Knock Knock: Ranking - 192

                                                   Knock Knock

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 6/5/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mike Bartlett, director: Bill Anderson)  

'New flat to rent. Wanted: nice, tasty Humans to live in old family house. It's a bit rustic with creaky floorboards and dry rot, but the rooms are really big and rent is cheap. Oh and do ignore the noises in the tower, I have a noisy family. Remember, in this house you're never alone, there's always someone with you on the other side of a wall, maybe closer!'  

Ranking: 192

 

Now to a story that’s stands out like a wooden thumb, one that’s impressively different not just to the rest of season 10 but Dr Who as a whole, one that would be an impressive standalone drama but which feels slightly out of place with every episode of the era. We’ve had character stories and surrogate families before on Who many times, but this feels new: Bill isn’t getting married or working as a nanny or even discovering the parent who died in childhood in a parallel universe but doing something as normal and everyday as moving in with her uni flatmates, finding her independence after several episodes where the Doctor has given her the confidence to stand on her own two feet (because, unlike Clara, she isn’t the teacher but very much the pupil). Given that students have always been a large part of the average Dr Who audience in any era it seems amazing that no one had done a story like this before: so much of this series is about fear of the unknown and taking your first big steps towards independence by moving in with a bunch of strangers in a town you’ve probably never been to is high on the list of ‘big scary life events’ that a lot of the audience at home would have gone through so it’s about as close as any of us are going to get to a Dr Who story full of fright and courage in everyday life. It’s a particularly big deal for orphan Bill who finally gets to move out of her hated adopted family home and into a flat with actual people her own age. Bill’s been portrayed to us as someone whose been a bit trapped at home, awkward enough not to have many friends and to never quite fit in, so for her personally this is a bigger scarier moment than seeing her fight off armies of Cybermen as she tries hard to get along with near-strangers and make roots of her own. There’s a cute scene where she’s hanging up the portrait of her biological mum on the wall and sighing: finally she’s made it, she’s got out from her toxic household and everything’s going to be alright now. Only it isn’t.  

For the Doctor of course meeting new people is easy and ‘Knock Knock’ works best as a comedy, juxtaposing slightly awkward Bill who never feels quite at home with people her own age with the elderly grandfather who looks three times everyone else’s age and who is in reality several hundred times their age and who effortlessly fits in, making friends far quicker than Bill ever could. The series is switched round: suddenly Bill feels like the alien while the Doctor is in his element swapping stories, dancing to the latest hit songs and happily wearing all the food while Bill stares on thinking ‘how does he do that?’ For the Doctor, though, every time is now and he doesn’t belong to any particular Earth generation so getting down wi da kids is as easy and natural for him as rubbing shoulders with Marco Polo or cavemen.    He ends up being the ultimate embarrassing parent from hell: insatiably curious, unstoppably chatty and downright weird with no understanding of human etiquette or what people do at this age in this generation at all and yet Bill’s friends all love him while they don’t quite know what to make of her, with several barbed comments about her being standoffish when really she’s just shy and has been putting off the time of meeting the friends of her friends because she’s scared (although travelling in the Tardis probably had a little bit to do with that). Poor Bill: it’s like ‘The Lodger’ all over again, only this isn’t a stranger he’s moved in with, it’s his companion and her mates he just won’t leave alone. And it’s hilarious in a way the series has never quite allowed itself to be before, Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie being the perfect odd couple. I’d have gladly had a whole episode or even a whole series of this rather than the first ten minutes or so setting up the rest of the story. Considering that writer Mike Bartlett only had a brief screen-test of Pearl’s to go on he doesn’t half nail her character, all eye rolls and silent fuming, while Capaldi is at his best in a script that calls for him to do a lot of comedy, by far his strongest suit as the Doctor.

Mostly, though, this is a horror story, one that tries hard to tap into the Phillip Hinchcliffe era of creepy insects and nasty things from the past being dug up in the present and in that sense is slightly less effective because the effects are mixed and it’s never quite the outright scary story it’s trying so hard to be, especially (not for the first or last time) given the poor quality of the main ‘monster’ that just makes it all seem a bit silly. Even there though ‘Knock Knock’ earns bonus points for doing all sorts of things that make this story feel utterly unlike the others. For the only time outside ‘Blink’ we have an alien entity invading not a street or an army base but an ordinary house (indeed, it’s the exact same house they used in the filming for that episode, located in Wester Drumlins, Newport: David Suchet commented on the first day of filming that it seemed familiar and after posing in the doorway for publicity photos was shocked to find the real landlord coming out to greet him and asking if he’s enjoyed his stay there for a family reunion the last Christmas). Usually Dr Who gets its jumpscares from the fact we’re somewhere new and unknown and it’s the Doctor and companions who are the alien visitors wondering what the things scuttling off in the shadows are, but here its Bill whose ‘supposed’ to be there and the story takes place, for the most part, under bright dazzling artificial light. We get all the hammer horror clichés its true, from creaking floorboards to a chattering just out of earshot, but this doesn’t feel like a haunted house exactly: it’s a reasonable contemporary student flat developed from a property a few decades old. It’s exactly the sort of ordinary place where the extraordinary things of Dr Who shouldn’t be. However, because we’re watching Dr Who and we know that something Dr Whoy is likely to happen, we spend the first half of the story looking for something scary, jumping at the sound of our own shadows, only to find out for the first few minutes that it really is just a creaky floorboard and that it is just thunder and lightning outside and, most memorably, that the scary man outside the door is just the Doctor lurking, alert to something no one else can see and refusing to go home.

Dr Who has had no end of alien insects too, from Zarbi ants to Menoptera butterflies to Mentor slugs to Vespiform wasps to Giant Maggots, but never anything quite like the woodlice (sorry, Dryards) that aren’t just living in this house but to all intents and purposes living off this house. They really are insect-sized though and not that alarming for a good two-thirds of the story. After all, seeing insects isn’t all that rare in student houses, particularly in ones that have just been refurbished and where builders have disturbed walls and floors that haven’t been touched for a while (not to mention the food left out all night because your flatmates are lazy slobs with no sense of responsibility) so they don’t seem out of place at first. But the way the woodlice behave as a swarm, picking off the students one by one and pulling them through the walls, is new (and genuinely creepy, like the maggots in ‘The Green Death’ rather than the wishy-washy spiders or the lifesize wasps attacking murder mystery writers and giant busses that have been too silly to take seriously): we’ve never had a monster that both looked so Earth-like and acted so alien, with the unsettling explanation that they can potentially live in any house on our planet but normally keep to themselves unless asked to intervene. And we’ve certainly never had them turn into a wooden-looking humanoid before, kept alive (spoilers) out of kindness because they took pity on a boy who didn’t want to let his mother die. The explanation isn’t obvious either and needs the likes of Poirot on hand to solve it, only as it happens David Suchet is playing the baddy, a landlord with a family secret, under-playing a role that could easily have tipped over into parody. He starts off being quite scary and ends up being quite sweet, making the move in such tiny steps that you never quite see it coming. The script cleverly plays up the ‘otherness’ of the Landlord, whose realistic in both the alien strangeness and the disconcerting way he always seems to be there when you don’t expect him to be, perhaps letting himself in quietly with his own key (although as it turns out he lives inside the house). It’s typical landlord tactics, ruining your ideas of independence and doing your own thing without supervision, that feeling that you’re still not quite trusted to live your own adult life by other older adults yet and yet he’s also plausible as part alien himself (although that might just have been because my student landlord had a wooden leg and so seemed even more part woodlouse). Really, though, he’s not an alien at all just a lonely little boy who never quite made his way out of childhood and the family home the way the students did. He’s just become so warped in his grief that he’s happy to see people die to keep his mum alive – and misguided love is a far more believable motive for a baddy than world domination.

