Terror of the Autons

With Liz Shaw having gone back to Cambridge, the Doctor is short of help. The Brigadier has a replacement in mind: agent Josephine Grant; mind you, she's not a scientist, she's barely trained in any other aspect of UNIT operations aside from using the phone and fluttering her eyelids at Captain Mike Yates, but she'll do. And her first introduction to life with UNIT is going to be a doozy: the Master, another renegade Time Lord who has so far escaped the same justice that saw the Doctor put on trial, has come to earth, and he's brought the Nestenes back with him. Once again the plastic killer Autons are stalking the cities, although with the Master's help they have branched out from store mannequins and are now manifesting themselves as killer toys, plastic household goods, and masked replicas of human beings. With the aid of a brilliant Time Lord they are intent to conquer the Earth this time - unless the Doctor can stop them again.

This is the good meat of the UNIT years; alien menace comes to Earth and spreads unseen, aided by the Master in his quest to simply destroy and to humiliate the Doctor. The Master is on a higher more dangerous tier than the Meddling Monk; collaborating with aliens so long as he gets power. Only his obsession with destroying the Doctor is what causes him to fail. I'm sure there is somewhere out there a paper on the Master, written by someone in fandom, labelling him as an absolute psychotic sociopath. It's far easier to accept someone who is evil when they are out and out evil and consumed with rage and fury, though; and the Master is calm and polite, meticulous and scheming. And he's going to be a thorn in the Doctor's, the Brigadier's, Jo's, UNIT's, the world's side for a while.

Terror of the Autons is another of the colourized adventures, the results being pretty iffy, and made worse by the fact that it's on VHS tape. Of course technology has changed and there is probably a better way to make this kind of thing work, so when a DVD release comes along it'll be better. I hope.

And now we have a new companion. Jo Grant. She's a bit of a ditz, perhaps a product of her era if her wardrobe is anything to go by. But where she is the antithesis to the brainy Liz (who was just a less abrasive Zoe) she is still a very new kind of companion; someone from a modern age who might have a few more brains going for her than Polly, whose days were spent toiling for Professor Brett and then idling the nights away flirting with sailors at the Inferno Club with Kitty. Jo's got the ambition to be a UNIT operative but she's not experienced enough of the realities of the job yet, although when job description is "assistant to scientific advisor" things are bound to get a bit dodgy for her...

NEXT EPISODE : THE MIND OF EVIL

Inferno

In recent days of feul crises and energy concerns, the 1970 season finale, Inferno, remains a topical story. A drilling project has been started outside of London with the aim to penetrate Earth's crust and tap pockets of a gas that has been dormant since the early days of the planet. Heading the project is the obsessive Professor Stahlman, a man who will not let anything get in his way, not even reports of a strange green goo coming up the pipes that is transforming all who touch it into crazed killers. With the Brigadier and UNIT handling security, the Doctor and Liz come along; the Doctor has also brought the TARDIS console with him to attempt to get it restarted using power from the drill project's own nuclear reactor. In a freak accident, the TARDIS console slips the Doctor sideways into a parallel dimension where the world is run by facists, the Brigadier and Liz are senior staff of a neo-nazi style military elite, and the drilling project is much closer to completing its task. First suspected of being a spy and then accepted as the crisis reaches its boiling point, the Doctor must try to return to "his" Earth and stop the drilling before hell is literally unleashed. The parallel Earth dies in the molten flow released as the crust is penetrated, an image that will haunt the Doctor the rest of his days, and he must do everything he can to stop "our" Earth from suffering a similar fate.

Inferno is an incredibly well done adventure, all 7 episodes in full colour! I'd love to see this one come out as a DVD sometime soon with a bit of cleanup done on some of the visual effects. Jay settled in with me to watch the show, noting right off the bat how the drilling projects' gritty industrial setting looked like "one of England's nicer little towns". Then came a sound of surprise very early in episode one; a clever edit between scenes as an infected worker lashes out to strike someone, and then we find Sergeant Benton hammering nails into the wall of the Brigadier's office. This is only the third time Benton has appeared in the series; following his debut in Invasion he returned in the previous story, Ambassadors of Death, and is now a part of the UNIT family, even cracking cheeky grins as the Doctor makes fun of the Brig's moustache. The alternate version of the Brigadier (the Brigade Leader) has no such stache, but instead has a nasty scar and an eye patch. He is also a total coward and a bully, a far cry from the hero our own Brigadier has already proven himself to be. Liz's counterpart is cold and efficient at first, but starts to show some of the compassion we know her real self to be capable of as she spends more time with the Doctor, but no matter what universe she is in or what colour hair she has, her skirt is still too short to be practical. And Stahlman.. well he's the same in both universes; consistently stubborn and miserable.

