The Monster Of Peladon: Ranking - 263

  The Monster Of Peladon

(Season 11, Dr 3 with Sarah Jane Smith, 23/3/1974-27/4/1974, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Brian Hayles,  director: Lennie Mayne)  

Rank: 263

       ‘Rule Peladonia, Peladonia rules the waves                             Peladonians never ever ever shall be slaves                                  We shall rule for ever more                                                    Thanks to the might of Aggedor                                             Err…even though we haven’t got a sea                                         As pointed out by Alpha Centauri                                              (And Except for the Peladonians down the mines –                   We don’t know much about them, but we’re sure they’ll be fine)’

It’s EU#2, as Britain officially joins The European Union on January 1^st 1973, gets impatient waiting for immediate results and spends most of 1974 moaning about the old days (the thing eventually undone by Brexit in 2019) in one of Dr Who’s most depressing tales of fragmentation, divide and, erm, even hairier beasties than last time. If the original story ‘The Curse Of Peladon’ is the most ‘remain’ of Dr Who stories, with a plot based around overcoming deceit and suspicion and laying your differences to rest, then ‘Monster’ is the most ‘leave’ of Dr Who stories, where it’s stupid getting your hopes up because your enemies will all revert to type and the people who promised to look after you will just stab you in the back anyway (even though most of it is your own stupid fault). This isn’t some Star wars dystopia where everyone is intent on killing each other from the first though: this is a universe where individual people get on and where most of those no directly affected by the events in this story are sat in the middle sighing ‘why can’t we all just get along?!’, before finding out that the rumours about your allies getting into a peace treaty with you just to steal your resources all turn out to be true. Only we’re not talking about something as low key as a collection of countries that could be seen on the news: in Dr Who’s hands we are, of course, talking about a union of planets, with Peladon the newbies in town.

I love ‘The Curse To Peladon’ and nobody was calling for a sequel more than me, except perhaps the production team: that story had been such a success and the sets and costumes so expensive that a sequel was inevitable. But just because something is inevitable doesn't mean you should just make it anyway: sadly nothing in this story quite works and ends up being like one of those school reunions that leaves you feeling really uncomfortable, one where you still remember how optimistic and idealistic everyone used to be before you find out they’ve grown into a bunch of narrow-minded weather-beaten racists. The Doctor has no intentions of having a reunion or of taking Sarah to see his old friends in Peladon (he’s trying to take Sarah to a holiday planet - again) and the last thing he wants is to be reminded of the consequences of his actions, but The Tardis has other ideas and soon he finds himself arriving fifty years after his last appearance (how time flies!) This allows writer Brian Hayles to take a number of pot shots at all the things he can already see going wrong in the ‘real’ world two years (ish) after Britain joined: the trading partners trying to rip us off, the so-called friends trying to use us for our resources, the former enemies who welcomes us with open arms without revealing they were hiding a hatchet in their feet. Some things are very much the same: Alpha Centauri is still hanging around (although even for a long-lived race spending fifty years as a diplomat on a backwards planet he/she/it isn’t very keen on seems a tad unlikely), Aggedor is still hanging around growling (and now celebrated as a planetary mascot rather than a myth left to hide in the labyrinth at the heart of Peladon) and this is still a feudal system, with the Royal Family at the top and the working classes below (literally below: most of them work in the mines). Some things are very different though: King Peladon is dead, long live The Queen! (with Thalira looking very like Jo Grant and showing that her dad very much kept his taste in well-spoken drippy accident-prone blondes), the same crooked advisors still really run the place despite The Doctor’s intervention last time and still nobody in this kingdom really stops to think about their own people. Peladon is fractured, disillusioned, frustrated that the promise of riches on joining this Galactic Federation haven’t trickled down past the Royal court room yet and, worse, it turns out that they’ve joined under false pretences. The Ice warriors, who everyone blamed for sabotaging the union last time but turned out to be good, turn out to (do you really need a spoiler for this? Because it’s the most inevitable thing to do in a sequel ever!) be bad, taking all of Peladon’s resources of trisilicate which they are running out of back home, to the point where they’re conspiring with the court advisors (no doubt with a bit of a bribe on the side) to keep the minerals coming cheap. The result is a strong candidate for Dr Who’s most depressing story: all the good The Doctor’s arrival did last time, all the replacement of superstitions with science, all that encouragement to make the Royals think for themselves and from the point of view of their people, all that hope and optimism of a new tomorrow has gone straight out the window with Peladon further back than where we started. Really, what was the point of that then eh? That entire adventure and the only people who got anything out of it are the King (who apparently fell in love and gave up), the crooked advisors (who are raking it in) and The Ice Warriors (who had enough as it was). What a swizz!

