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

The Highlanders

It's the Jacobite Rebellion of 1746, and the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Polly and Ben to the Scottish moors. The Scots have been routed by the English, and the time travellers fall in with a fugitive band hiding out in a cottage. Polly and a Scottish lass named Kirsty are separated from the others, who are taken to Inverness only to be sold into slavery. The Doctor does a bit of clever dodging and gets free, Ben causes trouble for his captors and gets a good dunking from the bow of the ship for his trouble, and Polly and Kirsty blackmail an English lieutenant into helping them find and rescue their friends. And in the end, Jamie McCrimmon, a young piper, joins the TARDIS crew under the condition that he teaches the Doctor how to play the bagpipes (which he never does, but whatever).

This is the last of the purely historical adventures until 1982, so every other time the TARDIS lands in the past from here on, there will be some alien menace hiding in history. The Highlanders is a very enjoyable story, full of all the things that make for fun in the past. The Doctor practices his talents for adopting disguises, first as a German official, then in drag as a cleaning woman. Polly gets to be the modern girl this time and berates Kirsty for being reduced to tears in helpless situations. Ben... well Ben gets locked up a lot with the prisoners and is exploited by being dunked underwater but only escaping by remembering to flex his muscles before being tied up... or something ("body contours" ahoy, Gary Russell!)

The addition of Jamie, played by Fraser Hines, puts the TARDIS crew back up to four, the magic number on the show that always leaves one of the regular cast with too little to do. Jamie's character is a departure for the show though in that everyone else to date, barring Katarina, has been either from the modern (or as modern as the 1960's were) era or from the future. Here we have a period character, through whom we can see all the joys of time travel again, but not from the perspective of scientific curiosity and wonder, but from confusion, and even terror. Jamie will stick around for a while and become a very popular character with the fan base (and Fraser Hines is a very nice man - I met him at a convention we threw in Toronto in 1993).

Alas, The Highlanders is missing from the BBC archives, save for a few scraps of censor footage from episode 1. I enjoyed the adventure on the BBC Radio Collection CD over the last two days, with Fraser Hines providing the narration. The myth centre claims that there was an alternate ending to episode 4 with Jamie staying behind in Scotland rather than coming along with the TARDIS crew, but who can say for sure without even the broadcast version to see for ourselves.

Maybe one day.

NEXT EPISODE : THE UNDERWATER MENACE

Wonderland

We're back with another of the fantastic Telos novellas, this one set is 1967 San Francisco. I was originally going to prelude this one with a BBC novel called Dying in the Sun, which was set just a bit south of this in Los Angeles and a few years before, but I changed my mind because a) my CD copy of The Underwater Menace came in at last and I didn't have to stall, and, b) Dying in the Sun is such an awful book I am doing it more service than it deserves by even mentioning it here.

The Doctor, Polly, and Ben encounter young hippie girl Summer in San Fran during the Summer of Love when the new age movement and cries for peace by a younger generation were scaring the crap out of parents and politicians alike. A lot of this movement was centred in California, and we come across Summer in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Fran looking for her boyfriend, Denny, who has gone suspiciously missing. Our regular cast are caught up in her plight almost immediately (with less than 100 pages, as I have said before, these books move fast) although the Doctor senses something more happening and spends most of the story in the shadows trying to figure it out. His distance is accentuated by the story being told from Summer's point of view, and she resents that he is only interested in her problems because maybe he can solve his own by helping her. And he does indeed, as do Polly and Ben, despite the crazy goings on of a massive Woodstock-esque festival and the various sides who are working to either enslave or destroy the human race from their respective corners.

With Wonderland, Mark Chadbourn shows us a side of the second Doctor that people often forget was there: his darker side. A lot of fans don't like it when this is brought up in any of the Doctors but the point of the matter is we are dealing with an alien being here, and aside from maybe the third and fifth Doctors he has always had a dark nature that surfaces from time to time. The second Doctor doesn't do anything uncharacteristically cruel to Summer but his indifference to her plight is testament to him having bigger problems and he has to make a choice about what he is going to care about. Everyone loves to remember Patrick Troughton's Doctor as a clown, a comedian, a shabby hobo who outwitted his enemies by letting them think he was too foolish to be a threat, but there are times when the darker more serious side presents itself, as it will in the upcoming incomplete adventure The Moonbase. (I'll probably recruit Jay again for that one - he does so enjoy seeing his name here. I'll bet Ira wouldn't mind a nod here right now as well for being a faithful reader.)

