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 multi-colours?...Oh and suddenly I'm the savage now am I?!?...Let me tell you one thing you pontificating poltroon…Carrot juice carrot juice carrot juice!!!'

I have an odd relationship with ‘The Savages’, I just can’t get it into my head at all. Of all the 335 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 low quality home-video footage of episode 4 mind, which is more than we have some stories) 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 a handle on this story at all. Even John Cusa’s telesnaps, professionally taken from the television as an episode went out and offered to the people who worked on the show as a ‘record’ of their work they could include on their CV, are blurrier than normal, whether because of a fault that day or because this episode was like an early episode of ‘The West Wing’ where everyone was moving all the time. This isn’t usually a problem. 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 and what we do have is drowned out by one of the more tuneless music scores (Raymond Jones decides that Bartok is back in fashion again in the far future, with a discordant match of squeaking violins and booming percussion). There’s nothing really to get a hold of, no ‘monster’, no historical event or famous person (though not the first time Dr Who did this as some guidebooks say: there aren’t any in ‘The Space Museum’ either but you don’t care because the mystery of the first episode is such a strong hook, there’s nothing like that here) and even the characters we do see feel like they’ve been sketched in, caricatures at best. It’s also a story where half the people live as if it’s the far future and half the people live like it’s our ancient past. As a result it’s harder to work out where this story belongs in the ranking than most, because there’s just nothing to get a hold of. I suspect that the re-discovery of most missing episodes wouldn’t change my opinion on any of these stories much, but this one? It could be a hundred or two hundred places higher or tumble to the bottom (though the forty-give seconds we have got don’t, in dark cramped sets, don’t fill me with an awful lot of confidence).

Other stories from this era look worse though. The biggest reason this story doesn’t stand out is the plot: there’s no one single thing ‘The Savages’ does that hasn’t been done better by another story. There's a very Dr Who 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 if you were sitting down to watch this at the end of Dr Who’s third year you would already have had a great sense of déjà vu as if a robot had come up with the perfect Dr Who story by sticking bits of others together. We’re on a planet where the posh intellectuals live in a city of impossible technology while everyone else suffers in the natural jungle outside (like ‘The Daleks’), where those at the bottom of the food chain run around in furs grunting (‘An Unearthly Child’), where The Doctor is told an outright pack of lies but sees through the deception and we learn not to judge by appearances (‘The Keys Of Marinus’), the leaders of the planet clash over the best way to treat these interlopers (‘The Sensorites’), The Doctor has a ‘body double’ (‘The Chase’) and everyone protests at the harsh treatment of those at the bottom of the food chain (‘The Ark’) yet in the end The Doctor’s presence sparks a revolution (‘The Space Museum’) while most obviously of all ‘Galaxy 4’ gave us the exact same plot, just with beautiful women for the toffs and hideous monsters high on ammonia...don't ask...for the troglodytes. We’re just missing a cameo from Napoleon or Marco Polo, some Human-size insects, aliens with big round feet and a game of  Monopoly and we’d have a full house. In between there’s lots of the things that happen in every Dr Who story pretty much: Dodo is captured and has to be rescued a lot of times even for her, while the Doctor ‘investigates’ and it’s left to Steven to carry the story and piece things together. Even the ‘cliffhanger’ at the end of ‘The Gunfighters’ of a savage wandering across the screen is shot in the exact same way as the first ever Dr Who cliffhanger.   
This is the sort of story you get from writers who either know a series so well they can write something that seems just like it or someone who doesn’t know the series at all and is trying to write something enough like what’s already been on to make sure it will ‘fit’. In this case it’s kind of both. Ian Stuart Black might be most famous for his Dr Who work now but in 1966 was quite the rising star and easily the highest profile writer to work for the series that hadn’t found fame on it (i.e. Terry Nation). He was the co-creator of ‘Danger Man’ amongst other things and had been lured to the BBC to make a six part thriller. He’d never written science-fiction but his children were big Dr Who fans and wanted to know why he was working on other series when he could be working on that. Black thought no more of it until he noticed that his new producer Alan Bromley’s office happened to be next to the Dr Who one, so he popped in and asked if they’d like to commission him – so eager was new producer Innes Lloyd for new scripts and so desperate to get hold of a writer he’d actually heard of that Black was commissioned for two stories, this and ‘The War Machines’. You get the sense that the writer went home and asked his children for everything they could remember about past stories and threw them all into a pot.