There are no lasers or spaceships in Inferno and other visual effects are minimalized. There are some okay uses of miniatures for the drilling complex as it explodes, and when the Earth's crust is penetrated and the lava starts to pour out the location film is treated with a red filter on the lens (aside from a moment in episode 6 where someone forgot to put it on as the scene started; but the restoration team will no doubt take care of that). The Primords, as the crazed infected technicians are called, are werewolf like people with fake Dracula teeth, green faces and long shaggy hair, but there's something about them loping across the burning refinery setting of the project that is unsettling. The transition scenes between "our" Earth and the parallel world are a bit hokey; a blurred closeup of a mirrorball spinning in one direction and then a sloppy cut to it spinning the other way is all we get, and, of course, Jay and I couldn't help but groan when it happened.

A funny thing happened to Jay's VCR, though: as we were getting set for our romantic McDonald's lunch between episodes 4 and 5 (which is where the divide is between the tapes of the two-cassette pack), the VCR died. No play. No rewind. No fast forward. NO EJECT. We took the thing apart and pried the tape free, but were faced with the prospect of not seeing the rest of the show. Luckily, my friend George was home and we trekked from Riverdale to St Jamestown (the trip itself is an adventure all its own) to impose on him to finish watching the show. "Oh look," George said "It's in colour!" and then he took off to shop at IKEA.

And that's the end of Jon Pertwee's first season. Unlike the first season of Patrick Troughton, there was no real feeling of the actor settling into his role at all; he just was the Doctor from moment one, even if some of Troughton's characteristics did pop up from time to time but eventually faded. Pertwee himself was often quoted as saying he was told not to play the part as any other person, just play it as Jon Pertwee. "Jon Pertwee?" he asked. "Who the hell is he?" Well now we know: he's the third Doctor. Inferno sees his first use of Venusian karate, which establishes him as something the previous two Doctors were not: a man who would use violence if he had to. Hartnell would wallop people with his walking stick the odd time, or crack a vase over an assassin's head in The Romans, and Troughton once pushed a Dalek off a path into a pit, but neither actually punched or shopped anyone, or nailed them with a paralysing nerve hold. Jay rightly said that Pertwee seems like a man who can get away with it; he has a certain elegance and a style that would allow fisticuffs from time to time. Mind you, just as he is getting used to his situation as an exile on Earth, the Doctor is going to lose Liz. This is her last story. There is no proper farewell for her character in the televised series, but in the novel series by both Virgin Publishing (The Scales of Injustice, The Eye of the Giant) and BBC Books (The Devil gblins from Nepture) she works with the Doctor and UNIT a bit more before she makes her return to Cambridge, her contract with UNIT expired. Next season, the Doctor will have a new assistant, but to kick things off he will be faced with old enemies, even if we have never seen one of them before...

NEXT EPISODE : TERROR OF THE AUTONS

The Ambassadors of Death

The world waits on pins and needles as Mars Probe 7 makes a silent return from its mission to survey the red planet that is our neighbour. The astronauts on board have made no contact with Earth, and the manned capsule Recovery 7 is sent to meet them. With UNIT handling security, the Doctor and Liz are soon involved in a conspiracy to abduct three radiation-dependent alien ambassadors sent to Earth on a supposed mission of goodwill, but soon the ambassadors are rampaging about on a killing spree. The Doctor and the Brigadier find their investigations hampered by an unco-operative minister and the devious General Carrington of Space Security, Liz is kidnapped and forced to work for the conspirators, and the aliens threaten to destroy Earth if their ambassadors are not returned.