Darker Doctor. Does it work? Handled properly, yes it does. The new series has momets just like this where the Doctor's approach to situations puts him at odds with his current companion, Rose, and one can't not mention how the seventh Doctor was almost made into a sinister shadow of himself towards the end of his television days and well into his days of print and audio CDs. The second Doctor doesn't go mad and kill anyone with an axe or watch without pity as someone drowns, but he does come across as very cold when dealing with Summer's demands for him to help her find Denny. Summer herself tries to come to terms with him, as this is the first impression she gets of him, and she calls him on it repeatedly, and for his apparant lack of concern for Ben and Polly when they are threatened, although we know how deeply he does care for his companions and that he knows they are strong enough to not need constant coddling.

And I will also say I was really impressed with the final moments of the story. Summer is granted a lot of new potential which would be interesting to explore given the right circumstances, and since this is Doctor Who, anything is possible.

Onwards.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HIGHLANDERS

Invasion of the Cat People

Um. Yeah. Total b-movie title for starters, although somehow in Doctor Who it's allowable, and one can almost see it on the screen if one closes ones eyes. Unfortunatlely, I don't see Jude Law in a starring role as per Gary Russell's fantasy cast list on page 261.

But anyways.

I didn't like it.

Ben and Polly suffer the usual displacement anxiety that the early companions exhibited in the series when arriving in the future; it is 1994 and they marvel at the price of things, and have their requisite encounter with McDonald's while the Doctor tries to make some sense of time experiments in a house somewhere in the English countryside. Clever references are made throughout to the Doctor's past, and even into his future with a mention of special books from "home" - a future reference (or retroactive continuity - "ret-conning") to a fourth Doctor adventure in 1979.

Cat-People. Yep, they're cats. Cliche cats, hissing and spitting, and despising humans, and of course to make sure they're really bad cats they're all females. Another reference to cat-kind is made, this time ahead into a 1989 story. Clever cross knitting of the elements of the series, but not really enough to save the story from getting a bit tired. Oh yes, they're out to conquer the world. And invade. Hence the title.

I didn't like. Did I already say that? Well I'm saying it again. I didn't like it. There are references back to Vulcan and the Daleks again, but to be fair this book was written before The Murder Game. Yes, this is another of the fabled Missing Adventures from Virgin Publishing back in 1995, so as far as Gary Russell was concerned when he wrote it, this was the bridge novel between two televised stories and he could treat it as such, so we get a bit of a hiccup with the recaps from Vulcan, but the story gets back underway without dwelling on it. Good point on the TARDIS crew dynamic: Polly and Ben are already feeling out of place having gone into the future, and the concept of them leaving gets brought up quick. Bad moment, though: both Polly and Ben have nightmares and get night sweats, but Ben's is perhaps dewlled upon a little too much for comfort, until he arrives in the console room a sweaty stinky mess with his pyjamas "clinging to his body contours".

Jude Law and sweaty Ben in the same book. Okay Gary, welcome to this side of the closet door. Sheesh. And I can say this as a gay man myself. Shamless sexploitation of the companions? Well to be fair around the time this book was written, the New Adventures featuring the seventh Doctor and company were really pushing the envelope and breaking new ground, and there was a hot young companion always being deprived of his clothes; it just feels wierd to ret-con that new style of writing into the classic (we have to call it "classic" now because of the new series) era.

So. Done. Relatively painless. On to the next book, then we're back to televised stories, I promise.

