The Nightmare Fair / The Ultimate Evil / Mission to Magnus

I have decided to encapsulate all three of these stories together for this entry seeing as they respresent an entire season that was lost to the hiatus of the series in 1985. I have heard of three other adventures that were supposed to be produced in this lost series as well - Penacasta, Made in Singapore, and Attack of the Daleks - but nobody came forward to novelize the scripts when these three were put out by Target books back in 1989 and 1990. Back then Doctor Who novels popped out once a month, usually adapatations by Terrance Dicks based on the televised scripts, and these three were the first of the non-televised ones. The bigger bonus with some of these titles that came later in the line was that they were penned by the same authors who produced the scripts; sometimes this was a tremendous boon to the range to have some fresh voices, and in other cases it showed just how some writers can write incredible dialogue for screen but be absolutely abysmal at prose and narrative.

First up is The Nightmare Fair, seeing the Doctor and Peri enjoying a trip to Blackpool as promised and coming up against the Celestial Toymaker trying his hand at subverting Earth through videogames and amusement park attractions.

BRILLIANT. Graham Williams nails this one perfectly and it is a crying shame that this never made it to the screen. Not only would we have had some magnificent location filming at Blackpool but the confrontation between the Doctor and the Toymaker (who is oddly referred to as The Mandarin ) would have been a classic. It comes across perfectly on the page, you can almost hear Colin Baker bellowing and Michael Gough (yes, he was signed to reprise the role!) with his calm tones which would drive the Doctor even more nuts. And not only would this one have featured the return of the Toymaker, but the sonic screwdriver was to make a return as well.

Somewhere online there is an audio version of this one with different actors playing the Doctor and Peri but trying very hard to sound like them. It's no Big Finish, but they themselves have said that they will never adapt anything that was originally planned for the TV series, so if you can't get a hold of a copy of this book, downloading the play might be the next best thing.

Next up is The Ultimate Evil, penned by Wally K Daly. Here we find the TARDIS taking the Doctor and Peri to the planet Tranquela for a vacation and to visit some old friends of the Doctor's, but they find things not very peaceful at all. An arms dealer called the Dwarf Mordent has set up shop in orbit and has managed to project violent mood swings onto the planet below, causing the people to attack and kill each other and fostering an atmosphere of parinoia.

This one was a bit more cerebral, but by no means unenjoyable. The only thing I was edgy about was how so many elements of this script - a diminutative nasty selling weapons - would be lifted into a script for the 1986 season. The Dwarf Mordent just struck me as a bit of a coward, hiding up in his planetoid and stirring people up. I suppose that was the point, though, but these moral messages seem less effective when they are so obvious.

Last of this little trio is Mission to Magnus, which turned out to be the most disappointing of the bunch. And it shouldn't have been. Why? Because the Ice Warriors came back in it at bloody bloody last. We were cheated out of a fifth Ice Warrior story! That still bothers me to this day, moreso since we have yet to see them back in the new series. As far as the story goes, Sil (from the previous season's Vengeance on Varos) is on the planet Magnus doing deals with the predominantly female population (shades of the Drahvins) and their leader, Rana. But Sil is secretly selling the Magnusians out to the Ice Warriors, who have plans to freeze the planet to make it a new home for themselves. To add to this mix there is a Time Lord named Anzor on the scene, one who used to bully the Doctor during their days at the Academy and who still terrifys him to this day.

I wanted this one to be my favourite. I really did. But something about it didn't do it for me. I'm not keen on Philip Martin's prose style, and honestly I'm not keen on Sil either. So much more could have been said and done in this book, although at the time there were page maximums to observe - this was just 122 pages long. And I don't think Philip Martin was the man to bring back the Ice Warriors; these ones in Magnus are far from the noble Martians previously seen in the series; they could have been anyone. And as producer John Nathan-Turner was so keen to make things flashy and grand they probably would have been painted neon green.