7 episodes of this, with the emphasis being on intregue and deception for the bulk of it. I remember when I first saw this episode on Channel 17 back in 1985, my grade 9 math teacher, Mr John Westlake, commented that the older Pertwees seemed more like murder mysteries than the sci fi romps we had enjoyed before. Still, at that time I hadn't seen anything older than this, so I didn't have the evolutionary perspective of the previous 6 seasons to look back on. Now, it is quite a different matter. Okay, the sci fi alien adventures are being a bit toned down in response to the Doctor's exile, and there can't be a massive invasion attempt week after week; everything would be played out a bit quieter, especially with UNIT there to stop threats before they got out of control. Of course there is the question then of what Space Security is needed for if there is UNIT. Is England's space program in this continuity that big?

And when I found out the manned mission to Mars was threatened, my first instinct, even in 1985, was that there were Ice Warriors on the horizon. But no. They're not. For the most part the aliens stay in the suits of the abducted astronauts and we only see their faces once; they look like they are rotting before our eyes. But continuity is not threatened here; the ambassadors never claim to actually be from Mars themselves, and may have been there themselves to contact the Ice Wariors, and finding them extinct or hibernating, they made attempted contact with humans instead. In a novel called The Dying Days the events of this story will be referenced as the eighth Doctor tries to stave off a real Martian invasion.

The Ambassadors of Death comes across as a very stylish piece of work all told. Episode one immediately establishes the air of tension at space control with the nervousness of the staff on display, contrasted with the placid calm tones of a live reporter speaking to the public on television. Such reporting would probably be the sort of thing to cause panic and public hysteria in its day, but it would seem right at home in today's world with the scaremongering of CNN. The action picks up as the UNIT men take on an armed group of thugs in a warehouse and get their butts kicked in an embarassing way. Later on in the show, the action comes back in a high speed chase as Liz tries to outrun her kidnappers first in Bessie, and then on foot over a dam. And through this all there is the musical score, which is distinctive enough to be joked about amongst fans but still be effective. The chase/fight scores are punctuated by percussion, the sequences involving the alien ambassadors making their way across the countryside in their slow plodding way is almost the stuff of dream sequences. The only bit of music I am not keen on is the outer space score from Recovery 7's initial link up with Mars Probe 7; it feels like something one would heard standing on the entry ramp to Space Mountain at Disneyworld in Florida. The opening of each episode was changed slightly, with the Doctor Who logo shown, a recap of the previous episode, and then a quick cut back to the adventure's title and the episode number before resuming the action. The closing titles were done as a complete musical piece as opposed to the fading out of the music in episodes previous; the episode ended with the famous "sting" and the credits closed to what is now knows as the "space sound", both elements that are found in the current version of the theme arrangement by Murray Gold.

Again, the lack of complete colour episodes in the BBC archive makes this VHS release ground for some experimentation; episode 1 was retained in its complete colour format and where off-air colour copies existed segments of the other 6 episodes were merged and colourized as with the previous story. The result is the colour fades up and down from and to black and white, but not in a jarring way. I hardly noticed the colour had gone at some points as I was too busy following the action on the screen.

Perhaps I should have asked Mr Westlake to join me for this one. I would like to know what he thinks. But next time, it's Jay and I once more, and he's even reserved our regular table at the local McDonald's for our intermission ...

NEXT EPISODE : INFERNO

Doctor Who and the Silurians

Settling into his exile and working with UNIT and Liz, the Doctor is more than a bit annoyed at being at the Brigadier's beck and call. UNIT are investigating a series of power losses at an underground nuclear research centre, and alongside this they have to contend with nervous breakdowns amongst the staff. The Doctor discovers that one of the base personnel has made contact with an underground colony of reptile-men called Silurians, and it is they who are causing the power losses in an attempt to revive their hibernating masses. The Silurians were the dominant life form on Earth millions of years before man evolved and they went into hibernation to avoid destruction from an approaching planet, but the planet became the moon and the Silurians slumbered on. Now awakened, the ambitious Young Silurian plans to infect mankind with a disease to wipe the planet clear of its human population, but the Doctor manages to find a cure and force the Silurians to take other measures. A plan to disperse the Van Allen radiation belt around the planet is foiled by a clever bluff, and the Brigadier takes his chance to blow up the caves used by the Silurians and seal them in forever. The Doctor is, of course, furious.