NEXT EPISODE : WONDERLAND

The Murder Game

With the events of Vulcan behind them, the Doctor, Polly and Ben are travelling together again, although Ben is still edgy about the Doctor's recent regeneration. The TARDIS receives a distress signal and takes the team to the Hotel Galaxian, which was once posh but is now a run-down space station/hotel orbiting Earth (and I'll say right now I wrote Offworld Vegas before this came out) to find a murder mystery game being played out, very much the game of "Clue" set in space. Rather than rock the boat, the Doctor and company willingly take part in the game when they are mistaken for late-arriving participants, but when someone is found murdered in the corridors of the hotel, it appears that there are other forces at work than a bunch of space tourists playing a game. It gets worse, though, when the savage Selachians arrive at the station looking for a hidden weapon, and threatening to kill anyone who does not help them.

Selachians. Hm. A guy I chat with online once had the the tag line "sharks with friggin lasers" on his bio and for a while I thought he either meant the Selachians or the Sharkticons. Turns out it was neither. But that's beside the point. The Selachians are nasty aquatic predators who have designed life support and travel mechanisms that resemble walking robotic sharks. With friggin lasers. One of the supporting cast tells Ben that the Selachians are mean, but not up to the same league as the Daleks or the Cybermen, and that pretty much sums them up. They are driven by the simple desire to kill, very much like sharks, although they have a more reasoning intelligence and a bit of a temper (and a glib line in threats which includes referring to humans as "miserable human plankton"). I found that Steve Lyons played them mostly for laughs; I never got a real sense of a threat, just fish-faced bullies that even he undercuts with chapter titles such as "Attack of the Killer Sharks". Still, when it comes to novels, it is not uncommon to have cheesy chapter headings, and to this day there is always some joker calling one chapter "Escape to Danger" or "Explosion!".

All told though The Murder Game is a good addition to the adventures of the Doctor, Ben, and Polly. Anyone who knows the series knows that they will soon be joined by another companion to bring the crew up to four, which will see some characters left out of the action from time to time. Peter Davison, the fifth Doctor, would comment in the 2005 documentary series Doctor Who Confidential that he felt that three companions was just far too much for the Doctor to deal with, and rather than have meaningful bonds between the Doctor and his companions one would get the sense that the Doctor was leading a school outing. Books such as The Murder Game and the next few to follow allow a bit of expansion into the relationship of the current crew; Ben and Polly would no doubt feel completely alienated by the Doctor's recent regeneration for starters, but when the next crew member joins up the Doctor will form a much closer bond with him, pushing Polly and Ben further away and adding a bit more justification to their joint decision to leave eventually.

But on with the current group. Meow.

NEXT EPISODE : INVASION OF THE CAT PEOPLE

The Power of the Daleks

Imagine it from the companions' point of view: you've been travelling with this mysterious old man through time and space for a little while, you've seen other worlds, aliens, historical figures, and the wonders of the TARDIS itself. And then one day, your guide, your friend, falls down in front of you, seemingly dead. And when you blink your eyes, there's someone new in his place. Someone who knows your name, knows the TARDIS, claims to in fact be the Doctor, but bears no resemblance to him whatsoever. But you saw it happen. But you don't believe it. It is this myriad of conflicting thoughts that faces Ben and Polly now as they are faced with the second Doctor. He's visibly younger than his predecessor, and acts in a mischevious fashion, and plays a recorder now; he doesn't need glasses anymore, and the ring that the first Doctor used to wear and guard against all as if it were sacred has been casually discarded as if it were nothing more than a trinket. Ben is suspicious, he can't come to grips with this concept, but Polly, who was first to embrace the reality of what the TARDIS was capable of, is ready to believe that the Doctor is capable of changing his form on top of everything else she has seen him do in past.

With this uncertainty hanging over them, the TARDIS crew are thrust into the political upheaval of the Earth colony called Vulcan. The Doctor is mistaken for an official from Earth who has come to investigate the goings on in the colony, and through the course of his exploration of the colony he discovers a mysterious capsule that was dragged out of the mercury swamp. The capsule is not empty though, and inside are two inert Daleks, and a space on the floor where a third one was. The chief scientist of the colony has secretly removed and reactivated the third Dalek, and believes that the Daleks are nothing but machines and can be made to serve the colony, and others in the shadows believe that they can be used to aid in the coming rebellion. The truth, of course, is that the Daleks will allow this charade to play out while they quietly establish themselves and feed power to their capsule, which is a Dalek seed ship capable of building an army of machines and placing mutant creatures inside. The Doctor warns everyone of the Daleks' plans but the colonists will not hear any of his protests and blindly allow the Daleks access to everything they request, and by the time they do heed the warnings it is too late and mass exterminations follow.