Recycling can work if a writer has something new to say and there are times across ‘The savages’ when it feels as if the writer is making an important point, a very Dr Who style moral message. Only no one can quite work out which one it is. Let’s start with race: the peak civil rights demonstrations had been in 1964, only two years earlier, and the question (which should, hopefully seem to have an obvious answer to us now) was whether black people deserved the same rights as white people or whether they counted as a ‘separate species’. Of course this being Dr Who they do, but only after they’ve been ‘mined’ for their ‘body essence’ which makes the Elders of the city feel great and the Savages wandering around their draughty caves feeling like zombies. In a very Dr Whoy solution one of the ‘baddies’ is zapped by his own machine and, overcome by feelings of remorse for how he and his kind have made people feel, helps overturn it so everyone can live together in peace and prosperity. Only if this is a story about race then it’s become rather convoluted in delivery: the working title was ‘The White Savages’, but the Savages only turn white when they’ve had the life-force drained out of them. The Savages aren’t entirely backwards: they have their own art and culture and possibly even a form of religion in their caves, but The Elders don’t recognise it as such because it isn’t ‘theirs’, the two leading very separate lives unless ‘needed’ by the Elders. Meanwhile at least one of the Elders (their leader Jano) has been made up with blackface, something still common on British TV as late as the 1970s (when Alpha Centauri’ from the ‘Peladon’ stories became the unexpected special guest of ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’). Just to add to the confusion only Jano is like this – it’s not an ‘Elder’ thing (Is this a comment on the hypocrisy of Jano being a racist in a society where he’s the only one who’s different? Or, which seems more likely, did they just run out of time and makeup?!) Some guidebooks disagree by the way and with only blurry photos to go on it’s hard to tell for sure, but if it isn’t blackface then it’s one heck of a tan. Some reviewers go so far as to assume this story is specifically about apartheid in South Africa, although that’s pretty wobbly and a bit rude too (black people didn’t live in caves you know!) So, is this a race story that works by swapping the two colours round, like the ‘Noughts and Crosses’ book series by Malorie Blackman (what is it with writers with ‘Black’ in their name talking about race today?) Maybe. The trouble is there’s nothing else to make you go ‘aha, that’s what this story is about’ – no parallel to bus boycotts or peace marches or sit-in demos. Nobody wears particular clothes or haridoes that makes you go ‘aha’. There’s also no one moment when The Savages get to do the Dr Who thing and overthrow their oppressors themselves, taking charge of their own destiny – the story is still as patronising to them at the end as it was at the start, even if people are more empathetic to their suffering. If this is what the writer was after then it’s a very rude way of doing it I’m afraid, with The Savages deserving of life but very much not equal still. I’m all for being subtle, but if your metaphor is so subtle it’s this hidden then it doesn’t work, while calling half your audience ‘savages’ is asking for trouble.