Details are sketchy about what the other three adventures for this skipped season would have been, but Penacasta would see the Doctor dealing with another attack on the TARDIS which would possibly destroy it (after all this was written by Christopher H Bidmead). Made in Singapore was reportedly going to be another Auton invasion story but this time they would be in cahoots with the Rani and the Master (although as the Master turned on the Nestenes at the end of Terror of the Autons it seems a bit unlikely he'd team with them again). And Attack of the Daleks was supposedly going to be a season finale in which Peri was either killed or turned into a Dalek and then killed. Something like that.

The whole hiatus episode really did the show a lot more harm than good; an 18 month delay in episodes would these days just result in automatic cancellation because no-one would remember to be watching when it came back on. The same was partly true of when Doctor Who did return, but it did manage to hang on for three more seasons after. Not to worry, there is an abundance of material to fill the gap between the seasons, besides these stories here.

So let's see some more.

NEXT EPISODE : SLIPBACK

Red Dawn

The Doctor wants to take Peri to alien worlds now that she is travelling with him in the TARDIS, and their first stop is a cold apparantly dead world. The planet is actually Mars, and while the Doctor and Peri explore within the structure they have landed, overhead an expedition from Earth is making final descent for the first time since the Mars Probe visit of 1970. Once the humans arrive it becomes obvious that some of them are not here on a benign mission of exploration, and as that happens, a group of Ice Warriors emerges from hibernation to defend their world.

It's nice to see the Ice Warriors back in action. Well, see being a relative term. The sad truth is the Ice Warriors made their final televised appearance in The Monster of Peladon and even now in this new age of Doctor Who have yet to be seen. Choosing the silibant Martians as audio foes is a bit of a calculated risk as even on television their voices could sometimes dip below audible levels, but they manage to work this time, with their leader, Lord Zaal, evoking Alan Bennion's performances as Izlyr and Azaxyr in both of the Peladon stories.

The Doctor and Peri work well together for having just met, really. Peri is full of questions and sarcasm that the Doctor takes in stride as part of his "nice guy" demeanour. On television they hardly had any time together before things began to change, but Big Finish have given us the chance to see this relationship develop so that when we finally rejoin the Doctor and Peri's televised adventures (and it'll be a while as I mentioned before) it will seem as if they have been together a while.

The human supporting cast is the usual sort of thing we get in these tales: scared of the unknown, unprepared for what they do find, and one of them with a secret agenda that puts everyone in danger when it emerges. Mars continuity is maintained by referencing the events of The Ambassadors of Death and referring to it as the "Mars Probe fiasco", wherein the public was spared the truth of events and told that the project had indeed failed. Turns out, it hadn't, and while the landing party met some Ambassadors from another world, they did indeed discover relics from the civilzation of the Ice Warriors which in turn spurred this landing expedition.

I've only got one tiny beef with this one, and it's the episode length. While the rest of the episodes in Big Finish so far have stuck to the established length of televised episodes as a guideline, one episode of Red Dawn clocks in at just under the 19 minute mark. Okay, only four minutes shy of the usual, you may say, but let me tell you when your day consists of a cramped ride on the 44 Kipling South to Lakeshore you need all the Doctor Who you can get your hands on to keep sane...

NEXT EPISODE : THE EYE OF THE SCORPION

The Monster of Peladon

50 years after his visit to Peladon with Jo, the Doctor returns with Sarah to find that the planet's membership in the Galactic Federation is not proving to be as fruitful as promised. The Federation is at war with the forces of Galaxy 5 and needs the mineral trisilicate for it's efforts, and it can be found in abundance on Peladon. Trouble is, the mining guild are effectively on strike and talking armed rebellion against the Queen and those in her court who get all the benefits of the Federation. The Queen herself is little more than a child, only ascending to the throne because Peladon had no son, and thus the real power is held by Chancellor Orton, who is also high priest. The situation is made worse when it appears that the spirit of Aggedor is on the loose attacking the miners who work with the Federation equipment, but the Doctor, having met Aggedor himself previously, suspects some kind of trickery. While Sarah talks womens' lib with the Queen, the situation worsens as the Ice Warriors arrive on the scene with their own agenda for Peladon, the trisilicate, and the Doctor.