I really REALLY wish this adventure had some better representation in the BBC archives than the few clips that survive today. Not only is this the historic first adventure of the new Doctor, but these Daleks are cunning mean ones, at their best for the time. I enjoyed all six episodes on audio while in the car and making dinner at a friend's place the other night, and found myself feeling truly cheated for the first time by the stupidity of the BBC when it came to preserving their shows. From all accounts, Patrick Troughton's new Doctor reacted with sheer fear and terror when he came face to face with one of the Daleks, which is something no other Doctor ever did until this season's Dalek from the new series. And the Dalek in question itself appeared to recognize the Doctor right away but continued to play out its role as a servant of the human colonists. A few times through the story you can hear the Daleks restraining themselves and submitting to the humiliation of being servants to an inferior race, biding their time until they can start the killing that they so enjoy. I actually found myself noticing dialogue similarities when it came to Polly rationalizing why Daleks do what they do, and the lines the ninth Doctor himself would say later on in the 2005 series; the truth is, the Daleks are just plain bad, they see no good in anything else, and they're determined to wipe out everything that is not of their creed. They are the ultimate in racial hatred, no conscience, nothing. It's best summed up by one of the Daleks, when it says "We are not yet ready to teach these humans the Law of the Daleks!" which is something no other Dalek ever really says; in future they will just exterminate, or they will be planning some conquest, there will never be any indicator of this being a conscious way of life for the Daleks. Maybe that's down to David Whitaker's writing, which is reportedly something that Dalek creator Terry Nation was not pleased with. Mind you, I personally find that Nation's future criticisms of what other writers would do with the Daleks seemed to stem from some kind of jealousy that his creations were evolving out of his hands; Nation publically condoned the way author John Peel would handle the novelizations of four Dalek adventures into target books, but those books were not really that good. Future scripts from Eric Saward and Ben Aaronovitch would be met with scorn by Nation, but they would demonstrate some good initiative and take the Daleks into the future. I sometimes wonder what Nation would have said about the Dalek scripts for Big Finish's audio range, and indeed about the "new" Daleks on the new series. Probably nothing good, in the end.

One can see (or hear) Troughton trying to find his role as the Doctor after taking over from William Hartnell, but having the Daleks in the script to distract the audience from what has just happened works quite well, so the Doctor doesn't need to do any soul searching and can more or less just deal with the Dalek menace and worry about who he "is" later on. And it won't take long for him to be established and in character; the next televised episode will see him pretty much right where he will be for the rest of his time in the role.

But before we go there, some more adventures in the world of printed fiction. Polly may have accepted that this is indeed the Doctor, but Ben is still convinced, so why not see what effect that suspicion has on the team dynmic in between episodes...

NEXT EPISODE : THE MURDER GAME

The Tenth Planet

The TARDIS arrives at the South Pole in the year 1986 just as a standard orbit by a manned space capsule starts to go awry. The Doctor, Ben and Polly encounter a hidden base in the ice where an international team commanded by the growly General Cutler and tracking the capsule and trying to guide it back to Earth. The Doctor discovers a power drain affecting the capsule and accurately predicts that another planet is about to appear in the sky, and then he predicts that they will receive visitors from that planet. Cutler doesn't care and is suspicious of the time travellers, but he has bigger things to worry about when the base is overrun by natives of the planet, now known as Mondas; they are mechanical with visible human hands, their faces wrapped in fabric but their eyes and mouths still disturbingly visible as if they are rotting beneath the coverings. All emotion has been removed from their brains, they are the Cybermen. Their planet is Earth's twin but has drifted off its orbit, and desperately low on energy it has returned to gather energy from Earth. Mondas does indeed begin to suck at Earth's power but times have changed since they were twin planets and there is a lot more energy going around in industry and technology, and under the overload, Mondas burns out and the Cybermen are destroyed. The Doctor becomes steadily weaker as the adventure unfolds, only barely managing to set the TARDIS in motion before he collapses onto the floor. Ben and Polly rush to his side, and as they watch, he regenerates into a completely new person...