Is ‘The Savages’ about class then? The Elders certainly have all the money, living in their posh city with a laboratory and all its finery, while The Savages live in caves in furs. The fact that the Elders physically drain The Savages of all their essence is a metaphor many working classes can relate to, while the fact that they just want to live their lives making art but don’t have the energy to is something a lot of working class writers can identify with too. However, I’m not sure if this quite works as a metaphor either. No money changes hands in this story at all. The Elders may well have come from The Savages in the dim and distant past but they at least think of themselves as two completely separate races.  This isn’t a city full of nepo ‘thankyou for my job Elders’, there’s no moment when an Elder counts out pots of moolah and we never actually see anybody working on either side bar the scientists with their essence-drainer. If this really was a comment on the unfairness of the class system you’d expect The Savages to be doing all the work, perhaps working in a sweat shop, but the most we see them do is a bit of painting. If this is a comment on the equality of theupper classes siphoning off the art of the working classes then Black (not the poshest writer Dr Who ever had but decidedly not lower class either – he took a philosophy degree at university for instance back in the days when you didn’t need a degree for any job going and only the privileged few went) doesn’t do enough with that thought. This isn’t appropriation so much as feeding off a class of people treated as if they’re animals. There’s a throwaway line from Flower too about how good it is to eat proper food like fruit, which makes you wonder if this is a jobe at modern day living and people in cities living off synthetics, as a sort of early version of the Autons made out of plastic and consumer culture, but if so it’s a line nothing more (the Elders seem to eat proper food too, not space cubes or something). It could be that the Elders just consider themselves a ‘better class’ of people, with an aesthetic taste to live in cities not caves by choice, but that’s not really born out by the script either: there’s no moment when a Savage wanders into the city and goes either ‘wow, so that’s where all my life force and taxes went’ or ‘wow, I wish I lived in a place like this’ or even ‘My ancestors used to live like this but they hated it so we moved’. The fact that the story ends in a sort of luddite attack on the industrial revolution, with Dodo having the most fun we see her have all series smashing things up in the Elders’ laboratory, might point to the writer being on the side of the working classes, however accidentally rude he might be to them.

Or is ‘The Savages’ really about generational angst? Is this a rude comment on how the kids are going to turn out if they remain hippies squalidly living in caves? Or how that life might be better than living in a posh city? You might have noticed that it keeps cropping up in a lot of these 1960s reviews that Dr Who was about the only programme parents and children watched together and that a lot of stories have openly debated about what sort of future they might inherit. The minute the Daleks walked on like Nazis in tanks there’s been the question regarding how the children of the 1960s might handle a future war and whether they are right to strive for peace whatever it costs them or whether it dooms them to certain failure. Just take a look at that name ‘The Elders’, which implies, well, they’re old, experienced, seen it all and lived their lives. The Savages, then, are the children, who have rejected that sort of cushy but very controlled life for freedom out in the caves. This is, after all, 1966 and the peak of ‘the young today are troglodytes with long hair and loose morals who might as well be in caves’ bashing (one group who broke big in 1966 got so sick of being called Troglodytes they even named themselves ‘The Troggs’). There’s even a Savage named ‘Flower’, though admittedly a Summer before ‘flower children’ are really a thing, while crudely painting caves is a past-time all good hippies can get behind. A slam dunk then? The Savages have rejected modern day capitalism with all it’s trappings for a more basic but freer and happier life in a cave. Well, maybe not. You see, confusingly The Savages are mostly played by old men, made up to look even older with ‘blow-dried’ faces and latex masks that add extra wrinkles, while The Elders are all middle age. Now this story is (probably) set in the future so it could be that this is an idea of how the hippies might be in the far future when they’re all old men and women, but even that doesn’t quite work. The Savages aren’t free for one thing. The Elders aren’t looking on from their strict routines I the city secretly going ‘I wish I had some of that, even if it’s a bit draughty’. Plus where does the life draining comes in? If the Elders are the capitalist parents supporting ‘the system’ then The Savages have escaped; at most they should be laughed at by The Elders and perhaps run outta town with a few shotguns, but if anything it should be the Elder’s lifestyle draining them.  The Savages are pretty miserable too, while most of them have regressed to the part where they barely grunt, which is not the most charitable depiction. Who’s side is the writer on? Interestingly at first The Elders believe The Doctor to be ‘one of them’ (because he’s old?) but – secret hippie that he is - he’s on the side of The Savages pretty much from the first even he never gives the sort of moralistic speech about being free to lead your own life and that every culture is sacred you’d expect; the closest the Doctor comes – and admittedly it’s a great speech, easily the best scene in the story – has William Hartnell declare to the Elders ‘so your rewards are only for the people who agree with you hmm?’, that ‘the sacrifice of even one person is too great a price to pay for progress’ and that ‘indeed I am going to oppose you sire – just as I oppose The Daleks or any other menace to humanity!’ (This is the sort of chest-beating comment we more often expect from later Doctors, particularly the 2^nd). Note that word ‘progress’ though: even thinks The Elders are ‘better’, if not in a moral sense then at least in the way they’re living. Jano does change his mind after being imbued with The Doctor’s ‘conscience’ but note how closely he sticks to the city as if he’d never be seen dead away from the technology - if he was a true hippie (as he’ll become later) then he’d be with them in a cave. As with the question of race or class it’s so confused: the plot is solved by the people inflicting the pain having a Doctor-infused change of heart: there’s no heartwarming moment when The Savages take matters into their own hands the way you’d expect in this sort of a story.  

