doctor who project – Page 17

Doctor Who Project: Terror of the Autons

July 23, 2023January 21, 2017 by Chris Baer

We Time Lords don’t care to be conspicuous.

Misery loves company, and Season Eight of Doctor Who provides our exiled Time Lord with a fellow Earth-bound refugee in the form of the Master. Robert Holmes’ season opening “Terror of the Autons” (Story Production Code EEE) introduces a renegade Time Lord, the Master (Roger Delgado), who will appear in all five stories this season, essentially creating the very first story arc in the series. Holmes, a regular writer for Doctor Who by now, reprises his Nestenes to, ah, spearhead a season once more, but everyone, from Third Doctor Jon Pertwee and new companion Jo Grant (Katy Manning) through to the Brigadier and the plastic fantastic Autons, takes a back seat to the Master.

The Master seeks to bring the Nestenes back to Earth so they can conquer it; the Doctor likes the planet and that’s evidently reason enough for the Master to help disembodied plastic entities take it over. Their shared animosity goes back quite far, and in several lines of dialogue, Holmes provides more back story for the Doctor, vis-à-vis the Master, than he has had in the series to date. We learn that the Doctor holds a lesser degree in Cosmic Science than the Master, a failing the Doctor attributes to being a late starter, and as with the Time Meddler, the Doctor uses a lesser mark of TARDIS than the Master. We do not learn just why the Master and the Doctor are at odds with one another, but they’ve obviously crossed paths many times before, being quite aware of one another’s weaknesses.

Typically the Doctor has some encounter with the main villain before the story is too far along, but not here. So strong is Roger Delgado’s presence that he and the Doctor do not even speak until the end of the third of this story’s four episodes, yet one still feels like they are at odds throughout the story. Though Pertwee does get more screen time than Delgado, it’s a close run thing. The producers seem to make up for it by allowing Pertwee to wrestle with, um, a telephone cord.

Perhaps it’s for the best that the Third Doctor has received both a new companion and a new foil, as the main thrust of the plot revolves around invasion via plastic daffodils, or, to use the slightly more menacing Nestene terminology, Autojets. But, still, they’re just yellow plastic flowers, given away in great numbers and for free. And they’re here to take over the world.

Doctor Who Project: Inferno

July 17, 2023December 8, 2016 by Chris Baer

I slipped sideways.

The Time Lords may have banished the Doctor to Earth, but they didn’t specify which Earth precisely, allowing Don Houghton’s “Inferno” (Story Production Code DDD) to transport our time traveller to a parallel Earth where the biggest difference is that the Brigadier has no mustache. Oh, and in this other dimension England happens to be fascist, too.

The story starts innocently enough, with the Doctor mooching nuclear power from a massive drilling project that aims to tap “Stahlman’s Gas,” a powerful energy source trapped just under Earth’s crust. He’s bent on jump-starting the TARDIS console, which he’s had installed in a pre-fab garage near the drilling site. Apparently he believes that with an independent power source, he can use the console itself to travel through space and time, defeating the Time Lords’ ignition lock. And it works, after a fashion, briefly propelling him, well, somewhere, and allowing Jon Pertwee to ham it up for the cameras again during a scene of dematerialization gone awry.

As for the drilling project, the stage seems set for a standard bureaucratic showdown between an officious administrator and a scientist bent on fulfilling his life’s ambitions, as seen most recently in “Doctor Who and the Silurians.” Almost immediately, the dangers of the drilling project manifest themselves when a rigger is exposed to a green goo leaking from a drill pipe. The viscous viridian substance rapidly de-evolves him into a slavering, primordial being (shades, again, of “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” where encounters with the old lizards trigger a mental retrogression, with hints of the sentient seaweed from “Fury from the Deep” for good measure). Once the lead scientist, Stahlman, accidentally infects himself with the goo, the story seems set on its rails: the goo is dangerous and threatens everyone, so naturally the Doctor will step in and stop the drilling. But after being confronted with evidence of some strangeness afoot, including a a vial of the goo itself and Stahlman’s increasing derangement, the Doctor petulantly focuses his efforts instead on getting more power for his pet project.

And the goo isn’t even the real problem. In a neat bit of subverted expectations, Houghton manages to make green-skinned pseudo-werewolves into mere set dressing, because the planet is about to explode.

Doctor Who Project: The Ambassadors of Death

July 24, 2023November 10, 2016 by Chris Baer

What about reducing the g’s by mixing K and M3?

What if they held an invasion and nobody came? With “The Ambassadors of Death” (Series Production Code CCC), series regular writer David Whitaker provides an engaging answer to the recent profusion of alien invasion plots in Doctor Who by neatly subverting all expectations of how an alien invasion story should play out.

Comparisons between “The Ambassadors of Death” and its immediate predecessor, “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” cannot be avoided. We have aliens, to be sure, and the threat of invasion from beyond (or below) gets bandied about, but this time, the aliens actually do come in peace. While Malcolm Hulke toyed around with the idea in his story, Whitaker comes right out and finally says what the series has been suggesting for some time now: the real monsters are human beings and their foibles.