Where did this story come from? Where did all that very Dr Whoy hope and optimism go? Back when I was little and first saw this story I fully expected to go away and read that the EU had done something really awful to Britain in 1973 for a story to turn out like this (especially West Germany, given that’s who I’m convinced The Ice Warriors are meant to be, a reformed warrior nation turned noble) but…really, it didn’t. Not even slightly. In terms of trade we’d never had it so good, give or take a few inevitable teething problems (although if you’ve lived through the Brexit years then it all seemed remarkably easy). Heck, Britain even got to keep its own currency rather than swapping over to the Euro, which was the big fear of many people who’d wanted to stay independent in 1972. The worst you can say about this period in British history is that we shot ourselves in the foot, with the government showing the kind of ignorance the Royal family show here. By chance ‘The Curse Of Peladon’ ended up being affected by something much closer to home, a miner’s strike that meant electricity came and went like an intergalactic yoyo and not every home got to see every episode on time. I have this vision of Brian Hayles, tuning in eagerly to see what the production team have done to his story, and  getting angry when the television promising this great new brilliant prosperous world he dreamed of wouldn’t turn on and he had to eat some sandwiches by candlelight. That strike had been over pay, with the government going back on a once-promised pay increase (because the one they’d doled out in the 1950s was considered over-generous at the time – but that was fifteen years ago! Other industries had caught up). It rumbled on into 1973 and was getting really out of hand by 1974 when, even after an agreement to a small increase, the miners went back on strike over expectations that they would all be forced to work extra shifts in dangerous conditions to make up the shortfall in electricity  (something the government had themselves caused after closing a number of pits). By the time ‘Monster’ came around we were in the era of the three-day-week, when a cold snap caused fuel levels to go lower than at any other time in recorded history and other industries were falling like dominoes, encouraged by the miners to strike as well.  Prime minister Ted Heath, whose more like Eckersley than many fans realise perhaps because the Peladonian has loads of hair sticking out of everywhere and Heath had hardly any, tried to call their bluff and pit the public against them, declaring a state of emergency (although Ecklersley is no doubt meant to be Arthur Scargill, the union boss blamed by the government for pushing too hard and holding out for deals for his workers even when it hurt everyone else; an ‘as long as I’m alright Jack’ mentality so, well, alien to Curse’s message of solidarity across species and classes. Does that make Ice Warrior Azaxyr Heath then? He does threaten to call in military rule to sort things out after all. And he does hiss a lot. Though he’s also a ‘foreigner’, which in the context of Peladon being ‘Earth’ – yes even in a story with Earth in the Federation – wouldn’t fit). The media of the day all seemed to follow suit, moaning about miners who’d ever had it so good and I would argue this is the first time that the BBC stopped being truly independent and sided with the government perhaps in fear of losing their license fee increase, turning on the miners in most of their bulletins. Most of the public didn’t buy it though: they moaned about the timings but, unless you were seriously out of touch and didn’t know anyone from the working classes, you understood the plight and sympathised with it a little (even if the timing of it could be pigging awkward). So some people started blaming it on the EU instead, comparing the promise of what could be to the harsh cold realities. And I’m rather sorry a Dr Who story, especially a sequel to such a groundbreaking future-looking Dr Who story, played right into those hands.