For third to being a comedy or horror this is a ‘message’ story, about the need for independence and making your own way in the world. For the knocking is both the very real threat of woodlice in the skirting boards but also the existential threat of something deadly lurking for you in the adult ‘real’ world away from the safe cocoon of the family home. And that it’s a step that’s universal, one every generation goes through. I love the mirroring between the students who are desperately trying to navigate adulthood for the first time (turning to this house out of desperation having not been able to afford any of the others on their list or finding their landlords are trying to rip them off with poky rooms at full price) and the landlord who (given the 1937 dating) is a good sixty years older than they are but who seems just as lost in it. They have a lot in common this lot: the students trying hard to find their way without simply running off back to home because it’s too hard and the landlord who was so afraid to let his mum go that he allowed her to become part woodlouse. For becoming adult isn’t just about getting on with your flatmates and finding a house at a cheap price and seeing through the strings of landlords trying to make money out of you, it’s being old enough to realise that the landlords need to live too and that however alien and strange they’re human beings just like you. At the start the landlord is a scary elderly adult but little by bit you learn that he’s not even the wooden girl’s father or her husband but her son and that he couldn’t leave’ her just as the students struggle to leave home for the first time and be away from the family unit. Becoming adult also means that you’re old enough to realise that you’re not the last generation who are ever going to be young and that one day you’re going to be old: one of the cleverest twists in this story is the fact that the Dryads need fresh humans to chew on roughly twenty years apart, with a basement filled with belongings dating from 1937, 57, 77 and 97 all bundled up (and the hint that we’re in the then-near future of 2017), with this tale of leaving home a universal generational occurrence (it’s hard to see on screen but according to the story notes there’s a box from 1957 with a Bill Haley record, a 1977 box full of polaroids and a box from 1997 with an early Nokia phone – they must have been rich students as they cost a fortune back then –  a ‘Friends’ video and a ‘Superted’ doll, one that really was ‘Superted this time unlike the war pattern seen in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’). Even having this in the basement is a neat twist: generally in horror movies it’s the last place you should go, but in Dr Who it’s the wood that’s dangerous and the stone floor is about the safest place you can be. I also love the way the landlord doesn’t quite understand modern life so the living room features a piano and a wind-up gramophone alongside more modern and likely belongings, yet student houses can so often be a jumble of things bought secondhand that no one in the house thinks it strange). Notably Bill’s path is the Landlord’s in reverse: she’s spent her life looking for love after not having any but doesn’t quite know how to go about it whereas the landlord knows how precious that love is and doesn’t want to let it get away. Bill too is close to her mum and would do anything to get her back (she nearly does in ‘The Lie Of The Land’): she knows how rare precious and beautiful motherly love is; so do the other students all glancing at their phones every few seconds for a text from home if they’re honest about it.  But leaving the family home and making your own way in the world is ‘normal’, however hard. The solution, for everyone in this story, is the same: to open the curtains to step out into life and live it, even though you’re scared. I like to think that, despite what the Landlord’s put them through, they all come to some sort of solution where they help each other on the outside world with Bill, naturally kind and empathetic the first to offer help.

‘Knock Knock’ is also unique in that it has a very 1990s feel to it. There only ever was one Dr Who story on telly in the 1990s of curse and ‘The TV Movie’ failed partly because it looked like nothing else being made in 1996. This story, though, feels like Dr Who might have been had it never been cancelled in 1989 and had it tried to keep up with the era’s big breakout hit ‘The X Files’ (the way the late Troughton stories have half an eye on ‘Star Trek’ and the later Tom Baker stories are made by people who’ve clearly been to see ‘Star Wars’ at the cinema lots). The idea of an alien that’s been lurking, hidden, on Earth before annoying a student-age population (who aren’t easily believed by the authorities) is straight out the X-Files guidebook, as if the fact that they turn out to be insects driven by…something bigger and sinister than they are. Even the Landlord is dressed like one of the Men In Black and the way he arrives in the middle of the house unseen is totally at one with the idea of an X-File ‘conspiracy’ of something bigger than Mulder or Scully realise. Even the way the Doctor is at home in this world of aliens and Bill is a fish out of water in  every day life is just like the famous pair. It’s a genre that fits Dr Who too: it feels like we could happily have had a run of stories like this and an era known as the ‘conspiracy age’ the way we have ‘bases under siege’ and ‘horror’ years. Admittedly it would have got stale quick and would have needed a good pay-off to work, but then so did the X Files and that didn’t stop people watching it (they never got the payoff the series demanded either). This could have been a pilot for a whole new Who!

Except…that’s where ‘Knock Knock’ falls down badly. It’s an excellent comedy, a pretty good horror tale and has a nice moral message and had this been a standalone story from a different universe or even a pilot for a new scifi drama I’d have loved it. The problem is trying to fit it into Dr Who canon and seeing it in the context of a series that would be hugely shaped by this story, but isn’t. In a rushed ending (cut to shreds so Steven Moffat could fit in another ‘tease’ with Missy in the vault) all the survivors escape the house and…that’s it. Nobody ever mentions this story again, not Bill, not the Doctor, and we never see Bill’s best friend or the rest of her flatmates ever again. Wooden Mum promises to let not just Bill’s friends go but all the past residents which seems unlikely given that they’d all have been digested long ago and there’s nothing on screen to promise us whether this happens one way or the other. Either way this would surely be huge news in the ‘real’ world: either Bill lost lots of her friends that night or they’ve come back to life traumatised with memories of being eaten by woodlice. They’d almost certainly drop out of university, afraid of ever leaving the family home again (and thus sadly ending up like the Landlord). There would probably be a police enquiry (indeed it’s weird there hasn’t been one before now, every twenty years and when it happened the second time in 1957 in the exact same house as 1937, you’d think the house would have been fully investigated and bulldozed). Not to mention the repercussions of people considered long dead coming back to life and adjusting to life in a new century, their family long dead and their friends all twenty forty or sixty years older than they are. It would change this town forever: there would be alien hunters everywhere, cold case enthusiasts and I’m willing to bet only a fraction of the next year’s intake would arrive as students the following year, with the university shut in three. None of this happens.

