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