Even so, The Elders at least equate The Doctor with being as Savage and drain his life force, turning him into a Zombie just like them. They’ve never done it to an ‘advanced life form’ before apparently, another possible dig at the black culture/working classes/youth of the day if that’s what this story is about, and it doesn’t go well. So William Hartnell gets a week off from learning lines (something that really helps his longer speeches in episode four, where he’s noticeably sharper) but still has to turn up to work, groaning, while Frederick Jaeger gets to do his best Hartnell impression in episode three having ‘absorbed’ his essence. It’s a rather good impression, with Hartnellish pauses and an authoritarian streak mixed with kindness, easily the best of the four times someone played/impersonated him, but one that rather annoyed the actor who was reportedly in one of his grumpiest moods during the making of this story: he hated being followed around in rehearsals and examined and it made him self-conscious (some sources throw in the fact that Jaeger was Jewish and Hartnell anti-semitic which may or may not be true – certainly Hartnell was of that generation for whom such prejudice was normal, which is what makes his very 1960s equality Doctor all the remarkable; Hartnell was mostly hurt at being told Steven was being written out at the end of the series though – Peter Purves was the last person left on the show he liked and trusted and he’d already met Michael Craze and Anneke Wills and not got on with them at all). Good as Jaeger is though there’s a ginormous hole in the middle of this story where The Doctor should be.

That’s filled to an extent by extra screen time for Steven and Dodo, something that would normally be a plus except that Black doesn’t seem to have quite understood them. Both regulars behave in odd ways that we’ve never seen them do before, almost as if they’ve switched characters. Far from being the strong-willed one who is one of the very few people to stand up to The Doctor (certainly The 1^st Doctor) Steven is now acquiescing to him, towing the line and staying out of trouble. Dodo, meanwhile, is leaving the safety of the city to go exploring. There are two real moments in this story that make you go ‘eh?’ One is when Dodo, the girl who does most everything she’s told (even by clowns and dolls sent by The Celestial Toymaker that she knows want to kill her), argues with Steven in the first episode: ‘Are you going to do everything The Doctor tells you to do? I thought you were a grown man – or are you?’ The implication the whole story. Especially the ending, is that Steven is easily led and lives in The Doctor’s shadow, something so different t his hot-headed introduction in ‘The Chase’ and his part in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ and ‘The Massacre’ as it’s possible to get. Then later Steven learns that there’s only one other way out the city but nobody ever takes it so ‘she wouldn’t be down there’.  ‘Oh you don’t know her’ groans Steven ‘She’d go anywhere!’ while The Doctor isn’t that fussed because ‘That young lady knows how to take care of herself’. Really? This is Dodo we’re talking about here, someone who nearly wiped out an entire civilisation by sneezing on them, annoyed people into kicking off the OK Coral gunfight and was happy to let Billy Bunter knock the stuffing out of her. Yet she’s not like her predecessors Vicki or Barbara, bravely heading into action out of curiosity or moral outrage, Dodo is much more like Susan, cautious and watchful, caught up in situations by accident rather than looking for trouble. Personally if I was The Doctor by now I’d trust Steven to make his own mind up about anything, while I wouldn’t let Dodo out of my sight, just in case.

