doctor who

There’s molecular movement!

For anyone keeping track at home, with Victor Pemberton’s “Fury from the Deep” (Story Production Code RR), the Doctor and his companions have now spent five straight stories (thirty episodes total) on Earth, at various times in that planet’s history, an unprecedented run. Not until the Third Doctor is stranded on Earth by the as-yet-unknown Time Lords (and by BBC budgets) will the Doctor rack up quite so many frequent flyer miles in the general vicinity of London. What’s more, the TARDIS displays an increasing tendency towards the sea, this time materializing above the waves close to the North Sea coastline. The TARDIS can float, at least, which is more than can be said for the story’s plot.

To be fair, the story moves along with some pace, though it’s not the fare one has come to expect from Doctor Who. Indeed, the Doctor barely figures in the first four episodes, which are given over instead to the intramural power struggle between a grizzled old rig hand and a fancy college educated technocrat whose wife just happens to have sprouted weed tentacles from her wrist. While Robson, the vet, and Harris, the know-it-all, fight, the Doctor dithers about until Victoria is finally (and inevitably) captured, spurring him to action. Throw in a meddling Dutchman appointed by the multi-national organization overseeing the gas extraction, a Laurel-and-Hardy-esque pair of villains named Mr. Oak and Mr. Quill, an overactive foam machine, and lots of helicopters flying to and fro, and you’ve got “Fury from the Deep” in a nutshell.

“Fury from the Deep” shows Doctor Who in a rut, with another isolated base (this time a set of gas drilling rigs in the North Sea) under attack from another enemy that can control minds and generate copious amounts of foam. Only this time, unlike the Great Intelligence and the Yeti, the foe has no intelligence of its own. Because it’s seaweed. Evil seaweed. Six episodes of evil seaweed.

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Here we go again.

Repeating monsters are, of course, nothing new by the middle of Doctor Who‘s fifth season. The Daleks have made six appearances so far (seven if you count “Mission to the Unknown” as separate from “The Daleks’ Master Plan“), the Cybermen a respectable three, together populating roughly a quarter of the Doctor’s stories to date. And yet there’s been no real linkage between the stories they’ve featured in beyond some vague desire for revenge on the part of the Daleks and ominous recriminations from the Cybermen for past plot foilings. Events of prior stories are waved away with single lines, the better to focus on the action at hand. Even the single return of the Time Meddler, the only recurring character thus far, as opposed to monster, feels more like a bit of early fan service (and an easy way for Dennis Spooner to leave his mark on Terry Nation’s magnum opus) rather than the establishment of a character with any depth or continuity across the series.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that when Doctor Who finally produces what can be considered a proper sequel story, “The Web of Fear” (Production Code QQ) by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, the producers choose not a well-established opponent to bring back but the amorphous Great Intelligence and the eponymous Yeti from “The Abominable Snowmen.” Haisman and Lincoln did pen the Himalayan yarn, so bringing the furry robots back makes sense in that regard. Yet at the same time that Doctor Who showcases, at last, two stories linked by a single continuity, with recurring characters and monsters and a direct line of action yoking them together, it squanders the opportunity with a flat story and uninteresting characters.

Uninteresting, that is, except for Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart.

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You’ll run out of doctors in a minute.

So, we have an underground base? Check. An unexplained device capable of creating natural disasters anywhere on the planet? Check. Monsters attacking said base to use the technology to their own ends? Um, no? Turns out, despite most of the trappings, David Whitaker’s “The Enemy of the World” (Story Production Code PP) changes everything up, and just in time. No monsters (of the non-human variety, at least), no base under siege, just a careful (and rousing) exploration of the importance of trust and certainty, played out through the device of the Doctor’s double. Or, rather, the Doctor being a double. Everyone winds up confused, and that’s a very positive development for Doctor Who as a series.

We’ve covered this ground before, at least marginally, in the superlative “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve,” wherein the Abbot of Amboise matches the First Doctor to a tee. But there, the arch coincidence remains mostly that, a coincidence that allows William Hartnell to stretch his acting chops somewhat by playing a new role; the story doesn’t make much of the similarity. Here, the Second Doctor is found to look exactly like Salamander, a highly influential philanthropist and inventor who supplies many of the Earth’s food needs by directing stored solar energy to areas lacking sufficient sunlight to grow abundant crops. However, when the Doctor is spotted cavorting on a beach just after landing—he does love the seashore—he, Jamie, and Victoria are set upon by men trying to kill him, thinking him to be Salamander, apparent benefactor of all humanity. With a hovercraft. It is the future, you see, just shy of the year 2019. Hovercraft it is.

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They came to get their ball back!

Thus far in its run, Doctor Who has delved only occasionally into religious themes, using such themes mostly as set dressing. The eponymous Time Meddler, for instance, occupies an abandoned monastery and disguises himself as a monk (and his TARDIS as an altar), but the religious imagery is incidental to the story. When religion becomes more central to the story, the results have been masterful, providing two of the best stories so far: “The Aztecs” and “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve,” both, not coincidentally, historicals written by John Lucarotti. There were no monsters in those stories (at least, non-human monsters), and they were in the “serious” historical mode. Imagine, then, a story where the Doctor and his companions defeat the Daleks with the help of nuns by reciting a string of “Our Father” prayers and you have, in a nutshell, Melvyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s “The Abominable Snowmen” (Story Production Code NN), which draws heavily upon Buddhism (or a facsimile thereof) for both set dressing and, more significantly, plot concepts.

“The Abominable Snowmen” is not, by any stretch, a historical in the vein of “The Aztecs,” but like that story, it treats the religious underpinning of its setting—in this case, Buddhism in early twentieth century Tibet—with a degree of respect. To some extent, the setting is treated as alien, with the actors playing the Tibetan monks of the Detsen Monastery with the same kind of nuanced mannerisms one finds in the portrayals of the Sensorites or the Menoptera. The acting is not uniformly convincing, but the characters all evince a strong and coherent belief system. Unfortunately, the belief system has been distilled into one of unthinking obedience to ritual and authority rather than any more searching version of Buddhism, and when one character, Khrisong, the warrior, dares to challenge the Abbot’s absolute control, he is portrayed as the villain. But with a mustache like that, how could he not be?

To its credit, “The Abominable Snowmen” emphasizes a peaceful vision of Buddhism, with a desire for harmony and a reluctance to commit harm, but the end result is a society where questions are not permitted, as in “The Savages” or “The Macra Terror.” To that extent, then, Buddhism is set dressing for a monster-of-the-week, an exotic and fanciful backdrop for a story about Yeti in the Himalayas. But still, there’s something more at work here. A sinister force has taken over the mind of the monastery’s Master, Padmasambhva, but only because of the Master’s meditative journey into enlightenment and his belief in the essential good nature of all beings. This malevolent force, the Great Intelligence, threatens to take over the world, all because Padmasambhva journeyed to the astral plane and provided the Intelligence with a means to enter the corporeal world. And he was just trying to be helpful. It’s not a ringing endorsement of Buddhism, or spiritual pursuits in general.

And to top it off, the Intelligence forced Padmasambhva to labor for hundreds of years, and all he got for his efforts was a cave full of silver balls used to control a whole bunch of furry robots…

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