You’d think at the very least for the rest of the series people would look at Bill funny and mutter darkly about rumours of an alien manifestation of insects and how all her friends seem to have disappeared. I mean, gossip and scandal travel quicker there than anywhere. I mean, my friend got hypnotised into believing he was a duck in a student bar in fresher’s week and strangers were still talking about it at graduation three years later. Bill should at the very least be sadder than she is that her new friends have died, but Bill seems to be less concerned by them than she is at the deaths of random aliens from the future or giant alien fish from the past (to be fair, I felt the same way about my uni flatmates too, who were all quite definitely alien, but it’s still out of character). And Bill ends the story homeless, again: that final scene should have had the Doctor becoming everyone’s landlord and letting Bill stay there for free, but all we get on screen is a cheery suggestion that he’s going with them to the estate agents: to all intents and purposes he’s just helping them get their money back. We don’t get to know the other students well enough but just for Bill alone this is such a crushing blow: she’s fought hard to find her independence and now it’s been taken away from her and she has to go back to her dreaded adoptive mum. This isn’t just a year’s digs for Bill: it’s the first place for her that’s a real ‘home’ (give or take the Tardis); losing that would have been devastating for her in a whole other level above Rose (who had her mum and Mickey), Martha (who was still just about tolerating her family), Donna (ditto) or Amy (who had Rory), but of past companions only Vicki and Ace were quite this family and friendless. Another thing too: when Bill dies/converted into a Cybermen/gets turned into a giant floating puddle in space, presumably she never goes back to the whichever home she does end up living in and presumably too her other surviving flatmates who never find out what happened to her (unless the Doctor nips back and tells them off screen). The poor things must have had a few sleepless nights and been digging up the floorboards thinking ‘oh no, the landlords back and the Dryards have eaten Bill!’  And don’t even get me started on the coincidence that the Doctor’s latest companion just happens to choose the one house in the town that’s infested with an alien landlord, in the one town that the Doctor happens to have chosen in his exile. Other Dr Who stories have whacking coincidences too but they tend to be explained away in the plot somewhere, as part of a bigger story arc, be it ‘Bad Wolf’ or Flux or something similar: not this one. Poor Bill really is unlucky isn’t she? Another plot hole is how the landlord ever worked out that the dryads needed human flesh to stay alive (something solved in the script with a cut scene involving a wandering tramp in 1937 who took shelter in a deserted looking house).  

Where this story falls apart, too, is that you still don’t feel as if you know any of the students by the end of it. Like so many other stories from 2010 onwards I have my doubts whether the production team have even met anyone under thirty because nobody behaves the way a real live teenager would. Although it’s not quite as offensive as Clara’s Coal Hill school pupils or Steven Moffat’s awful series ‘Excluding Douglas’, which makes teenagers into wet wimps who can’t take criticism and see everything as exist or racist, nevertheless they don’t feel like real people just walking talking stereotypes, obsessed with their phones. There’s no sense of what it’s really like to be a student: that agonising fight between the work piling up on your desk and the party going on down the street with neighbours who are both way cooler than you but also likely to fail and mess their lives up forever. They start off well, talking about how their meagre student loans mean they can’t afford anything good, but then they fork out what would have been a significant chunk of their budget on takeaway food: I’m not saying they couldn’t, or that I ever did, but it would be a big decision, not done on a whim with enough spare for the Doctor to dig into (this also raises another issue: Bill lives locally. Where is she getting the student grant to pay for her house from? She wouldn’t qualify. Unless rules are different in the Dr Who universe. Is she paying for it with the cleaning job she never seems to do? Surely that wouldn’t pay enough, student houses are expensive, even alien woodlice infested ones).

The best horror films, much like Dr Who ‘base under siege’ stories, work by having you get to know the characters and watching them being picked off one by one, worrying about who will get to the end. There’s none of that with this story: the deaths are just too silly and you don’t know the characters well enough to care. I’ve read the names of the characters several times trying to read this review and re-watched the episode lots of times, both for fun and for research, but I still don’t know which is which. The only one with any personality is (I think) Harry, the creepy one who offers to keep Bill ‘warm’ in the night if she’s scared, whose angry when she turns him down, then relieved when she comes out and reveals she’s a lesbian (the original script had him revealed to be Harry Sullivan’s grandson, as that was the writers favourite character, but the gentlemanly genes seem to have been lost; the idea got dropped partly because modern fans wouldn’t get the reference and partly because the odds of having two companions/relatives in trouble stretched coincidence way too far. Although it would have been sweet for old time’s sake if they’d included a scene of him accidentally blowing the house up and saying ‘sorry old thing’ to the others, before putting his hand in a tin of clam chowder). I think that’s Pavel who dies first with a terrible scream coming out of his room, which everyone else seems to think is a big joke instead of, y’know, investigating to make sure. Felicity snuffs it yet and people should be really creeped out by that point but no one ever comments on it. These are meant to be actual friends (with Shireen if not Bill) who’ve been together for a year’s worth of lectures and they all seem to be quite cosy in the living room yet no one seems to care the slightest for any of them. The only emotion is from Bill, watching Shireen disappear into a cloud of woodlice, and she doesn’t seem anywhere near as spooked or angry or desperate as you’d expect her to be (this is Bill, after all, not Amy or Clara: she doesn’t mind acting weak or emotional, especially when no one else is there). The original script, by the way, portrays Shireen as her best friend not only through university but through all of secondary school, with a pact that they never ever split up (something that makes more sense out of how annoyed Bill is when her friend gets a room far away from hers despite an earlier promise) – losing her, of having to betray that promise never to split not because they’ve grown apart naturally but because a ruddy great pile of woodlice have eaten her, should have Bill on the floor sobbing. After all, it’s the only friend we ever see her properly have in the series; love interests yes but her only actual friend. Bill had no one else in her life outside the Doctor. Taking that one step forward to make friends, only to lose the only one she had  before we ‘met’ her, is the thing nightmares are made of and would surely make her never trust anyone ever again; instead she just sort of shrugs it off.