There are other clumsy bits of storytelling here too. The Doctor, who has never been to this planet before, happens to have D403 capsules on board The Tardis that just happen to return the life-force of the Savages. Very handy! (He doesn’t even think to check their physiognomy or whether they were will work either – he just assumes they’re Human and nobody corrects him). Of all the supporting cast only Jano and Chal ever get anything to do and while Jaeger and Ewen Solon do well with what they’ve got there’s nothing much for them to really get their teeth into.  Jaeger is meant to be impenetrable, good at keeping secrets, until his Doctory change of heart at the end, while Chal is a bit ambiguous too, written so you can’t tell if he’s a goody or a baddy (by chance both actors, who don’t do any more Who for nearly a decade, will be cast in the same story ‘Planet Of Evil’ where you can get a better handle on their acting skills with parts to get their teeth into, which are excellent: Jaeger looks much the same as Sorenson, while Solon is unrecognisable as Vishinsky, showing what a full-on makeup job his part in this story was. No one else makes much of an impact though, while the poor girls – Kay Patrick as ‘Flower’ and Clare Jenkins as ‘Nanina’ must have two of the most thankless roles in all of Who, Neanderthal dollybirds that must have seemed dated in 1966 never mind today (Nanina is wearing a borrowed costume, the revealing one Raquel Welch wore in the film ‘One Million Years BC’ if that helps, despite having a very different figure; see ‘The Wheel In Space’ and ‘The War Games’ for proof of how well she can act with a proper part to play while Kay was much better in ‘The Romans’ too). This is the sort of planet where the people who’ve been there all their lives think the idea of outsiders living in caves is a myth and yet it takes Steven and Dodo precisely two minutes to bump into one. Meanwhile The Doctor notices something up almost immediately when he walks into the Elder City. A more complex plot could have had a lot of fun with both halves disbelieving or at least doubting the other, especially if they’d done it the other way round and had The Doctor side with the Savages while Steven and Dodo are fooled by being in the lap of luxury. The closing payoff just doesn’t happen: if you’d found out your entire society had been built on lies and deception and people had suffered needlessly you’d be outraged, confused, possibly conflicted if it meant giving up all you had to fix the problem. But the only people who react at all are The Doctor, Dodo and the Elder who’s been drained. Perhaps the biggest one of all though: The Elders say they know about The Doctor and have watched his travels in time and space (weirdly they assume he’s travelled alone, even though at this point in time he’s never ever travelled alone – even before he met him he ran off from Gallifrey with Susan; ‘The Savages’ is, in fact, the only Hartnell story the ‘Timeless Child’ arc supports rather than contradicts). Yet they assume without even asking him that The Doctor will approve of what they’re doing. They clearly didn’t pay close attention did they? And yes The Doctor as we know him, as a moralistic pursuer of justice, only really came together at the end of ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ (and disappears again for ‘Marco Polo’, written earlier) but even the earlier Doctor wouldn’t have approved and supported them, just walked away saying it wasn’t his problem. It’s as if they only know the John Hurt version of The Doctor (that would also explain why they know him well yet don’t know his name), but it can’t be because at this point in time his inventor Steven Moffat is all of five years old.