You see, it’s not the idea of the story per se that’s wrong but the way its handled. A lot of people criticise this story by saying it’s too on the nose and that Dr Who doesn’t do current politics which date so easily but that’s patently not true: the first two stories alone are different metaphors for the cold war, re-enacted in past and future. It’s the way Monsters’ does it that seems, well, monstrous. It’s tradition that Dr Who comes in to an unknown planet, works out whose suffering the most and rights it by taking the bad guys out (nearly always using their own methods against them), like an intergalactic robin hood). The miners of Peladon are as suppressed a minority as any we’ve seen in the series, forced to work underground for lousy pay to make money for a group of green aliens who are exploiting them. It would be totally in keeping for The Doctor to swan in, overthrow the corrupt Royal family and demand better rights. Only that doesn’t happen here because The Doctor knows this Royal family. Instead we get lots of comments on how the miners have done this to themselves and how they’ve kept Peladon stuck in the old superstitious ways with their ‘barbarism’. The reason Peladon hasn’t moved forward is because they’re not motivated or forward-thinking enough and their lack of output has jeopardised the treaties with the other planets. There’s a moment in the first episode when they talk of suing a ‘sonic lance’ on the workers to make them work harder: I’d have laid odds that The Doctor would have broken the lance or maybe used it on the out-of-touch overseers by episode six but he doesn’t. The Doctor is technically in the middle not siding with either side, in the role of the negotiator the 3^rd incarnation took so often as is his friend Alpha Centauri, but more often than not they spend their time bitching about the miners nd how things aren’t what they ought to be. The Miners are painted as people stuck in the past, too afraid and stubborn to ask for outside help from machine that would make their lives easier (and take their jobs?!) and prejudiced, perhaps the single worst thing you can be in a series like Who.  

Even the end, when it turns out that Ecklersley has been siphoning off profits and is in league with The Ice Warriors who are trying to make a financial killing by exploiting this cheap labour (something that would be fun with most any other monster but seems incredibly out of touch for a race who are, above all other things, noble and wouldn’t do anything unfair – and yes the fact this is most likely a small breakaway group rather than a planetary policy helps but it still feels wrong) goes more unpunished than maybe any other Who story. I mean, Eckersley is eaten by Aggedor the beast and spiritual symbol of Peladon I suppose so there is that, but its more a consequence of kidnapping The Queen. A Queen whose been turning a blind eye to the misery of her own people the whole time! In any other story she’d be first into the beast’s mouth and the fact that the story remains so kind towards her when she’s almost wilfully arrogant (especially as she knows the story of what her dad went through fifty years ago with his own shady advisors) just because the audience were quite fond of her dad is one of the hardest things to sell about this story. It seems to be an awfully long way from the throne room to the mines, both politically and geographically (they should have set this bit at the top of a tower, an ivory one, to make the irony complete but you’d think somebody would be curious enough to go look rather for themselves. Surely these Royals have toopen a new oven in a ribbon-cutting ceremony or something? This Queen seems never to have met a sigle member of the working classes, even a fawning one (that might explain the fawn Vega nexus actually, is he a member of the working class who turned traitor and alied himself with the Royals, telling them what they wanted to keep out the mines? It feels as if he should have been a uch bigger character than he is given that he’s the only  person the whole story they made a new costume for from scratch, poor as it is). Honestly, though, an out-of-touch ruler walking around going ‘let them heat coke’ who is never fully shown the error of their ways seems like the single most un-Dr Who plot ever, a break with the past on a par with the hippies-are-scum message of ‘The Dominators’ and ‘let’s break all continuity for the hell of it’ of ‘The Timeless Children’.     