The end result is a story that gets a lot of things ‘right’ in the first half (there are some cracking bits of comedy between the Doctor and Bill, which show how much Bartlett – the creator of Dr Foster who was one of the biggest names to write for the series and who was so much of a fan he pleaded for a commission rather than the other way round - ‘got’ this series. The idea of the ordinary hitting the extraordinary but in a whole new setting we’ve never had before is delicious, the twist at the end about what the dryads were and how it was all done out of love is very in keeping with the series and there are some great and very Dr Whoy moments (such as the Doctor boasting that he was the bass player for Quincy Jones, oblivious to the fact that a 1980s music producer isn’t impressive to anyone in 2017, the Doctors discussion about timelords to which Bill accurately says ‘they sound posh’ and asking if they have ‘big hats’ and the Tardis, the greatest vehicle in the universe, reduced to being a removal van). Things go downhill badly in the second half though when the threats stop being hinted at and become real: the revelation comes out of nowhere and the Doctor actually has very little to do with it (Eliza, wooden mum, makes the decision to pass on from her own realisations and might well have done it without him there). The story uses up its box of tricks far too early: it’s great in the first ten minutes hwne we don’t quite know what’s happening, then increasingly less so as we get more and more proof of what’s going on, all of it unlikely and a lot of it stupid. For this is a story that starts off an unusually ‘real’ Dr Who story turning into a house filled with sentient insects and a wooden human that doesn’t look convincing in the slightest, ‘Dr Whoing’ what seemed an impressively different kind of story. Too many of this story’s best scenes ending up on the cutting room floor whether for reasons of time and budget (there’s a very scary scene in the script of the dead students being kept half-alive, their arms reaching out from the walls pleading for help) or because of Moffat’s need to fit in a coda that doesn’t belong (fun as it is to hear Missy cheered up by a tale of humans being eaten it’s no substitute for actually finding out what happened in a story you’ve been wrapped up in for the past forty minutes or the very Dr Who scene as written, with the Doctor commenting that any house you’ve ever been in that felt a bit ‘odd’ probably had dryads in the flooring waiting to kill you too!) Had they stuck with the themes and ideas (which are sound), thrown in a few more bites about the cruelty of the Coalition government of the day’s austerity measures (which saw a lot of students, always traditionally strapped for cash, cutting even more corners) and given us a proper ending then ‘Knock Knock’ could have been one of the greats of series ten.

The result is a story that’s different, nicely quirky, properly scary, often funny and a little bit mad, all the things a good Dr Who story should be, though also far-fetched and more than a little implausible with some ropey effects, like so many of the bad ones. The dialogue has some nice bits of character (I love the way the Doctor is referred to as Bill’s ‘grandfather’, just like the 1st Doctor – much to his horror!) but not much of it actually soars and some of it is quite ropey (especially what the students say) without many truly memorable lines (the best one was, yep you guessed it, cut: the Lasndlord complaining ‘I lost my family, all of them, keeping them alive this way because the alternative of losing them for good was worse’. There’s so much more they could have done too: I mean, Bill has practically no possessions (the script specified a teddy bear, which is a start: this would have made her the first companion to have one since Steven’s’ panda Hi-Fi). Thankfully the acting is very much a plus with everyone making the most of the promise in the script. David Suchet was so eager to be in Dr Who that he’d ordered his agent to agree to any part that he was asked to play and he carries off the part of the Landlord well even though it’s a long way out of his traditional ‘brainy’ parts. He’s quiet and unnerving, but also believable as a force of nature who can stand up to the Doctor. He also knew Peter Capaldi well after working with him three times before (including a 1991 Poirot episode where he’s the ex of one of the Belgian detective’s best friends, a painter whose every bit as creepy and sinister as the Landlord is here) and you can tell that Capaldi is far more at ease than he usually is and turns in one of his best performances (having so much comedy to do, his best genre by far, helps). His Doctor is brilliantly alien, his natural brusqueness given free reign without Clara there to stop him and you really feel for poor Bill as the two worlds she’s desperate to keep separate keep colliding. Pearl Mackie is really developing her look of exasperated pain this series and she’s never better than as the gawky awkward teenager who finds being around teenagers her own age every bit as surreal as being on alien planets. For if the Doctor feels at home everywhere then her character is that she feels at home nowhere and here, where a girl her age is ‘supposed’ to be according to society’s demands that everyone have a degree for every job going, is where she feels least at home of all. The only trouble is this story works because of what we know about these two characters already and we can fill in the gaps for how they must be feeling: we don’t get to know anyone else. On the other hand the student actors are more wooden than the woodlice for the most part. To be fair none of them get much screen time so it’s not as if we get to know them well, but watching an episode like this one back to back with one from the RTD years really shows up how Russell The Davies could make a character come alive in a sentence, whereas none of these students seem quite ‘real’ after whole monologues.


The solution, in retrospect, seems obvious: have less students and give them more screentime, to give this story some more ‘human’ moments in between the jumpscares, maybe add a few pre-credits sequences of them trying to say hello to Bill round class and her being tongue-tied or give them a scene early on that, from what I’ve spoken to with my friends is pretty universal in your first night away from home: you sit around trying to be casual and adult and act as if everything ‘is’ normal until somebody is brave enough to speak up and say ‘this is weird innit? How are we supposed to get used to this?’ and everyone else nods (eventually, sometimes after copious amounts of drinking). For there’s a great story at the heart of ‘Knock Knock’ about the dangers of simply stepping outside into the real world and how there are monsters trying to eat you up, with the fear that despite a childhood of training you’re not quite ready to face that world yet and would rather stay at home forever. But you can’t: being grown up is also knowing that the bonds of love and safety that keep you at home can, in the end, be an even bigger trap that prevents you from  living your life than the scare of the unknown. Had we had that story, rather than the one about sentient insects and a wooden ageless girl, ‘Knock Knock’ could have been one of my favourites. Alas in the end it’s a nearly story, one knocking on the door of greatness that never quite walks in, with as much that goes wrong as goes right. Even so, I can’t knock ‘Knock Knock’ too much; it’s part of a definite swing upwards in the 12th Doctor era with a lot about it to love. In fact I hope they do another story like it some day, one set in the present day and about real situations like this again – only this time I hope it will be properly integrated into the series as a long running arc (knock on wood).

POSITIVES + The dryad/woodlice effects are somehow obviously CGI and yet also more realistic than the ones you see in real life and/or I’m A Celebrity. The way they crawl is very realistic and the method by which they rise up and ‘eat’ people by converging on top of them sent more than a few fans behind the sofa (where, if they were unlucky, they found some woodlice of their own). Usually in the Moffat era monsters are scariest when they’re about to strike – and generally don’t for the most part (think The Weeping Angels in mid-pose) but in this one you actually get to see it before you’ve braced yourself to be properly scared and it’s just realistic enough to creep you out. One of the scariest moments in all of new Who is the moment Pavel gets absorbed into the wall, though they’re ever so slightly less realistic by the end when they’re just gathering on top of people. ‘Dryad’ by the way, is a tree nymph in Greek mythology – not quite what we get here but maybe they were around in Ancient Greece too? The sound is pretty good as well: this was the first Dr Who story made available in binaural sound, the show being picked for an ‘experimental’ broadcast just like the olden days. Only because most people didn’t have televisions that could use them you had to watch a special version from i-player rather than the show as broadcast, something that wasn’t fully advertised at the time (and led to a lot of complaints that it sounded much the same as usual).