7 episodes for this one, and very good ones at that. This first season for Jon Pertwee looks a bit like the latter years of the show on paper with only a total of four adventures, but with three of them at the 7 episode length, they become small epics in their own rights. This story has the distinction of being the only one with the actual words "Doctor Who" in its title.

I love the Silurians. Script writer Malcolm Hulke does a great job establishing their history and culture, making them not mindless savage lizard creatures but a noble race with ideals and a society all their own. There is dissention in the ranks of the Silurians at the prospect of attempting to share the planet with humanity; some view the humans as equals now that they have evolved and formed their own civilization, but more agressive elements still see man as nothing more than an over-evolved ape that needs to be exterminated. It's good to be able to say that the Silurians will return over time in the series, and when the series left the air and became a novel range, the Silurians were also back, although as allies and not wary opponants. For the most part, anyways.

What's up with Liz Shaw's hair? It seems to have grown quite a bit since Spearhead from Space. Couldn't be a wig, could it? Hmm. And speaking of things cosmetic, note the second appearance of Jon Pertwee's naval tattoo on his forearm (the first time was during a shower scene in Spearhead from Space, which was a benchmark on it's own - the first time we ever saw the Doctor's nipples!) with no attempt to cover it up or anything. And now that the TARDIS is effectively grounded, the Doctor has a new vehicle: a bright yellow Edwardian puddlejumper named Bessie.

And just when you thought we were safe from the BBC archive purge that denied us the bulk of the Troughton years, here it comes again: all the colour episodes of this epic are lost, leaving overseas black and white film prints in the archive. All was not lost, however; the black and white prints were merged with off-air colour copies to form a colourized version of the story, the end result of this being somewhat muddy colours and grainy picture quality, but a colour version nonetheless. I like to think that maybe this is a better version to watch than the sharp clarity of the BBC studio sessions as it adds a different feel to the adventure, makes it look a bit less cheap. It looks old, but not like it was shot with a public broadcasting budget; the shadows are deeper, the brown skin of the Silurians is richer, but the faces of the human actors are a bit jaundiced, and the colours of the opening sequence just plain gaudy. The colourization efforts were made on a total of four of Jon Pertwee's stories where the material existed to make the attempt, but in some cases all we have left are black and white prints. It could be worse; we could be back in the mid 60's with nothing.

NEXT EPISODE : THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH

Spearhead from Space

An odd shower of meteorites lands in England, drawing the attention of UNIT and their newly drafted scientific advisor Liz Shaw. Liz is skeptical of UNIT's mission to deal with the unknown and unusual, but it told by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of past attempts to invade Earth by alien races, and how each time those forces were repelled thanks to special "help" UNIT received. The Doctor returns to Earth in the TARDIS, having been regenerated by the Time Lords and now serving his sentence of exile. The Brigadier has a hard time swallowing the Doctor's new appearance but had no choice but to ask him for his help with the meteorite mystery, as none of the objects are actually ever found. The Doctor and Liz realize that the meteorites are not what they seem and are made of a form of plastic, and at one point contained something. The reality of the situation is the first attempt by the Nestenes to invade and colonize Earth; creatures with no physical form as such they can manufacture bodies made of plastic and animate them with their own energy, and thus they create an army of Autons, which are no more than shop window dummies awaiting orders to attack. The Nestenes also create facsimilies of important people to use in their invasion to hamper the government's efforts to stop them, but the Doctor comes through by determining that the Autons' major weakness is to destroy the controlling Nestene creature itself. With UNIT's latest crisis solved, the Doctor strikes a deal with the Brigadier to offer his help in exchange for facilities to attempt to repair the TARDIS, and for the help of Liz in his work. The Brigadier agrees, and the Doctor begins his life on Earth.

First thing that strikes one watching this one: IT'S IN COLOUR!!!!!!! Yes, it's 1970 and the BBC have finally made the leap to colour television in their programming, and it adds and entire new level to Doctor Who. Stylistically the entire 4 part serial is shot on location, not in a studio, which gives it an even more impressive look after the black and white finale of The War Games. And then there's the scary faceless Autons, the creepy character Channing, and the Nestene tentacles attacking the Doctor... all impressive and a far cry from the previous days of the show.