That part especially, though, reminds you of how far we’ve come in such a short space of time. After all, three years is a good run for a series, especially a children’s series and a scifi series both – they only ever made four Quatermasses and the last of those was over a decade after the rest (could it be that Black only really watched the start of the series to see what The Daleks were like and his children had to fill him in on the rest?) As a character The Doctor has now been transformed into a moralistic crusader and it’s those parts where The Savages come together best. Back in the day the whole series was about getting Ian and Barbara to survive long enough to get back to safety; now you stay to see how The Doctor fares on each planet he visits. You know by now that The Doctor is going to save the Day and put things right – the only question is how and this is one of the first revolutions The Doctor himself causes, not his companions (Barbara got to smash things up in ‘Marinus’ and Vicki in ‘The Space Museum’ but now even The Doctor has an axe, even if he over-exerts himself and has to sit down; given how soon after this he regenerates you have to ask if the life-draining machine did more damage than he lets on). ‘The Savages’ gives The Doctor a rematch with the sort of cavemen he once looked down on three years ago and now finds him on their side – sort of. As a series, too, the contrast with ‘An Unearthly Child’ (and that first cliffhanger tease just has to be a reference it’s so similar, even if it was added to the script by someone else now lost in the mists of time) couldn’t be greater.  Dr Who now has a reputation, a certain respect within the industry and even if viewing figures have fallen to an all time low (not matched until Drs 6 and 7) nevertheless it has an actual budget now, a larger studio in Riverside (so much bigger than the old cramped one at Lime Grove), a far larger and bigger named cast and a surprisingly large amount of location filming. Which brings us on to the one thing that modern viewers would consider ‘old hat’ but which would have been impressively alien and other-worldly at the time: ‘The Savages’ features Dr Who’s first ever quarry. Yes, it took twenty-six stories to get here (longer than you might think) but for the first time an alien world on Dr Who actually looks alien rather than a painted backdrop. So cast and crew trooped off to two different locations; Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire (though you won’t find it I’m afraid location spotters – it’s since been flattened and turned into part of the M25, although that’s fun to think about next time you drive over it and think to yourself ‘this might be where Chal’s cave was!’) and the oddly titled ‘Virginia Water Sandpit’ in Surrey, which is still there (where the Tardis lands and dematerialises as they couldn’t fins a decent place in the other quarry). It’s hard to say how well they use it, given that we can’t see it properly, but at least on paper it sounds like a great idea: this is a world of humans living in caves on location up against those living in the plush confines of the city made from scratch in the studio. Quarries are the closest you can come to a bit of ‘alien landscape’ in Britain (while NASA astronauts trained for their missions in their quarries, because the rocks and craters were the closest our planet has to the moon’s surface) – to have a view that actually goes into the distance, rather than ending at a curtain, must have been very ‘new’ at the time. The very different ‘feel’ of the way TV was recorded back then (outside broadcast units could only use higher quality, glossier film, which tended to be used only for expensive model shots in the TV studio), so jarring in so many other Dr Who stories, might actually have worked really well here. I would love, too, to see how the ravine checks out: the set builders picked up on the real ravine that ran alongside the quarry and decided it would help continuity if they re-created it in the studio so it looked more like part of the same world – a level of detail you don’t often get (though alas the telesnaps are blurry and it’s so in the background you can’t see how good a job they do). The makeup used on The Savages, too, seems really good in still photos, although it’s hard to tell without any moving footage of any of them. Mostly though, it’s the quarry that stands out, with an alien world on Dr Who that at last seems alien. That’s meant to be the ‘hook’ of this story more than anything. It’s only now, after another twenty years of Dr Who over-using them, that these shots don’t seem anything special even on the few that do survive.