Oh where to begin.

The big news is the regeneration. William Hartnell has been the Doctor for the last three years at this point, and he wants to leave the role, citing health reasons for the most part but in a letter he apparantly sent to a fan he states that he was having creative differences with the BBC about the direction the show was moving in, and then left. Regardless, the problem of replacing the lead character was solved by introducing the concept of regeneration, a process unique to the Doctor's people wherein an old worn out body can undergo a complete cellular renewal and continue to live, but completely altering its physical appearance as a side effect. This would be a big risk on any program, but as Doctor Who is still very much on the go here in 2005, obviously one that the fans were ready to buy into. The regeneration is handled well on screen, slowly blending the face of William Hartnell into that of his successor, Patrick Troughton.

Then there are the Cybermen. It is hard to believe that these mummified creatures would go on the be one of the series' most notorious monsters, but they would indeed return numerous times over the series, seeming to update their appearance every time. These Cybermen were a very primitive breed, with bits of their previous human physionomy still very much visible as stated above. One of the Cybermen alludes to them still very much posessing organic brains, just with their emotions surgically removed along with their hearts and most of their organs to ensure their survival. There is a tremendous opportunity to explore the background of the Cybermen, and it will come in the Big Finish audio Spare Parts, but that's not for a while. One of the creepiest things about these Cybermen is the dull dead processed voices that come from their mouths; the mouths open but do not actually move with the words they speak as if there is a speaker buried within them.

I recruited my friend Jay for viewing purposes once more, and we noted the stylized titles for the adventure, but realized that the computer sounds of the control room were provided by the same effects that were used for WOTAN so recently inThe War Machines. Jay made note of a more professional look to the opening of the show, but that goes right out the window when the snow machine is parked right beside the camera to simulate a blizzard as the TARDIS arrives. The staff of the Antarctic base are all from different nations and are played a bit too over the top, with some not-too-convincing American accents and a really lousy Spanish dude complete with girlie mags and pin-ups by his bunk. Polly is of course ogled by the men seeing as there are no women on the base (so it's 1986 but there are still no women in the military eh? Actually that's really the only thing that was inaccurate about the social dynamic in the episodes, at least from what I can remember of 1986) and reverts to her typical 60's girl role by offering to make evryone coffee in a time of crisis. "Why doesn't she just take a dictation and be secretary too," Jay says from his chair. The concept of the United Nations working as one on a space program is interesting, even if they appear to have Americans running the bases, but then come the scenes at the UN buildings in Geneva where everyone wears distinctive tribal outfits to represent their nations and show us just how multicultural the world is in 1986. Uh, yeah.

The Tenth Planet is unfortunately incomplete, with episode 4 missing somewhere in the ether (although it is suspected that someone somewhere has it and is hanging onto it just to be a dick... dude, if you're reading this, you ARE being a dick, give it back to the BBC dammit). For the VHS release episodes 1 through 3 were cleaned up and episode 4 reconstructed using the intact audio tracks, stills, and a few choice moments of moving images recorded with film off a television screen during the original broadcast. The regeneration clip did mercifully survive as it was used in another program and lifted from it, so at least the first glimpse of the Doctor's truly alien ability is there to be seen. The reconstruction was done very well, and if enough material had been available a similar approach to the missing episodes from The Reign of Terror would have been a nice project, rather than forcing Carole Ann Ford to sit and read from a teleprompter.

So that's the end of the first Doctor. Gone. On with the new. The BBC are rolling the dice that people will still watch the show even though the character they have been with for three years is as good as dead to them, with a strange newcomer at the helm of the TARDIS. What better way to keep viewers onside though than to pit the new Doctor against his oldest foes....