When Patrick Troughton took the role of the Doctor the production team knew they were gambling with the future of Doctor Who, but he was well received and when it was time to introduce Jon Pertwee the fans were asked once again to accept a stranger in the guise of their favourite Saturday hero. And it worked. Pertwee's protrayal of the Doctor loaned him a certain element of elegance, making him more of a gentleman than Troughton's hobo-esque version, but bringing with him his own sense of humour and even a slight mischievous edge. The Doctor bridles at the Brigadier's sense of order and control; he wants to be free but is stuck on Earth without the ability to leave. The Doctor also gels immediately with Liz; as they are both scientists he recognizes her intellect and finds he can work well with her. Comparitively, Liz is the female Ian Chesterton when it comes to brains, but whereas the first Doctor enjoyed playing cat and mouse with Chesterton's limited scientific knowledge, the new Doctor takes the time to share his knowledge with Liz and add to her own capabilities as his assistant.

The Auton element of this adventure was borrowed heavily for the 2005 season premiere, recreating the infamous shop-window dummy rampage that was a lot scarier in 1970. My 7 year old nephew found the original version to be far more alarming, but he first saw it spliced with some specially shot footage recreating the scene for the commemorative More Than 30 Years In The TARDIS documentary. Still, though; faceless mannequins busting out of shop windows and striding through the streets shooting people down... yes. There is also an interesting moment of continuity in this episode which may or may not have been intentional; a certain General Scobie is part of the cast, and he was originally seen in the background behind William Hartnell's Doctor back in The War Machines. Nice to see Scobie is still an important figure in the UK military.

Jon Pertwee always said that he found it more frightening to have alien meances come to Earth rather than go off into space to find them, reasoning that the alien meance set against something familiar like, say, Daleks on Westminster Bridge (or as he was oft quoted: "Finding a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec,") was a lot more effective. Exiled to Earth, the Doctor would find a lot of new menaces heading his way, most from outer space, but some from Earth itself...

NEXT EPISODE : DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS

Sympathy for the Devil

In this alternate take on the Doctor's adventures, the TARDIS arrives in Hong Kong in 1997 just as the city is about to be handed over to the Chinese. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS in his regenerated form (played by David Warner for this adventure) and finds a pub called Little England being run by none other than the retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, a man whose military career is in tatters after the botched events of several UNIT attempts to stop alien invasions. The Doctor makes contact with the Brigadier just as a Chinese stealth fighter with a cloaking device goes down in the hills outside Hong Kong, and the current UNIT squad are deployed to rescue a defector from the wreckage - a defector who is not quite what he seems.

These sorts of stories are best left to be viewed in retrospect of the whole series, as Sympathy for the Devil makes reference to many events that took place during the third Doctor's exile to Earth. It is interesting to note though that without the Doctor's presence, the attempted invasions and attacks were still thwarted, but at a tremendous price to the world as a whole, and to the Brigadier personally. The Brig as he appears here (still played by Nicholas Courtney, though) is a defeated man, he has given up, he has no friends, and he just wants to be left alone. The Doctor is far more bitter about his exile than Jon Pertwee's third Doctor, even going so far as to appear to make a deal with the devil to escape from Earth, and only grudgingly getting involved in what's going on in Hong Kong until he begins to suspect what is really behind the plane crash and the untimely atomic test detonations by the Chinese government.

Like I said, best to be enjoyed on audio CD after having seen the whole series, or at least enough of it to understand why the Brigaider blew up central London in response to a supposed dinosaur sighting. That is still ahead of us here. Big Finish put out a total of 7 installments of their Doctor Who Unbound range, with an eighth on it way which picks up where Sympathy for the Devil leaves off. I will only be looking at 2 more adventures as they come along where they are directly touched by continuity or perhaps offer some kind of true insight into how the slightest change can alter a whole future.

But for now, back to reality....