The story also makes little sense compared to what we learned in ‘Curse’, where Mars had an abundance of trisilicate and Peladon was busy trading with The Ice Warriors for it. Suddenly The Ice Warriors have used all theirs up but want more to fight off another neighbouring federation of planets. Eh? Either their supply was already dwindling (in which case why trade it and not hoard it for yourself?) or they were having trisilicate parties every day for fifty years; either way it seems unlikely a race with as much cunning and guile as The Ice Warriors would have left this happen, even if that’s what they were planning in ‘Curse’ all along when they seemed to be good. Alsowhat other neighbouring federation can there be? It’s not just Mars in the Galactic federation but Earth too: if there’s another one crowding into this solar system then it ought to have bigger repercussions than just this, yet nobody really mentions it. Trisilicate also seems a deeply odd element to base any economy on. On Earth its mostly used as an inorganic compound that absorbs fatty acids, mostly found in Kentucky Fried Chicken or toothpaste (which is where Barry Letts noticed it, suggesting it to Hayles when he was looking for a suitable mineral in part because he wondered what it was and didn’t want to spend time doing research himself!) Even in a very alien environment it’s not the sort of thing could ever be used as fuel for transport or in a super weapon, or any of the things that would bring a planet to its knees if you ran out of it (although, ironically enough, it is used alongside magnesium and so might well be in the sonic lance effect which burned magnesium for real – although if this really was what Hayles was on about rather than merely a coincidence I’ll eat my I heart Peladon stripey wig). I’m not sure whether it’s telling or not that most countries don’t use it any more, after a 2007 court case in China where it was declared a carcinogen (not that they’d have known this in 1974, when it was considered to be as benign as these things come). Oops! No wonder The King died young. 

I think there might be something else going on in this story though, much wider afield than the EU with comments about world politics instead. As usual, I suspect there’s something about the cold war lurking behind this story. Ever since the end of WW2 Britain has basically become a whipping boy for America: when they say ‘jump’ we turn into Spring-Heeled Jack, in a desperate attempt to hang on to our younger brother and enjoy a ‘special relationship’ as a trading partner (it feels like a matter of revenge that America barely appears in any future-set Dr Who story and when it does its further behind technologically than Britain). By now America is so cared of imminent Russian invasion that its busy protecting third-world dictatorships in the Middle East, many of whom are far more wicked and ignorant to the needs of their people than Communist Russia ever was. As a very major bonus America also ended up with a lot of trade deals from countries that got to keep their independence in return for oil, something that still goes on now (most of the wars in the Middle East in the 1990s and 00s were really for oil, whatever the big speeches about America protecting democracy said; even after 9/11 they invaded the wrong country but used revenge as an excuse to get oil). That’s pretty similar all round to what The Ice Warriors do here: they pretended in ‘Curse’ that they were looking out for Peladon and doing them a favour, but really it was a ruse to gain a good deal on their resources and go toe-to-toe with a neighbouring federation that was gaining in size, a defensive move to prepare for any future war. All it needs is for them to open a capitalist ice cream franchise on Peladon that open up a quadzillion shops, maybe with a clown Aggedor on the advertising hoarding, and the metaphor would be complete.       

What a shame. You see, many fans reckoned there wasn’t much point in giving ‘Curse’ a sequel because it didn’t need one, but I’m not one of them. These characters are so strong (and the costumes so expensive) that making a sequel was a great idea and Dr Who is always doing bits of fortune-telling: it makes total sense that, after doing as close to a contemporary story as any they’d ever done, we’d get a story that did things the more usual way, about how a warning about all the little problems that are beginning to show themselves exaggerated to the point where they become really big problems. It’s not like they had to make this story a snappy happy-clappy The Doctor has nothing to do except take a nappy adventure either: we could have had all sorts of rumbling problems, like the Royals going back on their promise to help the people, or how Peladon feels as the junior runt of the littler asked to provide more resources than they can manage, or seeing how Peladon cope when, say, Pluto wants to join the Federation (as part of a tax break; See ‘The Sunmakers’) and they’re not the new kids on the block anymore or the beast of Aggedor causing a diplomatic incident by eating an Ice warrior and pushing Mars to the brink of war. Big Finish’s ‘Bride Of Peladon’ is far from the best thing they’ve ever done but even that would have been more than acceptable, a ghostly trip round unseen parts of the castle said to be haunted, with a no-nonsense Ice Warrior uncovering a much more tangible plot against the throne. It’s this sequel that isn’t necessary because the writer can’t think of anything to say with it. Hayles went through more drafts of this story than most (for a while it was ‘The Return Of Peladon’ with a story that sounds much better, about the clash between the King and his advisor over the cost of educating the masses, but that was considered too weak for a six parter). It got delayed from the 1973 series while Hayles worked on rewrites and ran so close to the wire that it would have surely been dropped from the 1974 series too had the Radio Times 10^th anniversary not mentioned it in a preview of all the stories being worked on for season 11. In the end it feels like everyone got a little too desperate and just started sticking random stuff in where they could: that’s why half the characters we know and love don’t really act much the same way (even Alpha Centauri, one of the sweetest aliens we ever meet in the series, has turned into a right whinge!) and the new characters don’t fit anything we learned about this planet last time. The mining plot hasn’t really been thought out, it’s just something in the news that got added. All the things that got learned last time have been forgotten, too, with Hayles figuring that with a brand new Queen on the throne she could just go round the same problems making the same mistakes (as, sadly, David Troughton wasn’t available much as he wanted to do it: in the end his dad Patrick will come back to the series three times before he does despite his character having regenerated!) The mystery is much the same as last time, only without the great reveal (the baddies are no longer goodies and have gone back to being baddies, which is less of a surprise than the suspected baddies being goodies after all). There are so many lost opportunities to say more though: a good example is the faun, Vega Nexus, who comes and goes in episode one for no apparent reason, someone who does at least look as if they come from an underground burrowing race usurped by the Peladonian miners and who has reason to be aggrieved that Peladon are usurping his kind’s abilities  to mine, but The Doctor doesn’t even speak to him.  