NEXT EPISODE : THE POWER OF THE DALEKS

Ten Little Aliens

Wow. This was a great story, complete with creepy little devil-monsters on the cover of the book.

Stephen Cole totally dismisses the notion of The Smugglers leading right into The Tenth Planet in Ten Little Aliens, and goes so far as to have Polly and Ben allude to having had many more adventures with the Doctor so far. This would certainly account for how tightly-knit the three regular characters have become in such a short amount of time. Or maybe it's just the Doctor, who is looking a bit worse for wear these days, his initial outrage at having two new companions thrust upon him now fading so fast he is almost welcoming of their presence. Together they step from the TARDIS in full space gear into a chamber on an asteroid with no air. That is, until the life support systems kick in, and it becomes clear that this is not just an asteroid but a trap and a half. A platoon of space marines from Earth's empire have also come to this place on a training mission, to find not only the Doctor and company but ten of the most wanted alien terrorists all preserved in their final moments of death behind a stasis field. Coincidence? Surely not - there's no such thing in Doctor Who. And then people start to die, in horrible ways.

Stylistically this is one of those novels that I have trouble dealing with when placed back during the old black and white days of the program. What's my problem? The sheer scale of the science fiction in it. In The War Machines, the Doctor examines supercomputer WOTAN with an expert eye and some glib phrases that had Jay and I laughing our asses off, seeing as there is more power in my PC now than WOTAN could have ever posessed. Here now we have the Doctor totally adept to technology that allows users to experience each other's thoughts on a closed neural network. Okay, so it's just because times have changed, and there should be no dumbing-down of stories set during the series' early days just to accomodate my gripes. There's also the military unit itself that is unlike any other seen in Doctor Who to date (and I speak in a linear sense now, from having just viewed stories made in 1967); they're all misfits, they're all mean, and they're all desperate to survive. My heart went out to the horribly scarred and voice-boxed character of Frog. Poor girl, she got a raw deal growing up.

The TARDIS team are done magnificently. Cole has nailed Ben and Polly's characters flawlessly, even touching on their dubious flirtation with each other (Polly seems to be a bit of a party girl in her days hanging at The Inferno club, and has a few wild nights under her belt, and she was apparantly fancying her chances with Ben that fateful night she took Dodo out) in much the same way that Ian and Barbara's relationship was brought to light in The Eleventh Tiger. This time, though, times have changed and even though it's only been a few years since Ian and Barbara first arrived on the scene, social dynamic has changed to an extent where Ben and Polly's attraction can be a bit more pronounced, and even a bit on the lusty side. Cole craftily makes a future reference to The Caves of Androzani from 1984, and in an early exchange between Polly and Ben on the subject of cat people and dog people alludes to events to come in Gary Russell's novel Invasion of the Cat People. And the Doctor? Close to perfect. He's fading, though, getting older. He still musters up his indignant pride and takes control of situations, even sits back and chuckles a bit watching those who would know better fumble their way along until it is time for him to admonish them and put things right. But he's still feeling the strain of his adventures, and appears to need a rest. He assures Ben, though, that soon he will feel a completely new person.

So I liked it. A lot. If anyone else is going to try and add more adventures to this era of the show I really hope they look to this book as a guideline of how to proceed, at least where the characterizations are concerned.

And now, back to the TV series. And into TV history...

NEXT EPISODE : THE TENTH PLANET

The Smugglers

The TARDIS is in flight, and the Doctor turns from the controls to find that Polly and Ben have managed to get aboard. Shades of Ian and Barbara, the Doctor flips his lid, telling them that he has no control over where the ship takes them and they'll be lucky if they ever get back to 1966. Polly isn't too bothered, she's up for adventure, but Ben is going to be declared AWOL if he doesn't get back to his barracks.

The trio find themselves on the Cornish coast in the 17th century, where pirates and smuggling are all too common, the locag magistrates are corrupt, and strangers are treated with suspcion. The Doctor is entrusted with the secret of where to find a lost treasure that everyone is after, and he is abducted by the pirate Captain Pike who has come to claim it. Ben and Polly are arrested on suspicion of murdering the local church warden (Polly, like Vicki in The Crusades, is mistaken for a boy due to her attire) but become involved in the schemes of the local Squire, who is working with local smugglers as well.