Brilliant. A trip back to a previous setting to see how things have changed after the Doctor's presence all those years ago - brilliant! Peladon is still steeped in superstition where Aggedor is concerned, but unlike Hepesh before him, Ortron is loyal to the Federation and the duties that come with membership, although as soon as Aggedor is brought into the situation he gets edgy about where his loyalties lie. Queen Thalira is a cowed monarch, holding no real power until Sarah teaches her how to be gutsier, which will save her life in the end. Good old Alpha Centauri is back, twittering away as always and waving his tentacles at everyone. And those Ice Warriors... classic at last, the bad guys through and through; there are five different sculpts to the helmet this time to add variety to the ranks, although one looks like it is grinning foolishly the whole time. Their mouths do not move as easily as they did in their debut back in 1967, so they are lead by Commander Azaxyr, one of the most vocal and brutal Ice Warriors to date. My nephew, Parker, is a huge fan of the Ice Warriors and asked if he could sit in for this adventure, and he actually applauded when Azaxyr got his comuppance. THAT is what Doctor Who is all about if you ask me; the power to protray characters you can laugh with, miss when they're gone, or cheer when they are given their just desserts.

I found some of the production values disconcerting, though. The mines of Peladon are shot on video in the television studio for the most part, but for action sequences or pyrotechnics the sets were rebuilt in a film studio, which makes for some odd shifting between two different grades of picture quality for what is essentially the same location. Also a bit unsettling is the climax of episode 4 (there are 6 all told) where the Doctor disarms miner Ettis in a swordfight but the tide turns and the Doctor gets one of the most brutal on-screen beatings of the series; he is headbutted, run into a wall and punched out repeatedly. Sure, it's been said that the Doctor deals with violent people sometimes, and in the novel version of the story Terrance Dicks removes a lot of the beating from the text, but I noticed that Parker was distressed watching the hero getting the stuffing beaten out of him, much like vampire slayer Buffy taking a pasting from the Ubervamp in her final season. But again, the reaction is down to emotional connection; guys are beat up on TV all the time in other series or on UFC programs, or even in professional wrestling, but they're strangers to the casual viewer; after several years the Doctor has become a friend of the audience, and when anything happens to him, we all feel it.

So, a very good one in my opinion. And in Parker's. sadly it's the last time we'll see the Ice Warriors again. They only clocked up four appearances but managed to enshrine themselves in the top monsters list right along with the Daleks and the Cybermen. Here's to their return in the new series in 2007 (I hope - it's not even a rumour at this point but it would be a great idea...).

NEXT EPISODE : THE GHOSTS OF N-SPACE

The Curse of Peladon / The Face of the Enemy

The troubled planet of Peladon stands on a pivotal moment in its history; the King has applied for his planet's admission to the Galactic Federation to better his people's lives, but supersition and terror are standing in his way. While delegates from the Federation arrive to negotiate, an apparation of the planet's royal beast, Aggedor, stalks the passageways of the palace. The Doctor and Jo arrive on a test flight with the TARDIS, and after the ship is sent crashing down the side of a mountain are mistaken for the Federation delegates from Earth. Amongst the committe is the many tentacled Alpha Centauri, the truncated Arcturus, and a pair of Ice Warriors, who the Doctor immediately suspects of treachery. But in the future, the Ice Warriors are no longer an agressive race bent on conquest, and Mars is a founding member of the Federation. It becomes apparant that the trouble is an internal matter, with a faction of the royal court fearing Peladon's admission to the Federation as a threat to their soverign ways, and the Doctor must uncover the traitors on both sides while Jo dodges the earnest romantic overtures of Peladon himself.