It’s not just the writing that’s tired though but everything. Most of the costumes come straight out of storage where they’ve been lying around for two years and most look the worse for wear. Alpha seems to have developed some rather odd fashion sense though, with a yellow cloak to replace the tattered old green cloak he/she/it used to wear. The Peladonians themselves have developed even weirder fashion sense, with even longer hair (the main difference between 1974 and 1972) and with even more raspberry ripple effects running through them. There’s a clever twist that the Queen covers hers up, keeping her red streak under her crown away from view, as if to distance herself from her genetic roots and be something more – but that aspect gets lost ijn all the noise. The sets too are mostly from storage and look drab and dreary: last time around four parts entirely in the studio was time well spent with such an exciting colourful world of colourful characters but here we only get places we’ve seen before, stretched across six episodes. When hope is fading you can generally rely on Jon Pertwee to get things moving but his acting is arguably the worst in the series. A back problem he’d had since his navy days but which came and went was at its worst during rehearsals which meant he couldn’t even stand up without pain and had to replaced for any and all action sequences, even the slight ones, by stunt double Terry Walsh in a wig – shockingly badly in places (and these were the parts of the role he enjoyed the most). He was still miffed and mildly resentful to this series after asking the BBC for a pay-rise to stay on another year and being flatly turned down without even a working lunch, with an attitude of ‘huh if they aren’t going out their way to help me why should I go out my way to help them?’ Pertwee still had another story to film but you can tell his hearts are already elsewhere, as he goes on automatic pilot and counting down the hours till it’s all over; despite his growing friendship with Lis Sladen he’s clearly missing Katy Manning, Roger Delgado and the UNIT boys a lot this story. Without Pertwee’s enthusiasm the rest of the cast are mostly going through the motions too, with some awfully bland performances of, admittedly, very bland and minor miner characters and Donald Gee turns Eckersley turned into a boo-hiss villain so obvious that you’ve worked out whose the bad guy by his first scene (its most out of character it takes The Doctor so long to see through him. Especially as that aspect of it is basically the same plot as last time). Only Ysanne Churchman, still having fun bringing out her inner gay civil servant for Alpha, plus Alan Bennion and Sonny Caldinez as Ice Warriors (who sadly go back to being one-dimensional scheming beings but are still played with such panache they feel like ‘real’ characters) make this story watchable.  