The trouble, more than perhaps with any other story, is coming to ‘The Savages’ from the eyes of a viewer in 2023 who’s seen so much more, all of it better. The parts that were new now seem old and the parts that seem old then seem terribly old now. There are too many scenes of capturing, escaping, bickering (Steven and Dodo are close to hating each other at the start of this story, making their tearful farewells a surprise), scheming and – given how little is happening on the soundtrack CD or reconstruction at times – staring into space for no good reason. There’s one great speech in there (possibly two if the smashing things up scene is the sudden violent surprise it seems on audio, rather than Jackie Lane going nuts and William Hartnell  mopping his brow, which is all we get surviving on screen) but an awful lot of filling in time waiting for something to happen watching someone in blackface pontificate about someone in white aged makeup. Maybe this is what Dr Who needed to do in this era, a back-to-basics story for a show that was in a time of constant change, with the third producer and second script editor that year bedding in, while the first thing new boy Innes Lloyd did was to change a cast he didn’t think was working (though he couldn’t touch Hartnell who was too big a star. Yet. The two loathed each other more or less on first meeting). But they go too far: ‘The Savages’ is easily the laziest most recycled story of the black-and-white era and you can tell that the mood in the studio, for a whole variety of reasons, is not good and everyone looks (and more importantly given what’s left sounds) as if they’d rather be anywhere else than making this. Some people are trying their hardest, especially the location manager and set designers, but alas their contributions are the ones that are missing, so for us here in 2023 that just isn’t enough to go on. The trouble, too, with doing a story about how half the cast have been turned into zombies is the lack of urgency to put things right – and that goes quadruple when The Doctor is one too. I would happily put up with all of this if the story’s heart was in the right place, but the ‘moral’ (if there is one) is so confusing it’s hard to get a line on that too. You have to hope there is one though, because taken purely as a story there’s nothing much there at all. This is the sort of story of good versus evil that doesn’t come with sub-plots and which even the rayguns are called rayguns and The Doctor uses a reacting vibrator he calls a ‘reacting vibrator’ (give that man a sonic screwdriver quick!)The first Dr Who story to have numbers rather than individual episode titles (another Lloyd decision) rather sums it up: this is Dr Who by numbers now, with the imagination removed and things will take a while to recover – ironically the entrance of more life-drainers, The Cybermen. The apathy you sense from all concerned, from writer down (I can’t believe this is the same writer behind the far more atmospheric ‘The War Machines’ and ‘The Macra Terror’, better than this mess in every way, never mind TV’s biggest name writing for the series so far) rather rubs off on the viewer: every time I pick up the book, the audio CD or the reconstruction (no animation yet) it’s a struggle to get to the end, as if the life-force has been drained out of me.

POSITIVES + Even three series in its become a bit of a cliché: 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. Briefly. It’s a neat idea that raises lots of interesting questions (Is this Dr Who’s first ‘meta’ story? Postmodernist TV was at speak in the 1966, think of The Monkees TV show or Batman. Does The Doctor know and that’s who he’s talking to in the festive episode of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’?  Is this ‘us’ watching Dr Who from our more modern perspective of the cavemen tribes in ‘An Unearthly Child’?) Sadly they don’t use this aspect as much as they might have done, but after five of the last six stories have had The Tardis crew under suspicion simply for arriving and having to spend an episode or more getting people to trust them (‘The Celestial Toymaker’ being the exception) it’s a welcome change I wish the series had used more.

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 he wants The Doctor to be proud of him and Dodo has been teasing him all story about 'being a proper man' (bit rich coming from the companion who needs rescuing more than most). Though The Doctor talks about maybe crossing paths again one day this is the era when he can’t steer the Tardis for love or money or jelly babies and the whole thrust of the first two seasons has been about how you might never get home again (Ian and Barbara risked life and limb in a Dalek spaceship to do just that not so long ago). So to all intents and purposes Steven is stuck here, his friends running off without him. 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 ignorant cavemen and rebuilding technology is in many ways the worst possible place for an impatient soul like him. To survive this planet needs a diplomat, healer, mediator and visionary rolled into one. Steven is a doer who gets frustrated the minute things start to go wrong. There’s bound to be a lot of that in his future. In retrospect the really manly thing to do would be to look the Doctor and Dodo in the eye and say 'get lost – Im not staying here, this planet's freezing!' Also I'd be pretty miffed personally if I'd missed landing in Swinging London in 1966 by one episode. In case you hadn’t guessed it was a last minute decision of the producer, who asked Black to write Steven out at the last minute, with Dodod to follow a story later, before proper plans could be made for their exit.