This story should have started the season, not that farce of a Dalek tale. We are presented not only with a complex and rich culture on Peladon, but with a cluster of aliens; two new creatures and an old enemy changed their ways. For a monster, Centauri is not at all agressive or intimidating but a gentle, nervous creature that wants only peace, even if it is a little hung up on details. The Ice Warriors are incredible as always, noble and proper, but this time without vicious intent, making then perfect allies for the Doctor. This would be the only time the Ice Warriors appear in the show as good guys, but later adventures with them in print would pick up this thread again - even seeing them as guests at companion Bernice Summerfield's wedding. I like the Ice Warriors as benevolant aliens rather than marauding monsters; in science fiction television it is too easy to take something inhuman and make it evil and bent, rather than develop it as something good, and not misunderstood.

With all these aliens comes a challenge to the wardrobe and costume department, one they rose to with great flair. The attire of the people of Peladon is primarily a royal purple, robes on the noble, battle kilts on the soldiers. David Troughton (son of Patrick) gets a bit shortchanged as the King, though; he's either wearing shorts or a short kilt but with high boots that look like... umm... stockings. Wierd. But hey he's all man, chasing Jo about and wanting to marry her. Maybe it's his cross-dressing ways that really put her off, not her budding romance with Mike Yates that is mentioned in episode 1 and then never again. Well, she has effectively stood him up on a date by going off with the Doctor, so no wonder the whole relationship is going tits-up.

Curse of Peladon has a fun Canadian connection to it. For a while the BBC archive didn't have a copy of the adventure at all, but all four colour episodes were at TV Ontario and were returned in one lot. It's on VHS right now but would make a good additioon to the DVD line in 2006, I think.

Meanwhile back on Earth, Mike is fuming over Jo having stood him up, and the Brigaider finds himself in need of scientific advice in the Doctor's absence. Drafting from the scientific community worked before with Liz Shaw so UNIT calls on a noted scientist and his wife: Ian and Barbara Chesterton. Events around UNIT are taking a nasty turn with criminal warfare on the rise, and a threat apparantly outside of Earth itself growing, the Brigaider is forced to also turn to the imprisoned Master for assistance as well.

Adventures without the Doctor were commonplace by the time The Face of the Enemy was published in 1998. The Brigadier and UNIT had already been used in a more contemporary setting in the ReelTime pictures VHS movie Downtime, but having a UNIT adventure running parallel to the Doctor's absence is brilliant. Involving Ian and Barbara is nothing short of genius, bringing back two of the original companions to show that their lives did indeed have a happy ending, and that they have a son and were able to get back to normal after their years in time and space with the Doctor. Their son was already mentioned in the prologue of the novel Byzantium and this is set some time after that vingette. With the Doctor on Peladon, his former companions never do get to meet him and have to go through the whole regeneration explaination, which would just detract from the story itself. The Master works well without the Doctor as a foil, matching wits with the Brigadier and the Chestertons but never overcoming them; their association with the Doctor has changed them all, and they are able to keep his old enemy in check while trying to work with him.

The other continuity note I will make is something of a spoiler, but as this book is listed as out of print now it's unlikely anyone is reading this right now and looking forward to getting their hands on a copy. Mind you, if you ARE reading The Face of the Enemy or plan to some day, stop right now. Close your browser. Thank you. Right. I was not a fan of author David A McIntee's work when he first penned the seventh Doctor new adventures novel White Darkness, but as he produced more work I found myself going from non fan to big fan, and it's because of novels like this that I like his work. McIntee pays such strict attention to continuity it's like he is on some mission to interwaeve his own contributions to Doctor Who so tightly with others that we accept his as official and discount lesser works. McIntee's forte was the historical adventure until he hit the sci fi payload with Lords of the Storm, and with Face of the Enemy he ties together elements from his second Doctor missing adventures novel The Dark Path (which I did not mention because I dopn't have a copy to go back and check anymore) and the apocalyptic television serial Inferno to create this story's central plot device: a benign alternate universe Master captured by the people of Inferno's Earth, and his TARDIS being used to allow the desperate people from that reality into ours to escape and plunder. Amazing. And brilliantly presented on page. And there's even a quick nod given to Miss Hawthorne and the people of Devil's End.