Well, them and the new companion because this is where Sarah Jane Smith as people really remember her starts. She doesn’t get a romantic sub-plot the way Jo did,  they’ve remembered she’s an investigative reporter and much of this story is her doing the stuff The Doctor should be doing, working out what’s really going on instead of taking people’s word for it. From the first, when she’s bolshie enough to moan about being on another rotten gloomy planet when she was expecting paradise, to telling Thalira about women’s lib on Earth (a cringeworthy scene indeed that would be better had the only other female character in this very male-dominated story not been such a drip, but at least they’re trying) she’s the biggest difference in this story: poor Jo was a victim who things happened to; Sarah is a moral instigator who stops bad things happen to other people. Most of the best scenes in this story are hers, from her winning line in sarcasm to her genuine believable emotion when she thinks The Doctor is really dead – and unlike 99% of times the series tries it his moment feels so ‘real’ the audience half believes it for a minute there too. After all, the viewers at home know that Pertwee only has one story after this and, by having a sad speech here mourning his loss, the production team can have their cake and eat it by making this moment feel sad and yet still somehow making the actual regeneration in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ halfway happy, with the thoughts of second chances and learning and moving on. The Doctor learns from this story in the next one, it seems, even if the writer didn’t actually writing it (which is unusual for Hayles: I love all his other stories, even the ones other people don’t). As much as Hayles seems to have missed the point when he opened up his papers and read about the miner’s strike, trying to imagine what the working classes would be like in half a century’s time, he gets the equality of the sexes bit right (well, nearly: this is still the 1970s so points for trying anyway).

Well, that’s sequels for you I guess: they're never as good as the originals are they? Well, not in DW they're not - or not often anyway (‘Closing Time’ was pretty decent and ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ even better than ‘The Daleks’). Few people would have sat down to watch this story expecting anything too different or inventive: mostly it was just a good excuse for the 3^rd Doctor to say goodbye to old friends before his regeneration. So all in all is this a wretched story that should never have been made? Yes: even aside from how much is morally and aesthetically wrong compared to ‘Curse Of Peladon’ and the usual Dr Who morals of optimism that things are going to be alright and not to be afraid of people who aren’t like you this story is woefully excruciatingly slow as the writer tries to wait out the clock by pushing the story along as slowly as he can, a snoozefest to the highest degree. And if you’ve turned a world this imaginative, full of such amazing creatures as Alpha Centauri, then something has seriously gone wrong. It speaks volumes that, despite this story also being popular(ish) and the costumes and some sets and props remaining in storage they never had a re-match on Peladon in the Tom Baker era (when I like to think he’d have marched any smug Royals down to the mines to see life for themselves before the end of the first episode, not sit around talking old times like the 3rd Doctor does here; in some ways the story ‘The Hand Of Fear’ is a sequel to this story, about why the big rivals to fossil fuels, nuclear power, have dangers of their own given that things can go werong so easily. Such as a thousands of years old fossilised hand coming to life and turning into an alien made of crystal. It’s a pain when that happens). But is it all a complete waste that’s unwatchable? No. The characters from last time are so strong that, even in diluted form, I care enough about them to want to know how they think and feel and I still care about this daft little planet, with its old traditional superstitions and old ways, even when I want to feed the whole lot to Aggedor. There are some really good individual moments in this story, usually when Sarah has worked something out or is desperately trying to wake up someone (Alpha, Thalira, even The Doctor on occasions) to what’s really going on or The Doctor, sentenced to be eaten by Aggedor, saved because the beats remembers his kindness last time. The story needed a few more moments like that, of how you treat other people comes back on you.

