in Doctor Who, including the ponderous presence of Britney Spears in 2005's The End of the World.

Atlantis never does rise above the waves again. And despite being convinced that "Nothing in the vorld can schtop me now!", Zaroff does indeed get stopped. For good. And the Doctor leads his triumphant band on a journey in the TARDIS, claiming to be headed for Mars.

Yeah, right.

NEXT EPISODE : THE MOONBASE