It's not often I am impressed to this length with a BBC novel; I find the bulk of them to try to achieve too much, and their authors not disciplined enough to know when to stop. But this one... wow. Perfect. PER-FECT.

Now back to television.

NEXT EPISODE : THE SEA DEVILS

The Seeds of Death

Will Earth ever learn that the moon is not a secure place to operate from? Nope. First it was putting world weather control on the moon and leaving it wide open to the evil plans of the Cybermen back in The Moonbase, but now the moon is the central relay point for the world's newest form of travel - the T-Mat. When operating properly, T-Mat can function as a matter transmitter and "beam" anything across the planet instantaneously, thereby getting food to areas that need it, and transporting people as well. Which is the perfect way for the Ice Warriors to invade after taking over the moonbase. Landing on Earth just after T-Mat breaks down, the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie become involved in the efforts to save the planet from destruction, even crewing a rocket to make a journey to the moon to investigate the system breakdown. But the goals of the Ice Warriors do not end with occupying the moon, they intend to use T-Mat to send seed pods to Earth that will release spores into the atmosphere and create a fungus that will render Earth's atmosphere more like that of Mars, and make it perfect for invasion.

For a 6 part story, The Seeds of Death is very simple and thus the pace feels a bit slower at times than it does on shorter stories. There are a lot of hysterical sequences with the Doctor literally running about either being chased by the Ice Warriors or trying to evade the encroaching foam fungus, which are in effect just visual filler, but somehow can be forgiven when one sees Patrick Troughton's performance. The outer space effects that mark the opening of each episode with dramatic music and pans across the lunar surface are good as well for the time, continuing the theme of good model work that was seen in The Dominators and The Invasion. The added bonus with this story is the extra work that was put in by the restoration team to clean it up for its DVD release. The first time I saw it, the story was split up into two smaller "movies" on Channel 17 many years ago, and I noticed how the picture would change in degrees of fuzziness from episode to episode, but that is no longer an issue with the amount of work that was done to it.

Ah the Ice Warriors. Good to have them back, even if they're not exactly of the same calibre of Varga and his marooned crew from their debut story. The Ice Warrior commander, Slaar, is a different design from the rest, his body being more flexible and not as armoured as his warriors. He still has the characteristic hissing speech of the Martians, and roughly the same helmet design too. The rest of the Martians are of the same design as Varga and Zondal from The Ice Warriors, without any of the oversized bobble-head helmets used this time around (thankfully). Where Slaar is different as a leader than Varga is his detachment from his fellow Martians, being even colder (no pun) and ordering them to do his bidding while he bullies and terrorizes the staff of the moonbase. Varga, on the other hand, was a warrior class himself and probably felt more of a responsibility to his crew to get them back to Mars, and thus addressed them as equals, or as comrades, not just as grunts. Slaar's only equal would be the Grand Marshal, leader of the doomed invasion fleet, who looks almost the same aside from some disco glitter on his helmet. Overall I wouldn't say these are inferior Ice Warriors, just different; the nobility that was hinted at in their previous encounter is left on the side this time, seeing as they are not fighting for survival this time, but out for conquest. We see instead an alien hoarde lacking feelings, stoically going about their plans to take the planet for themselves. The disappointing thing there is they didn't necessarily need to be Ice Warriors for that; any group of galactic thugs would have worked.

With only two more stories left for the season, time for another short break from the televised adventures to look at some more stories in print, starting with the return of another alien hoarde last seen terrorizing a space station full of mystery fans...

NEXT EPISODE : THE FINAL SANCTION

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