BEST QUOTE: Jano: ‘The man we need must inspire trust. His judgments must come from his heart even more than his head’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Big Finish – or at any rate writer Simon Guerrier -  wondered out loud what might have happened next to Steven and covered it in no less than three ‘companion chronicles’ across a sort of loose trilogy. ‘The War To End All Wars’ (2014) cleverly pitches an elderly Steven as much like the 1^st Doctor, now a respected if crotchety elder with a grand-daughter, Sida, who’s not unlike Susan. He’s no longer on the throne on the Elder’s planet, though, having been deposed by a head in a jar (!) and in retirement is looking back on his life. Unfortunately that promising lead is dropped when Sida asks her Grandad for stories about his past, one of which is about when he, The Doctor and Dodo landed on a planet named ‘Comfort’ where the locals appeared to be hypnotised. Captured, the trio are separated and sent for tests before being shipped to different parts of an ongoing war where Steven has been brainwashed into fighting until he stumbles across the supposedly evil and corrupted enemy and finds people looking just like him. It turns out there’s no war at all, just soldiers from the same side sent to fight each other – and one of them is Dodo brainwashed into aiming a gun at him! Steven’s unorthodox solution? Stand for election and change the way the planet is run. As part of his paperwork Steven discovers the real truth, that Comfort is a badly named penal colony where convicts are sent to kill each other. Reuniting with The Doctor, Steven never forgets the burning sense of injustice and - annoyed at The Doctor’s pact of non-interference all over again  as per ‘The Massacre’ - feels he’s let the people of Comfort down. It’s a neat retrospective way if explaining why he rather suddenly took the job doing much the same at the end of  ‘The Savages’ and why The Doctor recognised it was where his heart told him to be. One of the more thoughtful companion chronicles, though I wish there was more on the post-Who Steven rather than telling a story in flashback.

Thankfully ‘The Founding Fathers’ (2015) delivers a bit more detail there. The reason Steven ‘lost’ his election was because an essence of The Doctor’s brain, left over from ‘The Savages’, ran against him and was diametrically opposed to Steven’s view of the world. It made him despair: will he ever be free of The Doctor’s shadow? It reminds him of an earlier trip in the Tardis, with Vicki this time, in Leicester in 1762 when the timelord got on his nerves then too. Uncharacteristically locking himself out of the Tardis, The Doctor looks for the best locksmith in town and reckons its none other than Benjamin Franklin who breaks the Tardis lock using electricity from a kite! Ridiculous in the extreme, even though Franklin’s scientific curiosity at seeing the inside of the Tardis is well handled. A lot of the Franklin story is given over to his mistress Abigail, a made up character standing in for his many affairs and signifying a person considered unimportant by history and not recorded, which is an interesting idea that doesn’t really work. It’s also a bit clumsily tied to the main story, which has Steven realising that the brain in a jar really isn’t The Doctor, just some generic computer code with extras, because the ‘real’ Doctor knew how to charm people and do the right thing and treated everyone as equals.  

I would skip on to ‘The Locked Room’, easily the best of the trilogy, set even further in the future when Sida has become president and vowed to fulfil her grandfather’s legacy. Steven has got homesick, buying a telescope and installing it into his house in the mountains where he watches after dark, keeping the room locked in the daytime. Grandparent and granddaughter have a falling out over how to run their world and – much like the 1^st Doctor with Susan – Steven pushes things too far by locking Sida in that room, only to have second thoughts when remembering his own disagreements with The Doctor and how that made him feel. There’s  neat bit where Steven, who has been trying to get a message through to his old mentor, finally contacts ‘his’ Doctor only to find he’s dying, at The South Pole and about to regenerate (as per ‘The Tenth Planet’) where they have a tearful telepathic goodbye to each other. Poor Steven feels more alone than ever. Only there’s a humungous and unlikely twist (mega spoilers): maybe this isn’t ‘our’ Steven narrating at all but a brainwashed version that’s been manipulated by…The Vardans from ‘The Invasion Of Time’! Didn’t see that one coming I confess. Now it’s up to Sida to save her people and restore her grandfather, all from inside a locked room. Now that’s how you do a ‘Companion Chronicle’!

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