Warriors Of The Deep: Ranking - 259

   Warriors Of The Deep

(Season 21, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 5-13/1/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Johnny Byrne, director: Pennant Roberts)  

Rank: 259

''In which we end up 20,000 leagues under the sea and about £20,000 under the budget the show should have got

Or 'Warriors on the Cheap' as fans call it, for all sorts of reasons, as Dr Who goes 20,000 leagues under the sea on a budget of less than £20,000. This is a story that a remarkably large portion of (usually rightwing) ‘comedians’ and BBC bosses like Michael Grade (in his Room 101 appearance) quote when they talk about how Dr who was ‘always cheap looking’ with ‘monsters that are men in rubber masks’ or ‘pantomime horses’ shuffling past ‘wobbly sets’ while ‘people in weird costumes over-act’. There are actually relatively few examples of those in the ‘classic’ series – unfortunately they are all in this story. The real problem is that the last story on before this one, about six weeks earlier, was ‘The Five Doctors’, the big nostalgia-fest that got more fuss than any one story had in years and which had caused lots of lapsed viewers - including some with children old enough to watch for the first time – plus lots of curious newbies to tune in and see what a ‘normal’ episode of Dr Who looked like. Then they saw this low budget pantomime and assumed all Dr Who stories looked like this one. The opening story of any season tends to get the highest ratings anyway, but Dr Who never fully recovers from this one apart from the odd blip. The end is here.

Which is a shame, because the end being here is what this story is all about. There are many many cold war parables in ‘classic’ Dr Who as a series that was born around the time of the Cuban missile crisis and was last transmitted a month after the collapse of Soviet Russia gets to grip with the hellish landscape it’s living in and tries to make sense of the fact that perfect strangers could deliver a slow painful death from millions of miles away. Yet ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ isn’t a parable. It’s not trying to be clever by inventing a scenario that’s a little like what’s going on at home, it is what’s going on at home only a hundred years in the future when nothing has changed except that the missiles have got bigger and the population are that much closer to a nervous breakdown. There’s no attempt to shy away from what’s happening by making this happen to the people of another planet or be played out by ancient tribes of cavemen – this is us, in the future, after we fail to learn our lessons for another century, a hundred years exactly after the date of transmission. The children watching this story will have grown into adults, aged and died and the cold war is still going on. Only the Humans fighting this war can’t even remember how it started or why anymore, it’s just become part of life. Few stories are as brave or courageous as ‘Warriors Of The Deep’, a morality tale where all the Humans on both sides ask ‘how did we get here?’ It’s a story that screams through the screen ‘what are you going to do about it before it gets this far?’ It’s a story clearly inspired by Ronald Reagan’s ‘star wars’ missiles (a gift for Dr Who writers) as a million missiles are pointed at Russia from the air even though they only need one, before heading underwater to a deep sea base where England has become a dumping ground for American nuclear arms (not that unlikely at the time, when the Polaris submarine was housed off the sea near Scotland).The fact that today in the real world society has moved on to the point where the dangers are more from tiny countries buying secondhand missiles and terrorist groups are a bigger obstacle than power blocs has changed how people relate to this story now, but if you can put yourself back into the mindset of the times then this is a story that still has a lot to say, about humanity and their stubborn belief in warfare even when there are no winners.  

 
I’ve always enjoyed ‘Warriors’ as a story. I'm probably one of the last fans to experience the joys of getting to know certain Dr Who stories from the Target novels first, before videos or repeats became more commonplace (thanks to the village mobile library van that had a good half of the Dr Who books). I only ever read maybe 75 of them (33%ish) and last read one for a story I didn't know 30 years ago as videos became more plentiful, but its funny how some of these stories you read in a book decades ago stay with you longer than some stories you saw on TV a month ago. This is one of those stories. On the printed page Johnny Byrne, a writer more known for comedy-dramas like 'All Creatures Great and Small', turns in a tense, claustrophobic thriller where the stakes are high and everyone is desperate – desperate enough to actually go ahead and press the red button. And then two races of aliens wake up from their billion year slumber, decide to know what all the noise is about and decide their monkey pets are a danger and can’t be trusted to look after the Earth anymore either. Can two sides that hate each other’s guts come together for the greater good in the face of a more advanced and cunning enemy? Do the Silurians and Sea Devils actually have the right to destroy a civilisation that’s apt to destroy theirs? Can an arms race ever be won if people are paranoid enough to think that their enemies will actually go ahead and do it while being smug that they never would? It's gripping stuff on the page, with the Doctor the only person who can clearly see what's going on and less people willing to listen to him than normal, while the sea base setting is dark and sinister, filled with tough credible characters desperate to survive against imaginative monsters, humanity separated from destruction by its own oceans by a flimsy metal frame that can break at any time. This must have been incredibly chilling to read at the height of the 'real' cold war. It was pretty darn frightening to read after it ended. There’s no quarter taken either anywhere: if you’re coming to this from the Steven Moffat then the first thing that will strike you is how high the body count is. Besides The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough only one person (presumably) survives the onslaught: Bluic. Every single other person we see during the course of this story dies: that’s seven speaking Human parts, four speaking Silurian/Sea Devils, a Myrka and a baseload of extras – ten people playing guards lots of times over, four base personnel ditto, four Silurians four Sea Devils. By the time The Doctor gets round to his closing line in the book ‘there should have been another way’ you nod your head in silent agreement. But then that’s the brutality and mess of war. There are no winners, only  casualties.

Of course, by the time you get to that line on screen it takes on a whole different meaning: there really should have been another way to make this story than the way we got. Never before have I been so disappointed in how a story that seemed alive in my head could be so flat and dead on screen. The aliens look pathetic (especially the lumbering pantomime horse), the actors all seem to have spent Armageddon looking at themselves in a mirror for hours to get their make-up just right and this oddly clean and sparse looking base is lit up like a Christmas tree. There’s no atmosphere, no believability, no tension, no drama and way more fluffed lines than usual from a cast who don’t ever seem to have quite connected with this tale. Far from being a tragedy, this version is a comedy. At times it’s hard to believe it is the same story and yet it is (the book is a very faithful reading of all the dialogue heard on TV). So what went wrong? Well, not for the first time in this book there was a monster and her name was Margaret Thatcher. She was, at the time, nearing the end of her first term as prime minister, but not that year because she still had another maybe sixteen months to go before she had to call a general election (as traditionally in the UK they’re called in May). However one of her strategists pointed something out: Thatcher was currently riding the crest of a wave of xenophobia and jingoism after her misguided and utterly pointless invasion of the Falkland Islands and her poll  numbers had never been bigger. Sixteen months is a long time in politics and this was a cabinet known for being reckless if not a bit stupid, always getting into trouble. Better to make the most of it now and for Thatcher to use her prerogative to call an election early, thereby securing another five years in power. It was a sneaky move that caught the opposition on the hop and meant a lot of the electorate voted for her again simply because they didn’t know what Labour had to offer in opposition. It also caught the BBC on the hop as they scurried around trying to secure a spare studio for ongoing news coverage. Naturally priority was given to all the high profile shows, especially the Christmas shows (which, due to the length of time needed for postproduction, tend to be filmed in the Summer). One of the studios taken over had been planned for Dr Who. Producer John Nathan-Turner was given a stark choice: drop a story from the season or pull the first available story forward by a fortnight and film to a tight deadline.

Oh well, you might be thinking, a fortnight doesn’t make much difference. But it does. While Johnny Byrne had all but finished his script and the director had done most of the earliest preliminary jobs (like casting and camera floor plans) everyone else was caught on the hop. Mat Irvine, traditionally in charge of monsters and models, was busy working in Scotland on a film project that ran over by three weeks. Normally this wouldn’t be too much of a problem but every other person available had been commandeered into working on other shows and his usual buffer of a month to get things completed was reduced to nine days during which he also had to do all the model shots (which are brilliant, it has to be said). The set designers had to beg steal or borrow parts to put the base together and did things in such a rush that the walls were still covered in paint (at one point Tegan gets her costume coated in it; she saved the day by keeping her back to the camera for as long as she could, while luckily it’s one of those bright 1980s costumes that looks as if a brush of colour would improve it anyway.I'd love to explain it away, like all good Dr Who fans do, but repainting walls would be an odd thing to do in a base when under siege). The sets were built in such a hurry that one of the doors, supposedly reinforced to hold out the might of the English channel and survive a nuclear attack, wobbles like a jelly. The actors had to learn their lines at double speed, with less rehearsal time than usual. Even the stunts (for there’s a lot of underwater stuff in this episode, most of it things no series had ever asked them to do before) had to be co-ordinated in a hurry. Nobody was ready and it shows. The actors are visibly trying to remember their lines and there was no time for re-takes (there’s a scene, in episode two where Tegan and Preston are talking and get a bit giggly for no reason: that’s because they thought they were doing a rehearsal take not the proper thing and begged to do it again only to be told no). The extras playing the monsters can’t see and the only way the Silurians and Sea Devils can move is by walking extra slowly, while the costume department haven’t been able to line their masks up with their heads so at some parts the actors are all too obviously wearing their masks as ‘hats’. While it was hoped the Silurians and Sea Devils could simply be recycled from the 1970s none of the Silurian heads had survived in usable condition and only one Sea Devil had survived, in very poor state after weeks of underwater filming. So they were re-created from scratch at speed – and it shows. Not one of the changes makes things better; most of them make things worse. The ‘third eye’ for instance, once a fierce weapon saved for interrogation and death, now blinks on and off when the Silurians talk for no apparent reason. The Silurians now have bigger backs and fins that run down them that make them look ridiculous, not fearsome. Given that nobody still involved in Who had been working on the programme in 1970 no one can remember how the voices were meant to go, so the Silurians end up sounding like ‘a vocodered George Formby’ (according to the ‘Who’s Next’ book by Mark Clapham, Eddie Robson and  Jim Smith). The Sea devils fare a lot better and keep their menacing whispering sibilance, but even they look anaemic, with actors in masks that clearly don’t fit. Two of the most noble races in the whole of Dr Who, with two of the best back stories, have become a laughing stock. Especially the action scenes which, because of the heat in June, were recorded in short bursts while the actors moved slowly, rather than the action packed scene in the script.

Worst of all is the Myrka, the most notorious of all Dr Who creatures, who looks like a pantomime horse and is even played by the pair behind Dobbin the horse-spectre in ‘Rentaghost’ (No seriously: fans often thin that’s a joke in guidebooks like this one, but it’s true. The ‘bottom’ half John Asquith was in JNT’s contact book after playing a dancer extra in ‘Black Orchid’ and as he and front half William Perrie were ‘experienced lumberers’ they were obvious people to call. Only Perrie found the rush meant that the Myrka head had been made way too big and heavy to be comfortably worn so instead of walking like an animal he stood on his actual legs to wear it on his head, which makes a silly monster look even sillier). Given the delays the cast and crew didn’t get a chance to see the monster till the camera rehearsals – and giggled when it came through the door. In the novel it’s a terrifying beast, the size of a house, snarling through corridors with the unlikely but terrifying power to kill every living thing that touches it (you do wonder how that happened evolutionarily, especially when a mother Myrka gives birth to a baby Myrka and presumably dies in childbirth, although it would help cook any fish it came into contact with instantaneously and explain why it has such a temper, if it was never held lovingly as an infant). On television it’s one of the silliest sights you will ever see. Just to make matters worse guest star Ingrid Pitt (who is otherwise rather good, playing against type as a hardened scientists Doctor rather than her usual exotic Queen parts, though hardly the casting I had in my head when I reads the book I can tell you) takes it into her head that her character would die fighting and improvises a lunged kung-fu kick at the beast, before accidentally touching it and dying. Much to the horror of everyone watching who knew they would never be able to afford a re-take. It has rightly become one of the most reviled scenes in all of classic Who. If ever anyone (like, say, Michael Grade) wanted ammunition to laugh at a show for being silly and cheap and pantomime then this is it. 

There’s an obvious solution of course: film everything in the dark. That’s how this story was written after all, even before it became how obvious how poor all the costumes were. It’s how the best of the ‘base under siege’ stories from the 1960s work: push people back into a tiny room and put the lights out. But we never get that here: the base is a huge set so there’s none of that feeling of claustrophobia. The alien invasions are ho hum and treated as if they’re ‘just another shot’. You never feel scared once in this story, even though that’s clearly what the script is aiming for (and the book is quite a terrifying read). To be fair to director Pennant Roberts, usually such a reliable pair of hands, he tried: the lighting riggers turned him down on the grounds that shows had to be lit to a certain degree of quality to be deemed worthy of transmission (a decision reversed by the time of ‘Caves Of Androzani’ at the end of the year, thank goodness). But they actually seem to have turned the lights up, dazzling us with every last seam, every last weak point, every last mistake. So instead Roberts tries to recover things in post-production, adding multiple fast paced camera shots and edits in the hope that no viewer will linger on anything for very long. But it’s a forlorn hope: the speed of the cuts feels artificial and only emphasises how terribly slow moving and un-scary all these creatures are, while the invention of the home video recorder meant fans could linger on such mistakes for as long as they wanted. There are Dr Who stories with individual mistakes bigger than any of these but no other story has quite this much going wrong collected together in one place (only ‘Orphan 55’ comes to matching it in the modern series for sheer incompetence). It’s one of the ropiest bits of television that was ever allowed to go out, the sort of story you would never ever show a ‘non-us’ because you would be teased about it for the rest of your born days. 

True fans, though, know that if you’re watching your scifi for the special effects rather than the script or characters then you’ve always been better off with another show. Indeed I’d take this version over the story over the one Johnny Byrne originally wrote, for an episode of Space:1999 ‘The Guardian Of Piri’, in which a computer designed to be perfect has a malfunction that causes it to give out a wrong figure that leads to the crash of a spaceship. In horror the computer switches itself off for repairs, leading to the death of its paradise planet, killing far more people in the process. It’s a great starting point. We’ve had computers as the baddy in Dr Who before of course. ‘The Armageddon Factor’ has a similar scenario where two planets are caught in a stalemate war as part of a strategic computer programme to [prevent itself being shut off, whilst ‘The Face Of Evil’ has a computer develop schizophrenia. But this story is about a computer fault that accidentally launches an attack neither side can stop. That’s terrifyingly plausible. Especially in 1984 when we knew how temperamental home computers could be. Surely the big government computers wouldn’t be any better? It would only take one mistake or a bit of rust and all those ‘star wars’ missiles would come crashing down to Earth, even if they didn’t blow us up. There’s a nice bit of mental insight too into what it would be like to go through it for real: Maddox, part computer, has been trained to synchronise between computers and be the emotionless one to put the question to the computer, but his human part of his brain can’t cope with the stress and even he breaks down. It’s all very like the best of the (sadly around half) surviving episode of ‘Out Of The Unknown’, Dr Who’s old 1960s rival on BBC2, a J B priestly play about the strain on two Humans living underground who have been ‘brainwashed’ into taking shifts where they could be called on to destroy their families above ground at any one time (they actually press the button in that story too). What’s clever about this script, too, is that we never actually find out who the ‘enemy’ is. We assume it’s Russia because of our prejudice (and Dr Solon turns out to be a presumably Polish spy – at any rate Ingrid uses her natural home-born accent for the part. She came to the West as an adult in circumstances that sound very like a Matt Smith story, where a soldier pulled a gun on her at the barrier between her country and the West and, having dived into the water to escape it, she figured she might as well keep swimming to freedom). We assume ‘our’ side are the Americans. But we don’t actually know. Byrne’s script is careful not to take any sides: every side loses in war. It’s highly telling that no one can remember how this war even started, the way Tegan can. After all, who but historians (and Dr Who fans, who like looking this sort of thing up) can remember what caused events from a century ago, like the Boer or Crimean Wars? (see ‘War Of The Sontarons’ for the least historically accurate take possible. The title’s a clue). For nobody wins this war, everybody loses. There’s an especially eerie moment when The Doctor, surrounded by bodies, tries to call the other base and gets no answer: they’re all dead too. That’s terrific. It’s exactly what a Dr Who story should have been doing in 1984, saying the un-sayable that no other series possibly could and showing that it’s mankind who are the real monsters. The crux of this story isn’t meant to the Myrka shuffling away from being kung fu kicked by a hammer horror icon in a 1980s tracksuit. It’s meant to be the stalemate between the two power blocks reaching a crisis that not even The Doctor can solve, while the Silurians in the middle prove they have more right to the planet than either set of Humans who don’t treat it properly. But those bits that go right get lost in amongst the bits that go so very obviously visually wrong.

Of course the script isn’t perfect. Even in the novel the story never properly stops to see what these people are thinking or feeling and they’re the ‘stiff upper lip’ types taken to extremes. The whole story would be so different, for instance, if someone had spoken to Maddox or given him a rest from duty, instead of forcing him back to work when he’s clearly not well. There are plotholes galore. Byrne suggested this story when script editor Eric Saward asked for a ‘monster’ and asked if he could use the Silurians and Sea Devils that he remembered so well from childhood, even getting an archive copy of them from the BBC (then still in black-and-white). However he doesn’t seem to have paid too much attention to them. The Silurians were utterly and completely destroyed in the 1970 story, yet the main one Ickthar knows The Doctor. He speaks about being part of the ‘triumvirate’ who spoke to The Doctor and nearly brokered peace, but we saw both the ‘young’ and ‘old’ Silurian snuff it on screen. That only leaves the ‘scientist’. But this Silurian is not the scientists. He looks very different in a way that couldn’t be explained by cryogenic sleep for one thing, has no interest in science for a second and seems to have a very different memory of that story’s events to what happened for a third (mind you, The Doctor’s seems to be faulty too, remembering the Silurians as all peaceful rather than equally paranoid and wasn’t as close to brokering a peace as he maybe thinks he was before the Brigadier blew everyone up instead). Tegan’s leg gas, near fatal at the start of the story, clears up completely between episodes three and four, just in time for her to do lots of running. Rather more weirdly she seems to have taken time out to put a bra on between episodes one and two despite being in the middle of running for her life. It really is amazing that continuity advisor Ian Levine allowed that through (although to be fair he did point out that the Silurians never saw the Tardis and didn’t know the Doctor was a timelord – as indeed we at home didn’t back then –so two references were removed from the script). There are other issues too: is it really sensible, in a nuclear war that’s clearly cost billions upon quadzillions of pounds, to leave the deciding ‘vote’ of going to war up to an inexperienced boy? Of course he was going to break, computer enhanced or not. This isn’t Data from Star Trek: Next Generation, Maddox has kept all of his emotions, he’s just got extra computer abilities that’s all. And surely calling him a name that starts with ‘Mad’ is giving the plot away a bit early? Having the ‘spy’ be Polish, the one foreigner on an otherwise all English/American base, also makes you a bit uncomfortable too. Then there’s the hexachromite gas the Humans happen to be carrying around with them which, by complete and utter coincidence, just happen to be lethal to the two reptilian species nobody knew were going to wake up when this base was built. And why don’t the Silurians and Sea Devils wake up earlier when the base was being built and the Humans were helpless? That surely would have been a better story as The Humans explain that they’re trying to fight a war on land by commandeering the sea while on the Silurians’ home turf. Then there’s the fact the Doctor takes Tegan here at all, so she can ‘see her future’. The Doctor must know about this war, so why take her here? Why not take her to the far future when humanity are colonising other planets? Why not take her to something that might interest an air-stewardess from 1981, like a futuristic aeroplane? Why not take her to the past and her Aboriginal ancestors? Why take her slap bang into the middle of a war? For all the good moves forward this script makes there are too many basic clumsy errors that put it into a stalemate, even before the way it comes across on TV. There isn’t one character you care for outside the regulars and even they’re even more of a pain than usual this episode more concerned with saving their own skins than anything else.

The Human actors try their best but there’s nothing really to get their teeth into. Martin Neil’s Maddox could have grown into his nervous breakdown slowly, but instead it’s scripted to come on suddenly which is less interesting (if he seems familiar he was one of the three Freewheelers kids, alongside Wendy Padbury). Spare a thought for poor Ian McCulloch by the way (Playing the one-dimensional bully Nilsson): the actor had been the star of Terry Nation’s series ‘The Survivors’ (where, confusingly, he plays a character called Preston, the name of a girl in this story) and was riding high in the late 1970s when his career was cut short. He’d celebrated a wrap party by taking lots of showbiz friends out in his yacht when a freak wave caused a freak accident, knocking their series director ‘Lovely’ Lennie Mayne (who directed four Dr Whos between ‘Curse Of Peladon’ and ‘The Hand Of Fear’) into the water where he drowned before anyone could get to him. There were inquests galore and endless tabloid speculation most of which centred on McCulloch as the owner of the yacht, but he was cleared of all wrong doing. Even so, a lot of his showbiz friends shunned him, till Pennant Roberts gave him his first work for six years. And after all that time out of work he then had to cram these lines in at double the speed! Ingrid Pitt gets her silliest role in Who, beating even Atlantis Queen Gallilea in ‘The Time Monster’ (one far closer to her usual sort of roles). The rest of the cast make no impression at all. The Silurians and Devils are particularly poorly catered for and treated as just another monster who wants to blow things up because they can. There’s almost none of Malcolm Hulke’s origins left in them, the fact that they are intellectually and technologically superior to man and have a better claim to the Earth being here first. The original stories were about how man is the refugee who got lucky, filling in the vacuum when the two master races of Earth went to sleep. Here they’re soldiers who want in on the action too. Especially the Sea Devils who used to be intelligent in their own right but are now worker drone soldiers kowtowing to the Silurians (who have never met before on screen and shouldn’t know each other, though a few spin-off works have tried to correct this).

The biggest problem, though, is how The Doctor solves it. This is a story all about the horrors of war and the stupidity of the people who fight it. In almost every other Dr Who tale (including ‘The Silurians’) he’s the outsider who can see what the people fighting can’t, the bigger picture that only by working together will anyone have a planet survivable enough to be worth living on. There’s none of that here: no great passionate speeches, no impassioned pleas, no lectures aimed at the characters that are really directed to us at home, none of the things that made the original Silurian match-up so thoughtful. Instead The Doctor fights back, hard. Yes it’s in self defence and it’s to get back to the Tardis and escape more than anything, but this is The Doctor, our moral compass. If he can’t even be bothered to try to save lives and give us something to live for, with all his extra abilities and knowledge, then what hope have we? As courageous as it is to have a story this bleak we need a much better ending than the depressing thought ‘they all wiped each other out’. Dr Who is meant to be about solutions and escapism, however much it reflects our own world problems at ourselves. There just isn’t any. Instead The Doctor commits genocide on two entire races who’s biggest crime is to wake up and wave a gun around (to be fair I’d be grumpy too if my pet monkeys had woken me up after a long nap, while the Silurians are, surprisingly, the first race in Who to talk about a ‘final solution’, rather than the Nazi-based Daleks or rather desperate Cybermen) and then has the audacity to stand there saying ‘there should have been another way’. In 1970 genocide was a last resort as we watched two intelligent beings try to broker peace despite the ignorance of a Human 3^rd and a story that lasted seven tense episodes as we waited to see the chess pieces move across the board. This time genocide is a first resort and it’s four episodes of running round the same set as things happen to prevent The Doctor pressing the trigger; that’s just not as interesting or entertaining for all that the ‘heart’ of this story shows Byrne was closer to Hulke than most writers and trying to write a worthy sequel. The Doctor only gets one heroic moment, in a water tank, in an unusual stunt that looks as if its riffing on Davison’s other series ‘Sink Or Swim’ (due to the rushed nature of the shot they forgot to heat the water and it was freezing, Davison contracting mild hypothermia. The sequence was filmed at the Royal Engineer’s Diving Establishment, a training ground at McMullen Barracks, Hampshire, much to everyone’s amusement).Byrne doesn’t really ‘get’ Tegan or Turlough either- she spends most of the episode being selfless and he spends most of it being selfish (reportedly some last minute re-writes from Saward who wanted the ‘old’ untrustworthy Turlough back again. But why? How come The Doctor is suddenly suspicious of him now, after he’s proven his worth by rejecting the Black Guardian offer in ‘Enlightenment’ and they were so pally in ‘The Five Doctors’? It’s weird, especially after Turlough was so obviously untrustworthy from the first yet accepted by The Doctor with open arms). Whether because of the script or the lack of rehearsal time or both all three regulars are off their game, all clearly remembering their lines rather than saying things from the heart.   

‘Warriors Of The Deep’, then, is a let down. Not because it’s the sort of misguided story they should never have tried (like ‘The Dominators’ or ‘Voyage Of The Damned’) but because there’s such a good story inside here waiting to get out, but they muff it through a combination of the script not doing enough (Saward cutting the double-size drafts down for the final version and apparently taking all the interesting bits out), the production being rushed and the actors not at their best. It’s still a story worth telling and there’s certainly nothing else quite like this in the Dr Who canon, NCIS with aliens as written by the guy behind cosy family drama ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ with a dash of the BBC nuclear-war preventing drama ‘Threads’ in there to boot. For this is a rare story where there is no baddy and everyone is disgusted with the situation: a brave and very adult statement to make indeed in 1984. After twenty years of hinting at the cold war being a stupid idea it’s great that they tried at least once to address it directly and it’s nice to have one last base under siege story in the 20^th century (there won’t be another till Christopher Eccleston gets nine: ‘End Of the World’ ‘The Unquiet Dead’ ‘Dalek’ and ‘Father’s Day’ all feature our heroes trapped somewhere as part of the screen, although ‘42’ is the next time a base under siege – well a crashing spaceship hurling towards the sun - is the full plot and only location).  Alas it ends up looking like children’s television, with a pantomime horse and 100 minutes standing around trying not to press a button that will kill people in seconds. There are repercussions to these mistakes too: viewers watching began to agree with Michael Grade’s open criticism of Dr Who in the press and so miserable was the experience of working on this story that both Peter Davison and Janet Fielding handed in their noticed during the recording of it (hypothermia will do that to you) and it’s a rare story where nobody involved in it has a good word to say about anything. It’s rotten luck they had to put this story out when they did, as unfinished as it is, as the opening to a new season when all that goodwill from the anniversary special died off. How typical that an election caused by the cold war should get in the way of telling Dr Who’s biggest cold war story, something that sounds like a sub-plot from this story as it is. This is one of those stories where I suggest you go and read the novel instead.

POSITIVES + The underwater base set is one of the biggest seen in the series and they spent a comparatively large amount of money on it, given that they only had to pay for some corridors on the side. Yes it’s not what it could have been and what it is in the script (big, rusting, dark and ominous) but it’s still impressive for 1980s Who. The main part looks like a submarine but without the periscopes, recognisable from any amount of Falklands coverage (and there was a lot, given that it was the first big wear in the era of 24 hour news channels) and very much ‘now’ but with a few space age twists. There’s running water seen through portholes too, an extra detail they didn’t need to add for the script but which really sells the fact that this base is ‘real’. Just a shame about the doors…

NEGATIVES - The Myrka is a case of multiple departments  getting it wrong at the same time and multiple people dropping the ball when someone could have easily stepped in and stopped it. The writer should have known that over-sized monsters never work in Dr Who - there are so many precedents by 1984. The costumers and special effects teams messed up royally. Instead of hiding the finished product with close-ups or shots in darkened tunnels, the way other directors have done in the past with bad effects, Pennant Roberts shows the thing off in full light and actually lingers on it. The producer  JNT could have said 'no' at any stage, but didn't (instead he told the director, pleading not to see the monster, that ‘the monsters are the icing on the cake of Dr Who’. The Director retorted it was instead ‘the lards at the bottom of the pan’. It does look as if it needs to go on a diet). No wonder the Doctor says 'oh dear' as he sees it (a line in both script and book meant to convey fear, but spoken by Peter Davison with obvious pity for how bad it looks). 

BEST QUOTE: Tegan; ‘What year are we in?’ Dr: ‘Around 2084’ Tegan: ‘Little seems to have changed since my time’. Dr: ‘Absolutely nothing, Tegan. There are still two power blocs, fingers poised to annihilate each other’.

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