To Whitaker’s immense credit, and in keeping with the series’ long-standing tradition of concealing the monster as long as possible, the viewer doesn’t quite know what humans and which foibles are at fault until nearly the finish of the seven episode story. A tangled set of interwoven conspiracies develops around the mystery of the missing astronauts from Mars Probe Seven, and the cast of players seems immense at first. Will it be the bureaucratic pride of the civil servant, the simple greed of a cunning con man, the unbridled Promethean lust for knowledge of the foreign scientist? We’ve seen them all before. Instead, we find at the core of this story a sad tale of misplaced morality coupled to the human destructive impulse. All summed up with a swagger stick.

Doctor Who Project: Doctor Who and the Silurians

January 12, 2025October 12, 2016 by Chris Baer

It’s a bit hard to accept one monster, let alone two.

The Third Doctor and UNIT go hand in hand. Far from being a harmonious relationship, however, the Doctor often finds himself at odds with his putative employer, and as Malcolm Hulke’s oddly titled “Doctor Who and the Silurians” (Story Production Code BBB) demonstrates, UNIT and the military-bureaucratic mindset it represents serve as a second foe more often than not, one occasionally as deadly and bloodthirsty as the monster of the week.

From a narrative perspective, the bureaucratic bumbling that prevents UNIT from mustering sufficient resources to answer threats helps drive, and pad, all the stories of the UNIT era, here allowing this tale of a reptilian civilization that has slumbered, and now awakens, in a cave network under Britain to reach seven episodes.

But more than that, this inertial force helps define the Third Doctor quite clearly, and consequently we have a more distinct understanding of his essential character more quickly than we did with either of his predecessors. For while the Doctor has always been disdainful of the martial mindset, the force-before-reason mentality, this story cements the Third Doctor as a scientist first and foremost, with no patience for rules and no qualms about subverting his relationship with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the military organization he represents if needed to save lives.

Neatly, Hulke provides the Doctor with a Silurian counterpart who shares his efforts to broker a truce between the former masters of the planet and the current inhabitants, and the nameless reptilian leader has his own version of the Brigadier to contend with. This one, however, has the ability to kill with a third eye at the top of his head and desires the complete eradication of the “apes” infesting the Earth; our Brigadier just has a mustache and a little portable radio. But in the end, the Brigadier is the one who oversees a mass extermination.

Doctor Who Project: Spearhead from Space

July 26, 2023September 8, 2016 by Chris Baer

My dear fellow, how nice to see you again.

Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Or hearts, perhaps, in the case of Doctor Who.

Six months elapsed from the end of Season Six to the beginning of Season Seven, making Jon Pertwee’s debut story as the Third Doctor, “Spearhead from Space” (Story Production Code AAA) by series regular Robert Holmes, a long awaited reunion for viewers indeed. And what a change they found when they tuned in. A new Doctor and the use of color footage, to be sure, plus a new companion in Caroline John’s Liz Shaw, but also a vigorous sense of confidence in the storytelling that manifests itself in a four episode story filled with fast pacing and dynamic directing by Derek Martinus. Never did the camera zoom in on people in various stages of horror quite so often as in this story. Shame the Doctor spends the first two episodes in bed, though.

And the cause of this extreme terror? A plastics factory run by aliens has been turning out plastic automatons, none of which are quite as terrifying as their usual line of work, plastic dolls. The establishing scenes in the factory, with conveyor belts lines with disembodied plastic baby heads, must surely count as some of the most disturbing in the series’ history.

The intended monsters in the story, the Autons, derive their menace from their nearness to human beings, humanoid without quite being human due to the slight angularity of facial features and the overall blankness in the visage. The effect harkens to the original, Mondasian Cybermen, whose obvious similarity to human beings causes a degree of ontological dread that the later versions simply lack. The Autons function quite similarly to Cybermen as well, lacking any affect or individuality and obeying the orders of a centralized hierarchy. And wouldn’t you know it, they want to conquer the Earth, too, only while wearing blue coveralls and cravats.

Doctor Who Project: Patrick Troughton Retrospective

July 24, 2023July 19, 2016 by Chris Baer

In many ways, Patrick Troughton is both the “missing” Doctor and the most important Doctor of them all.

When Patrick Troughton took over the role from William Hartnell in the famous dissolve shot at the end of “The Tenth Planet,” he proved that Doctor Who as a concept could last beyond the tenure of a single Doctor. A failure of the audience to embrace this change in actors—indeed, this change in the very nature of the character itself, from wizened curmudgeon to puckish raconteur—would have ended the series for all time. It is to Troughton’s credit that he succeeded quite resoundingly, becoming the Second Doctor, not the Final Doctor.

And yet, he’s nearly unknown to modern viewers of Doctor Who, perhaps remembered for his pipe flute and iconic showdown with the Cybermen on Telos but not recognized as the Doctor who fully advocated aggressive intervention when necessary to fight evil in all its guises, who allowed people to underestimate him (to their own chagrin and, often, peril), who managed to combine slapstick with seriousness. He’s merely that “other” black-and-white era Doctor, the one without the scarf or the car or the celery stick. It’s a status worth changing.