NEGATIVES -  Alas the other big effect doesn’t work as well as it’s not only sonic screwdrivers but Dr Who monster effects that ‘can’t do wood’. It’s just not believable: for all the developments of forty years of technology sticking an actress in a wooden suit, even a good one (Mariah Gale, who was an excellent Anne Frank in the 21^st century adaptation of ‘A Diary Of A Young Girl’) who can’t move or express herself in any way except her voice is always a difficult move. Keeping her out the way until the big reveal at the end, without a chance to learn more about her character when the plot needs us to feel sympathy towards her for it to work, is another big mistake. Mostly though it’s the looks, Eliza shyly peeping round a door seeming more like children’s telly than anything else the show had done in years. Talking of which that’s what inspired it: Bartlett is roughly the same age as me and, too, learned to read partly from Dr Who target novelisations and partly from ‘Puddle Lane’, the Neil Innes show about a magician and his dragon that did for kids TV what The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band did for music (Innes was in both). One of the spin-off books by Sheila McCullough, read in the series ‘Jacaknory’ style that stayed with me for years too, involved ‘The Sandalwood Girl’ who looked very much like Eliza, only more malleable, being an illustration. It’s a coming of age tale (unusual for the under five market but it works if school is the first step to adulthood) and she’s a Pinocchio style puppet whose desperate to leave home like the other girls, but her magician owner is worried about her safety. She sets off on tests to prove she can be independent and cope with life outside, which she does by befriending the people she meets and helping them on their life journeys too, not a million miles from the plot of this story. She’s just a bit really though; by contrast this clunky thing can’t move and – as Moffat realised, hence all his monsters caught mid-attack – it’s hard to be afraid of something you can outrun. It’s like that old joke: ‘Did you hear about the one about the wooden Dr Who monster with the wooden legs a wooden body and a wooden head? It wooden go’.

BEST QUOTE: Bill: ‘This is the bit of my life you’re not in’

Previous ‘Thin Ice’ next ‘Oxygen’

The Sontaron Stratagem/The Poison Sky: Ranking - 193

   The Sontaron Stratagem/Poison Sky

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Martha, 26/4/2008-3/5/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Helen Raynor, director: Douglas MacKinnon) 

'Directions: Turn Left into Zygon avenue. Avoid the bumps! Next head onto Mondas Way. Be on the look out for Cyber-men-at-work. Stay in the New Earth gridlocked traffic for approximately seventy-two of your Earth years. Head onto Skaro Road and exterminate as many sleeping policeman as you can. Be careful to avoid the Ice (Warriors) on the road at Mars. Next, take a right past the milky way to Earth in the 1970s. Or is the 1980s? Anyway, watch out for The Doctor driving Bessie at dangerous speeds. Then wipe those stinking Rutans out of the sky on behalf of our glorious empire. Sontar-ha!' (what the Sontaron sat nav should have said).  

Ranking: 193

 

 With the episodes for series four filling up fast and Russell T preparing for his big exit, he was running out of time to tick the box marked ‘bringing back things from the classic series and doing them in new ways’. ‘Stratagem’ has a lot thrown at it: the first appearance of The Sontarons since 1985, the first appearance of UNIT since 1989 and the first appearance of Martha since last year’s ‘Last Of The Timelords’. Throw in a re-appearance of Donna’s family, a millionaire wannabe collaborator, a nuclear attack, a major sub-plot about cloning and an ecological moral and it’s fair to say this two parter is a little…busy. Just as he did with his mammoth shopping list from last year (‘The Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks’) Russell gives the job over to his right-hand woman Helene Raynor, the unsung hero of the first two seasons who helped edit and shape Russell’s own stories into a finished product. By now she’s as steeped in Who folklore as anybody and has had a crash-course in pacing and juggling plot elements so we end up with a well-paced story where lots seem to be happening and a clever denouement where, rather than kicking their heels as per usual, everyone is phoning The Doctor up for advice at once. What’s really odd about this story, though, is that despite mixing so many ideas new and old we end up, perhaps fittingly, with a ‘clone’ story that, more by accident than design (Raynor still wasn’t that up in folklore yet) ends up almost exactly like another ‘busy’ story, ‘The Invasion’. There’s UNIT – check! – fighting an enemy (Sontarons standing, well stomping in for The Cybermen) – check! – with a millionaire accomplice the Doctor can talk to – check! – and a plan to infiltrate Earth using a technological gadget pretty much everyone uses but very people actually understand how they work (only instead of transistor radios we’ve got satnavs). All we’re missing are the hiding away in the sewers. Luckily ‘The Invasion’ is one of those stories worth doing again with a modern setting and it makes sense that we should get a showdown between the two most ‘militaristic’ forces in classic Dr Who, The Sontarons and UNIT (it seems odd, in retrospect, that even though the potato-headed ones’ first two adventures are right in the heart of the UNIT era they were the ‘anomalies’, the adventures away from a contemporary setting and into time and space). Unfortunately with so much else going on we don’t really get the showdown and full-on battle a script like this would seem to dictate: we’re too busy coping with the soppy brat, the cloning sub-plot, the choking car gas and ‘evil Martha’, plot elements that keep getting in the way of what should be the one straightforward punch-up in the show’s history. Delaying is part of the art of storytelling in Dr Who, holding plot elements back from coalescing until a big finale, but somehow we never quite get that: instead ‘Stratagem’ is a story of exquisite build-up that never leads to the pay-off it deserves.  

Some of these elements work better than the others too it has to be said. First up, what’s happened to UNIT? They used to be Dr Who’s family, well, unit – the Human face of soldiers who, more stories than not, understood that aliens could be benevolent and that they were there to protect the Earth from harm, not go on the attack. This lot aren’t family but strangers, just nasty boy soldiers, without an ounce of compassion who couldn’t organise a piss up in a Guinness factory after defeating the Cybermen there. Even The Doctor bemoans that Captain Mace is a poor substitute for the Brigadier (even though he pretty much does everything the Brig would do ironically:  so much so I do wonder if they tried to get Nicholas Courtney out of retirement for this gig originally. We don’t know, but we do know that they had to re-write a Sarah Jane Adventure ‘The Enemy Of the Bane’ later in the year to take his appearance down from the full story to one scene). They’ve also been forcibly renamed: one of the promotional ‘tricks’ when Dr Who came back was a fake website discussing The Doctor’s past appearances, credited as usual to ‘The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce’. The UN went ballistic: how dare the BBC associate them with a fictional armed forces that fought aliens. People might get the wrong idea! They were confused when it was pointed out to them that the moniker had been used since 1968 and never been a problem but, to show goodwill, the website was changed so that ‘UNIT’ could stand for anything. This time Russell makes the ‘UN’ part stand for ‘Unified’, which rather messes up the neatness of the acronym but is as good a replacement as any (older fans know what it really stands for anyway). Whatever the name though Raynor, on Russell’s orders, doesn’t quite know how to pitch them: much as he might love the Pertwee era the showrunner always admitted to being uneasy that the Doctor, a force for peace for most of the modern series, should ever have thrown his lot in with the armed forces. It was a problem writers at the time shared too (especially Malcolm Hulke, who was forever trying to make The Doctor question where his alliances really were). So the writers try and do the same here, having The Doctor criticise and belittle the military mind, but that’s the wrong ‘fit’ for this story: if you’re an ‘oldie’ who’s fond of the UNIT and know that they were there as the last defence against a vulnerable Earth then this modern lot are a pale facsimile who just don’t ‘get’ it at all. While if you’re a ‘newbie’ UNIT are just a plastic substitute for ‘Torchwood’ without the emotions (mind you, did any TV series ever have a cast as full of emotions like Torchwood?!) This lot need sorting out – goodness knows how Kate Lethbridge Stewart got UNIT in line before their next appearance (in ‘The Power Of Three’) but they work far better then.

One of the ways this story tries to ‘comment’ on the idea of an army is what they do to Martha, only they mess this element up to. Now I’m one of those fans who was really pleased to see her again – Martha is my favourite ‘modern’ companion until Bill comes along and the end of her story in season three was a bit rushed (my theory is the original plan was to have her along for the ride for series four too, until Catherine Tate made it clear how much she wanted to come back). But she’s in the wrong story. Martha’s whole arc has been about how she’s moved on from mooning over The Doctor and become an independent woman. Great, perfect, just how it should be! But somehow that ‘independence’ has meant her joining… Torchwood (she does all the ‘physical jobs’ in season two their Doctor Owen would be doing, had he not become a walking zombie who can’t interact with objects and technically dead on the paperwork). But Owen was perfect for Torchwood – self-obsessed and arrogant (like all the characters barring Tosh), with the confidence to defy orders when necessary. Martha is his polar opposite: her strength is her empathy and kindness, all the things they tries to give to Gwen before toughening her up. Martha does a good job of not becoming ‘one of them’ though, she manages to concentrate on the smaller pictures of the individuals hurt while letting the others get on with saving the universe. So having her join UNIT ought to be more of the same, only Russell decides this is a good opportunity to tell us how the armed forces change people instead, so Martha becomes hard and tough instead, obeying orders instantly even when she’s ‘normal’. The idea is that Donna is meant to be alarmed, to see that travelling with The Doctor isn’t always sweetness and light, that his companions can end up soldiers who don’t know how to stop fighting. Except that this element is muddled by the fact that Martha and Donna actually get on: you’re all primed for another Rose-Sarah Jane catfight that doesn’t come, as instead the pair gang up on The Doctor and tease him mercilessly, which is great fun but rather at odds with the idea of Martha being a hard-nosed soldier now. The sad truth, too, is that Freema Agyeman is a lot happier playing sweet and kind than she is grumpy and mean and her performance is easily her weakest across her sixteen episodes. The last-minute decision to have flashes of Rose everywhere this season (not just ‘Partners In Crime’  and ‘Midnight’) also meant the audience were talking about her (poor Martha’s overshadowed by Rose again – and she was only on screen for a second!) which doesn’t do either character any favours. Frustratingly they bang on about Martha being engaged to Tom (from ‘Last Of The Timelords’) in this story, which is odd in itself given the plot arc about Martha being independent and not needing anyone (she’s swapped one Doctor for another). Which is worse when he’s never mentioned again and Martha appears to be dating Mickey Smith by ‘The End Of Time’ out of nowhere (though it’s really a chance to combine two goodbyes in one in Russell T’s big farewell. Given actor Tom Ellis’ other famous role of the period, perhaps Miranda Hart took him back?) And then they throw in the ‘cloning’ plot, with Martha an evil Sontaron version of herself, although we don’t quite know where this starts and don’t notice a difference until episode two when the camera keeps giving close-ups of her solemn face, though presumably it was earlier. So has being with UNIT turned Martha into a monster? Or was it this week’s monsters?

Talking of which…mercifully The Sontarons are something this story gets very much right.  When the trailer for series three came out a lot of fans got very excited at the sight of marching Judoon in helmets, figuring they had to be Sontarons and then were a bit disappointed when they weren’t. After seeing such an outpouring of love having The Sontarons (property of the BBC, unlike the Daleks and Cybermen and a few others, so easy to negotiate the rights for) in the series proper was an obvious thing to do. Despite their small number of appearances in the original series (four) and their even smaller stature, the Sontarons are big in the Dr Who world for lots of good reasons. Whereas the Daleks are ruthless xenophobes, the Cybermen creepy adaptable survivalists, the Ice Warriors noble strategists and The Master a madman in a suit, the Sontarons are more like the sort of monster race seen in other scifi series, a relentless army always up for a fight who see the rest of the universe as being beneath them. This being Dr Who, though, the joke is that they don’t look like natural warriors at all, tending to be shorter and stouter than most and looking like the kind of kid the playground bully picked on rather than the bully themselves (it helps that they have an impressive arsenal of weapons. Who would win in a massive DW alien fight? Well, probably the Daleks but I’m putting the Sontarons through to at least the semi-finals). They think they’re civilised because they’re so technologically adept but the joke, at least in their first appearance ‘The Time Warrior’, is that by using the technology and progress purely for fighting then they’re no better than the barbaric cultures of Britain’s Medieval past. Thankfully all those past elements are kept and, while I’ll go to my grave criticising the changes made to the Cybermen, Silurians and Sea Devils, The Sontaron re-design from Neil Gorton really suits them, so convincing that Catherine Tate admits to working with them for two days without realising that they were actors (though, admittedly, this sort of thing happens to Catherine rather a lot – she’s one of the few Dr Who companions more scatterbrained in real life than their characters). It helps that the prosthetics whizzkid remembered them from his own childhood, remembering the Medieval setting of ‘warrior’ and his anticipation that, rather than an alien, they would turn out to be a ‘black knight’ (more of this when they start riding horses in ‘War Of the Sontarons’). The suit of armour emphasises their stomping, the helmet keeps the ‘old’ gag that their head is the same shape as their helmets for a whole new generation and they even have the delightful addition of a war ‘hakka’ chant which really suits their character. For while other monsters ‘play’ at war like football (throwing in a few nasty tackles when the ball is in someone else’s court) – with the exception of The Ice Warriors of course, who play it like Ice Hockey - and The Doctor plays it more like cricket (by the book), The Sontarons are rugby players, short and squat with cauliflower ears who are happy to pummel the opposition to the floor in an outright fight. It helps that they’re well cast: while no one can compare to Kevin Lindsay a returning Christopher Ryan is much more comfortable than he was playing Kiv in ‘Mindwarp’ and a young lad fresh out of drama school getting his big break, Dan Starkey, is already stealing the show so hard he’ll be the show’s go to Sontaron for decades to come. A third, playing a Sontaron extra, is Christopher Reynolds, who appeared in Dr Who a full forty years earlier as one of the children in ‘The Mind Robber’. This is the Sontarons’ first appearance in modern Who when it actually has a budget  and we see a lot of their culture on screen that had only been talked about before: the actual cloning process and the sort of mass army the old Dr Who budgets could only dream of, while in retrospect they’re pretty neatly in the middle between the humourless foes of old and the comedy heroes of the future.