NEXT EPISODE : SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE

The War Games

The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive on the dirty bloody battlefields of World War I in 1917 and are immediately embroiled in the hostilities. Captured first by Germans and then the British army, they are accused of spying and become fugitives. Things are not what they seem, though; the generals in charge of the different armies have high tech telecommunications equipments hidden in their private rooms, and somewhere else the events are monitored by technicians with freaky sunglasses. And practically next door to 1917, just over a hill and through a fog bank, are Roman soliders, and other soldiers fighting in the American Civil War. The Doctor discovers that they are not even on Earth, and someone has set this place up and kidnapped soldiers from various wars in Earth's history. And they have used travel machines that dematerialize with a familiar sound, and are bigger inside than outside. The Doctor is suspicious of these factors and then realizes that the entire operation is being run by the War Chief, one of his own people, who has allied himself with the War Lord and an entire race out to enslave the galaxy. To save the soliders from death on this planet and to defeat the War Lord, the Doctor must call upon his own people - the Time Lords - to assist him, even though he himself is on the run from them, and by calling for help he may well be signing his own death warrant.

10 episodes. My friend Dan grimaced at the prospect and said that aside from episodes 1, 9 and 10, watching The War Games is like having teeth pulled. I admit that at times I felt like I needed a nap, but hey it's over 4 hours in front of the TV, anyone would need a stretch. So I recruited Jay once more, and between episodes 5 and 6 we enjoyed the fine dining experience of the Gerard Square McDonald's and observed the plight of the area. Jay usually has a lot to say about the production values of the show but The War Games is actually done with some very high production values for its day, although the use of transparent plastic sheets as walls and the hideous photographic blow up walls of the TARDIS console room gave us both cause to groan. And we can't figure out why there was a need to have a bubbling maze of streams in episode 10 on the Time Lord planet when any old corridor would do. Running away is, after all, a time honoured tradition, and it is traditionally done in corrdiors. But it's a minor point. So is the sex fetish look of the War Lord's guards, even though their weapons are pretty cool for 1969.

This is the last regular performance of this ensemble TARDIS crew. After a year together, the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe will be separated, and not by choice. Caught by the Time Lords and put on trial for his involvement in the affairs of other worlds, the Doctor is taken from his friends, and they are returned to their proper places in time; Zoe is returned to the Wheel, and Jamie finds himself back on the Scottish moors, neither of them remembering their time in the TARDIS with the Doctor. The Doctor is forced to defend himself against the accusations of the Time Lords by showing them the evils he has faced, and he is granted a slight bit of mercy; the Time Lords decide to exile him to Earth, and he will be regenerated. Amid a storm of protest, the Doctor is last seen spinning into infinity on a Time Lord monitor screen, his future hanging in the balance.

Another Doctor down. There was probably less hesitation about regenerating the Doctor again as it had proved to add to the show's popularity back when Patrick Troughton took over the role from William Hartnell, and when the series returned with the new Doctor in the form of Jon Pertwee, things would certainly be very different all over.

There has lately been a lot of development in the revisionist elements of the series, a lot of it centering around exactly what did happen to the Doctor at the end of The War Games. As we never see him regenerate into his new body, it is now being speculated that maybe the Time Lords didn't send him to earth right away and kept him in a form of stasis for a while, using him as an agent when it suited them. In future adventures, the second Doctor will be seen with his other incarnations but without his companions, and even in 1983's The Five Doctors the Doctor will reference Jamie and Zoe's departure, which would certainly seem to place him in a strange kind of limbo. One BBC novel called Players contained a segment involving the second Doctor, obviously in the employ of the Time Lords, and another, called World Game, takes this even further and sees the Doctor paired with a new companion to assist him in his mission. Unfortunately it's only early September now and I am not willing to put the whole blog on hold for the sake of one novel, so if you're reading this as a first time Doctor Who enthusiast, you can hop over to amazon.ca (or.com or whatever is local to you) and reserve your own copy and see for yourself. And if you want to have some fun on the "what if.." side of the coin, Big Finish's audio adventure CD Sympathy for the Devil sees David Warner as an alternative Doctor arriving on Earth in 1997 to serve his exile.

Oh that's what I'm going to do next...

NEXT EPISODE : SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL