The Savages: Ranking - 260

  The Savages

(Season 3, Dr 1 with Steven and Dodo, 28/5/1966-18/6/1966,  producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Ian Stuart Black, director: Christopher Barry)  

Rank: 260

''I'm filled with the Doctor's energy...but not this Doctor's energy...Do you like my coat of clashing multicolours?...Oh and suddenly I'm the savage now am I?!?'

Of all the 312 stories of Who we've had so far this is the one I feel I know the least. It doesn't help that all the episodes are missing (there's about 75 seconds of episode 4, which is more than we have some stories mind) but even after reading the Target novelisation, hearing the TV soundtrack recorded onto reel-to-reel machines by enterprising fans and watching the rather good Loose canon reconstruction by fans using Telesnap photographs (long overdue being adopted by the BBC and being given an official release by the way) I still can't get much of a handle on this story at all. Some of the missing stories I feel I know better than the ones I've really seen with my own eyes. Some, even many, arguably seem richer in my imagination than they could possibly seem on TV. This one though: I still can't work out how it might have looked. Most of it seems to take place in long corridors, some of its in a quarry turned into a jungle and a lot of it is in a laboratory, but how those would have turned out is hard to tell from the still photographs, while the soundtrack doesn't have an abundance of dialogue either. In other words, it's hard to know where to place this story in the ranking, more than the others, so I'm happy to bump it up the list if it gets rediscovered and turns out to be a masterpiece. Something tells me it won't be though: we're near the end of William Hartnell's run, my favourite Doctor, and he sits most of the middle episodes of this one out to watch guest star Frederick Jaeger do his Hartnell impression instead while Dodo and Steven, well, scream and bicker for the most part. There's a very DW plot where (spoilers) you think the nice civilised society we run into are the good guys and the scary hairy Neanderthals who live in caves are the baddies, until it turns out to be quite the other way around and that in fact the 'posh' lot have been leeching energy off the poor. That makes it sound like a great story, but the trouble is DW had done this many many times before, even in 1966 (the very first episode was about being careful which caveman to trust, while in this very season 'Galaxy 4' gives us the exact same plot, just with beautiful women for the toffs and hideous monsters high on ammonia...don't ask...for the troglodytes. The only part that really sticks in the memory is when the Dr's energy is absorbed and Jaeger does an impersonation of Hartnell that's easily the best of the 4 times someone else got to play his Doctor. There's also the very first use of a quarry standing in for an alien planet, which does look good on the photographs I have to say. There's really not much happening elsewhere at all though and you can see the end of part 4 coming halfway through part 1. Could this be DW's emptiest four parter?

Positives+ Even three series in its become a bit of a cliche: The Tardis lands and everyone is either on the run or captured for appearing out of nowhere inside a blue box during some local/national/international crisis. The Tardis team are immediately put under suspicion and have to talk their way out of it. The great twist here is that this (un-named) planet knows of the Doctor and have been tracking the Tardis, convinced he'll show up one day because he seems to have been everywhere else. In a clever bit of scripting this of course flatters the Doctor no end and blinds him to the truth of what's going on for a couple of episodes...

Negatives - Poor Steven. While not the worst leaving scene ever (that's a tie between Mel running off with a gangster, Clara being killed by a space bird, Peri marrying Brian Blessed, Dan basically giving up and staying home because the script doesn't need him anymore and Dodo herself being brainwashed by the prototype for Microsoft Windows) he pretty much gets fired by the Doctor here, nominated to stay behind and lead the two warring factions of the planet into a new era of prosperity, even though he's shown no inclination to this role or special regard for this planet at all (they don't even know when or where they are). You sense that Steven stays not because he wants to but because Dodo has been teasing him all story about 'being a proper man' (bit rich coming from the companion who needs rescuing more than most). It seems to be the need to prove himself that makes him stay behind, but is this really the right place for him to strut his stuff? Steven is an action hero, a make do and mend out of nothing kind of guy (it's not for nothing actor Peter Purves became a Blue Peter presenter after all!) and before the Tardis came along he was stuck in isolation by the Mecchanoids, with a low opinion of humanity. Putting him amongst a bunch of dodgy scientists and rebuilding technology is in many ways the worst possible place for him. To survive this planet needs a diplomat, healer, mediator and visionary rolled into one. Steven is a doer who gets frustrated and impatient. In retrospect the really manly thing to do would be to look the Doctor and Dodo in the eye and say 'get lost - this planet's freezing!' Also I'd be pretty miffed personally if I'd missed landing in Swinging London in 1966 by one episode.