Unfortunately the way the Sontarons are used isn’t so strong. Take that title, ‘stratagem’ – that’s the last thing the Sontarons should be doing. If this was ‘the Sontaron Invasion’ it would make much more sense! The Sontarons are an army of clones, unafraid to lose men because they can be easily replaced. While many lazy reviewers yawned and said that this episode was jumping on the ‘cloning’ bandwagon, they failed to recognise that Dr Who, while not quite inventing the idea of using it first in science-fiction, was very much hanging out the driver’s cabin and using it early. That’s why we get a plot about using the Earth as a cloning centre and that rather odd idea of Martha being cloned in the first place and disrupting the Human plans of retaliation. Except…That’s not very heroic is it? Sontarons don’t skulk they invade and being a cloned race means that if they lose a few men then never mind. Admittedly they had similar ideas in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ (where they tried to find out human weaknesses in preparation for a full-scale invasion) but that’s an aberration explained away, in my imagination at least, by Styre being on work experience or patted on the head and given a deliberately simple mission even he couldn’t mess up (until the 4^th Doctor arrives anyway). This is slightly different: a full-scale invasion in order to better fight the Rutans (still no sight of them in battle against each other? Even with the bigger effects budget modern Who has? Boo…) for which they need…Earth. To clone Sontarons that they can obviously already do perfectly fine. Why? It was established in ‘The Time warrior’ how different Earth is to Sontar (not that the planet had a name back then), with much weaker gravity for one thing. While Sontarons are a hardy bunch. Why not just take over a planet nearer the Rutans and have a big ol’ fight with the chance to die gloriously in battle? As for cloning Martha as a sneaky pre-emptive tactical attack, that seems dangerously like being un-honourable. The Sontarons have everything this story…except a real reason for being there. It’s as if someone told Helen Raynor The Sontarons had the same back story as The Cybermen and were survivalists looking to divide and conquer.

Especially when you throw in the element of satnavs: tampering with technology to terraform Earth. During the course of the story the gas the satnavs emit is kind of explained as ‘clone-feed’, the thing needed by the Sontarons to create lots of little Sontarons for battle, but it’s never really explained what this gas does or why Earth is the best place to develop it. And why put it in a car instead of just gassing the planet? It’s all such a Cybermen thing to do. They have no interest in Humans, their lives or their vehicles, so how do they even know about them? (Especially given that of their four appearances one took place in the Middle Ages with horse and cart, one was in the far future without any vehicles at all, one was set on Gallifrey and one was in the outskirts of Seville that didn’t have any cars either on screen). They’re not a monster inclined to research, like the Cybermen or Kraals. Realistically they’d dismiss vehicles as some puny weak Human device because their legs aren’t strong enough; utilising them to kill Humans by gassing them is more something a sneaky, under-handed species like The Zygons or The Great Intelligence would do. So how did they ever come up with this plan? Which is a shame because, had it been a Cyber plan, it would have been a great one. Part of classic Dr Who’s remit, especially when Bob Holmes gets going in the 1970s, is to make the ordinary extraordinary, to take a  piece of technology that Humans don’t quite understand and which suddenly seem to be everywhere and make it ‘alien’. Satnavs are perfect for this and even more so back in 2008 when they were semi ‘new’ and not yet perfected, leading to stories every other week in the papers about a driver put in danger when their satnavs led them into a canal or onto a railway line because somebody updating the technology goofed somewhere (a lot of American fans were confused by this so it’s worth pointing out British roads are very different; most of them are old, very few of them are straight and the vast majority are tiny lanes rather than main roads so these aren’t major mistakes but minor ones). Putting your life into the hands of technology and your trust in an artificial voice that’s in that eerie halfway point between not being quite Human and not being fully artificial, is exactly the sort of thing Holmes would be writing about if he were alive in 2008, as logical a thing for the modern series to build a plot around as holiday camps and airports in the 1960s, plastic in the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Not least because they went from being nowhere to being in almost every car almost overnight. It’s certainly an improvement by Raynor, who was handed a potential subplot about chimneys pumping poison out into the atmosphere but figured a lot of children in modern high rise buildings (such as the Tylers) with central heating wouldn’t have a chimney and so wouldn’t be scared in quite the same way. Unfortunately even there the plot comes apart slightly: millionaire whizzkid Luke Rattigan’s invention really is quite incredible, bordering on impossible. How else can you explain a tiny device which, when clicked into your car, has the power to over-ride the window and door controls, can overpower the engine and dismantle the brakes? With that sort of technology his allies should be dismantling nuclear missiles and enemy spaceships without leading the comfort of their Sontaron sofas.  