Overall, though, this story still leaves a sour taste in my mouth that’s rare for Who (only ‘The Dominators’ is worse), a rare story that seeks to sow division rather than cure it, about fear not hope – and fear is never as entertaining as hope. Even something as small as The Doctor’s fight against ‘The Queen’s Champion’ seems wrong: fair enough he’s forced to fight to the death and its him or them but The Doctor doesn’t try to talk him out of it that hard or tell him who his real enemy is and even after he’s killed doesn’t stand there looking sad and just shrugs his shoulders and walks away Since when did life become so dispensable? It’s almost as if he didn’t matter because he was ‘only’ one of those stupid Peladonians and a series like Dr Who is on shaky ground when it starts doing that about aliens. Had they even had the miners as actual people, some of whom agree with Eckerlsey when he stirs up trouble and some people don’t, I’d swallow this easier but they really are portrayed as a bunch of brainless sheep who agree with everything their leader says, even when its blatantly wrong. In one small awful way Hepesh, the scheming baddy from ‘Curse’ ends up being proven right: the Federation does spell trouble and these people would have been better off if they’d stayed isolationists, struggling on a backward planet. Those handouts they were promised from the other planets turned out to be greedy claws grabbing what isn’t theirs. The people who voted to join the Federation last time aren’t visionaries but gullible fools while the people who wanted Peladon to stay separate get their way through manipulation and lies the working classes are too thick to see through. It was depressing in 1974, our great hopes of the future dashed before they’d ever really begun it’s super depressing viewing today now that we’ve had a number of Eckersleys of our own (he’s clearly Nigel Farrage right down to the racist views and the government being spooked of him even though he should have no power whatsoever) and that the workers are portrayed as being too thick to see through his lies. This feeling right here, this paranoia about other people coming over to take your jobs and your resources and use you, is one of the main reasons why Britain is in the mess it’s in right now. And no its not the scheming Ice warriors who are making you miserable and keeping you in your place (well, not directly, only their leaders), and no its not poor Arcturus come to steal your jobs (its hard pressed to know what job a head in a jar could actually do or how his planet has an economy at all) its your own leaders listening to the wrong people and exploiting your interests. I only ever say this elsewhere in ‘The Dominators’ but for once the enemy isn’t the people Dr Who is telling you it is. I’m not saying this story led directly to Brexit but, blimey, if ‘Monster’ isn’t a sign of that way of thinking that led there (from its title on down: who is the monster? Aggedor plainly isn’t as we found out last time. Do they mean Ecklersley? If so then why not tell us properly?) then I don’t know what it is. Sure Dr Who wasn’t about to come out and slag off the government at a sensitive time when The BBC were firmly on their side (though see ‘The Happiness Patrol’ for just one example when it did anyway, consequences be damned) but surely they didn’t have to become its mouthpiece parroting disinformation and lies? Thank goodness for all the things that worked so well in ‘Curse’ coming back for another go or this would be in the bottom five Dr Who stories easily, misguided, poorly conceived, badly written, very very boring and just plain wrong on most every level. What should have a major story about minors becomes a minor story about staying in your place. Horrid.

POSITIVES + Alpha Centauri is one of the best Dr Who characters. Other scifi gives us nasty aliens or occasional comedy aliens, but no series does cute aliens better than Who and Centauri is one of the cutest. He (?) is so very endearingly sweet, with that big eye and those cute little arms and that high pitched squeaky voice, brilliantly portrayed by Ysanne Churchman meekly trying to make everyone get along like an ineffective substitute teacher. No other scifi show would dare include an alien character like this who has nothing much to do with the plot except get in the way and yet I suspect, from experience of the EU and similar institutions, this is exactly the sort of alien dignitary we'd get running an interplanetary federation in real life. 

NEGATIVES - Aww, I really liked the nice Ice Warriors. Why did they have to go back to being evil and scheming Ice Warriors? It’s just a copout having them turn out to be what The Doctor suspected all along. And for dumb reasons too: if The Ice warriors feel entitled to something they just take it, they’re not naturals at politics (which is why everyone suspected them last time). There’s nothing they do in the script that means they have to be ice warriors; why not have The Humans end up stealing and betraying? They’re oddly enough not even mentioned in this story (despite arriving at the end of ‘Curse’ after everyone has mistaken The Doctor and Jo for them). And where is Arcturus, my other favourite? Did his species understandably leave the federation after their ambassador was really murdered? Or did his casing get damaged in storage?  Either way, it's a shame not to see him.

BEST QUOTE: Sarah on The Doctor: ‘I still can’t believe he’s dead. You see, he was the most alive person I’ve ever met’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Obviously ‘The Curse Of Peladon’, but also a whole bunch of sequels we’ve listed under that story (because, let’s face it, who reads a review of ‘Monster’ when they can read about ‘Curse’?)

Previous ‘Death To The Daleks’ next ‘The Planet Of The Spiders’