There's not much of The Smugglers to actually watch, just some behind the scenes footage and a few clips that the Australian Censor removed from their copies prior to braodcast for being deemed too violent for the averange viewer. My CD copy made for good listening in the car driving back home from Toronto several times this week. In keeping with the tradition set with the audios so far, The Smugglers is narrated by one of the original cast, in this case Anneke Wills, who plays Polly. She does a good job in both capacities, as do the rest of the cast in this rather simple yet fun adventure. The script even succumbs to the cliche of having a pirate captain with a hook where his hand used to be, and everyone talks in those growly voices that more or less start every sentence with "arrrrr," ... I'll bet there were eyepatches as well. Maybe one day this will be one of those fluke discoveries, where all 4 episodes will magically reappear together. One can dream.

At the end of episode 4, the Doctor announces that the TARDIS has brought them to the coldest place on Earth, which is the setting for perhaps THE most historic adventure in the series, but before we go there, there is a side-trip of a novel which doesn't exactly fit in this continuity. When TV adventures all ran right into each other such as they did in the past there wasn't much room for additional adventures, save for ones in between seasons. So for argument's sake we'll slide this is somewhere in the few seconds between leaving Cornwall and materializing in the cold...

NEXT EPISODE : TEN LITTLE ALIENS

The War Machines

The TARDIS makes another trip to contemporary London, this time in 1966, landing at the base of the newly completed Post Office Tower. The Doctor and Dodo emerge and immediately the Doctor has an odd premonition about the tower and decides to investigate, but finds nothing more menacing than a supercomputer named WOTAN, which is about to be linked to computers across the world. WOTAN, however, is full of surprises, and can solve any problem; it even knows that the word TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, which tips the Doctor off and makes him suspicious of the machine and its creator, Professer Brett. Brett's secretary, Polly Wright (no relation to Barbara) becomes fast friends with Dodo, and they hit the local club where they befriend Ben Jackson of the Royal Navy. WOTAN, meanwhile, begins to exude some form of influence over everyone around it, taking over Brett, two of his associates, and then Dodo in its attempt to get at the Doctor. Polly eventually falls under WOTAN's influence as well and joins a work crew who are creating one of many massive War Machines, which will be WOTAN's soldiers in its coming war against humanity. The attack of one machine is triggered prematurely so the Doctor can get a look at it, and with Ben's help he is ready for the next one when it emerges on the streets of London. The Doctor manages to turn the machine back on WOTAN, which effectively ends the computer's bid for world domination. Having recovered from the machine's influence, Dodo decides to stay in London, but as the Doctor is attempting to leave Ben and Polly accidentally enter the TARDIS and are whisked away with him.

I watched The War Machines with my friend Jay, who is not very familiar with the early years of the show, but he had a lot to say about the production values. It has been pointed out before that at the time it was made, Doctor Who was state-of-the-art despite the flimsy sets and effects, but it was also affected by the timeline it was made under; the third season had 45 episodes and there was no luxury of time to re-shoot anything that went wrong (hence some of William Hartnell's flubbed dialogue carrying over to the final takes). Jay also noted a lot of close-ups gone wrong, which I had never thought much of, but it's almost as if the actors were not told about the close-ups and moved off their marks ever so slightly so rather than see their faces, we get a close up of an ear. The War Machines is also the first episode to experiment with a "customized" opening title, with the episode title and the writer's credit in some computer-ish text, with a dramatic drumroll in the background.

The army is involved in this episode a lot, the Doctor's first direct involvement with the local authorities to help combat an alien menace. In a few years the show will touch on this theme again, and it will become part of the programme's history. Although a lot will change between now and then.

So season three is over. There is no starscape this time as with the previous two seasons, just some confused pedestrians as the TARDIS dematerializes with a new crew...

NEXT EPISODE : THE SMUGGLERS