The Creature From the Pit

The TARDIS pick up a distress call from the overgrown jungle planet of Chloris, and leads the Doctor and Romana into the clutches of the greedy Lady Adrasta. Metal of any kind is rare and valuable on Chloris, and a trading mission from another planet rich in metals but in need of cholorophyll has gona awry, with Adrasta desperate to keep her grip on the monopoly of metal. The Doctor attempts to make contact with the mysterious "creature" which lives in the pit while Adrasta seeks to use K9 as a weapon to kill it once and for all. But the creature is not a mindless monster waiting to kill all who come near it but a desperate alien wanting off the planet before its people exact a terrible revenge for Adrasta's hostility.

This is a pretty basic kind of script, with the Doctor and Romana going back and forth between being free and then captured by Adrasta's people. There are several good points to the whole adventure like Adrasta's oozing evil, the vicious killings of Madame Karela, and the fierce wolfweed plants that attack and immobilize K9, but there are a couple drawbacks. The biggest one is the Creature itself. It was 1978 when this was made so we have to forgive the production crew their failed attempts at realizing the Creature, but to watch it in any time period save perhaps 1963 is to see a big green garbage bag monster with the odd phallic limb sticking out here and there. I'm not sure if cgi could even save this one. I mean really.... it's a blob. A big green blob. A huge green blob, really. How it actually made it down the pit in the first place though is a bit of a mystery, as the well that the Doctor jumps down to gain entrance is hardly big enough for it.

I watched this one with Jay and as one can imagine, we were kinda cruel to the Creature. And the whole production really. Jay spotted that one of the supporting cast, the character Organon, had a more than passing resemblance to the first Doctor (and indeed he was cast in that role for two of Big Finish's Doctor Who Unbound adventures). And then we started in on the members of Astrasta's palace guard and their hockey mask uniforms. And we went after the Doctor for wiping the creature's slime trail in his hair. The only big hangup we had with this one was actually watching the copy I have; the VHS copy is crap. I paid money for crap. Whatever happened to it, the copy has bad picture quality with the white level going way up all of a sudden and blinding the viewer. I had the adventure captured to a DVD by a friend of mine but somewhere in there the disc failed and thus Jay never got to see the ending so I had to fill him in. And my precis can never do the poor quality of the effects justice.

Carrying on from his bout of laryngitis in Destiny of the Daleks K9 now has a new voice, provided by David Brierly, as John Leeson was off on a project doing talking books for the deaf. Or the blind. The new K9 voice isn't too bad and he manages to "be" K9 alright, but he just sounds wrong. At least it's just a temporary measure. K9 gets a real bum deal this episode, attacked by wolfweeds, threatened with destruction, and then hauled around by the guards and anyone else who can carry him (a dummy model is used and it's pretty obvious it's just a box with a head).

The violence level of this episode is really up there. People are thrown down pits to be killed by a monster. There are stabbings. The Doctor clubs down two guards with a set of wooden stocks. Lady Adrasta slaps Romana around real good and has a knife at her throat a lot. K9 shoots stuff. An entire planet is threatened with obliteration.

Rock on!

NEXT EPISODE : THE NIGHTMARE OF EDEN