Ah yes, Luke Rattigan. The public schoolboy who thinks he’s superior to everyone and gets a deserved comeuppance, is a true DW villain, ignorant of the beauty and possibilities of the world in his quest for more of the money and power that kept him secluded and lonely – it’s just that he’s the wrong collaborator to work with The Sontarons. They’re a universe apart, in so many ways, yet both similarly stubborn, arrogant and undiplomatic. How this union lasted beyond the opening credits without one betraying the other is beyond me. However I happen to be (re)writing this review the same week that Elon Musk is having his spectacular falling out with Donald Trump and suddenly it’s all clear to me. The arrogance of money! The brains that can invent stuff but are too thick to see that bullying people won’t make them like you! The ignorance and obliviousness that allow people to take advantage of you! Rattigan’s followers, all bright youngsters dressed in funny robes, even look like Musk’s DOGE team of teenagers busy meddling in political affairs they don’t understand (I’m amazed one isn’t called ‘Big Balls’). All while working for a squat grumpy fellow egotist with an itchy trigger finger bald head (most of Trump’s hair is a combover). We even have a plot that revolves around killer cars that nobody wants but people feel pressurised into driving. While we all know that Musk threw humanity under a bus for power, which then got removed when his ally didn’t need him anymore. It would be as tragic story, all done out of arrogance that he was ‘special’, were Rattigan not so responsible for his own downfall and had he not burned all his bridges on his way letting a monster take over. Even Rattigan’s tantrum ‘but I’m cleverer than you!’ is almost exactly the tweet spat going on between the two. It’s a quite scary bit of fortune-telling, even though at the time of transmission Rattigan just seemed like a less believable re-write of Sarah Jane’s adopted son Luke: both share the same intelligence and specialist knowledge but the same obliviousness where it comes to people and emotions. He’s also no substitute for Tobias Vaughan in ‘enemy collaborator’ stakes and is so obviously painted from the first as the ‘fall guy’ it’s no surprise to anyone but him when things start going wrong. Even so, it gives the script a useful conclusion, with Rattigan ‘solving’ things and blowing up The Sontarons so The Doctor doesn’t have to, a worthy end to a story about the dangers of working with the military (and the one place where this story improves on ‘The Invasion’).

It’s a form of karmic justice actually quite rare for Russell’s first run of Who. For instance, Sylvia Noble is crueller than ever to her daughter in this story. There are hints that she’s not so much angry with Donna as worried about her, especially after she ‘disappeared’ (actually having adventures in the Tardis) but you can see why her daughter doesn’t pick up on this. Part of this story, indeed part of this season’s arc, is about Donna being so much more important than she believes she is, until by season’s end she’s the single most important person in the universe. But Donna never gets that showdown with her mum, never has that moment of softness where Sylvia admits how it was all a front. In an episode about army generals giving orders that do people harm, it’s an obvious parallel to make. What’s more, Donna won’t ever have that and even after her mum knows the ‘truth’ it’s one she can never speak out (for…reasons. See ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’). Admittedly that’s closer to real life, but it’s so outside the realms of how television and especially Dr Who normally works that it’s unfathomable that Donna never gets the chance to prove her worth here, where her mum can see it. This is a strong story for Donna though: you feel for her throughout this story even more than normal, her fright that her family might be in danger and she won’t be able to stop it, her return as semi-conquering hero still treated like dirt, her worry when Martha talks about how being with The Doctor changed her, Donna’s loneliness when she goes back to the Tardis and gets cut from everyone, left to do the Doctor’s donkeywork against The Sontarons while afraid and with her confidence as whacked as hard as the Sontaron she hits with the Tardis hammer (a last minute script substitute for a shoe, the hammer hastily written into the beginning of the script – and then never seen again). It’s a strong story for Wilf too, replacing dad Geoff at a late stage of the first script when the actor fell ill, filling in a nice lot of character details. Though the oldest in the family and a former soldier himself, Sylvia infantilises him too – but he gets ‘quiet victories’, sneaking away to eat pork pies against her diet when she’s not looking and rooting for his beloved grand-daughter. It’s the family that works best in this story, even though it’s meant to be about the army and while there’s lots of Atmos plot, but it’s the Atmosphere that works best. The best scene is where all of this come together, as a terrified Donna rings Wilf up Sylvia and Wilf to effectively say goodbye, where mum gets cross and Gramps gets sad, before asking how one man can possibly ‘save’ everyone (even though in the end it’s Luke acting off a Doctory idea).  

There’s a number of injokes too, such as the cute line about The Doctor not remembering when the UNIT stories took place (the 1970s! or was it the 1980s?), given that no two writers could ever decide when those stories were set. There’s a classic bit of Dr Who budget cutting when the money ran out before the Atmos device in the jeep could be blown up, but as it was so essential to the plot it got kept in – and turned into a comedy moment when the jeep doesn’t go bang as expected. Very clever! And another great injoke where The Doctor is handed a gas mask and pretend to be ‘The Empty Child’ (in the middle of a nuclear evacuation. Priorities Doctor!) Perhaps the best of all is the subtlest: when Robert Holmes invented the Sontarons he thought they should be pronounced ‘Sontar-Ons’ with the emphasis on the last syllable. But Kevin Lindsay, playing the first two Sontarons seen on screen, thought it sounded odd and pronounced it ‘Son-Tar-On’. The director intervened and Lindsay barked back ‘but I am one, I know how to say my own species name!’ Here Donna pronounces it the Holmes way and everyone keeps correcting her that she’s wrong (though technically she’s the only one saying it right!) There’s also a more obvious injoke, that Kirsty Wark now seems to be doing Trinity Well’s job commenting on the news!
One other problem is that this story isn’t ‘about’ anything. Well, there’s a theme of trust and betrayal and the moral debate about whether someone with the moral compass of The Doctor should ever rely on weapons, but these are small fry by Dr Who standards. A lot of people say that about the past Sontaron stories too, but they actually had a lot to say: ‘The Time Warrior’ is about the cycle of aggression with different technology but the same drive across time, ‘The Invasion Of Time’ asks big questions about the suitability of people in power and how far you can go bad to do good and ‘The Two Doctors’ did its best to turn every fan vegetarian.  There’s none of that in ‘Stratagem’. And yet there nearly was: Russell’s original plan was to make this story an ecological plea, to make us re-think whether we need as many cars on the road when we’re endangering our planet (a moral that, as a lifelong pedestrian, I would happily get behind). The first draft had lots of references to how the Sontarons were damaging our fragile ozone layer and set the sky alight – until somebody pointed out to Russell that the hole in the ozone wasn’t a very big problem anymore. It’s a very Dr Who story actually: twenty years of drip-feeding alarm and protests into the public conscious meant that it became in industry’s best interests to start manufacturing aerosols that were ‘good for the environment’ and the politicians realised it was a vote winner. So laws were changed and while the problem isn’t gone the hole is shrinking and back where it was somewhere around the time ‘The Two Doctors’ was on air. That’s a Dr Who story waiting to happen, a ‘Peladon’ tale of how countries really can get their act together and work as a team, but alas there wasn’t room for that story as well.    

That’s a lot to juggle, then, and ‘Stratagem’ drops as many balls as it catches. Like ‘Daleks In Manhattan’, it’s a decent script with a decent monster that just doesn’t work paired together, putting them in a setting that makes no sense and then having to build up a plot around that’s bananas if you stop and think about it. However at least this time the plot is so involving and the action so pacy that you don’t notice the plotholes as much. ‘Stratagem’ does a good job of bringing things to a climax midway through episode two, with the clever device (surely a Raynorism) of having the companions all phone The Doctor up at the same time while he’s already trying to cope with a missile attack. It really brings home just how many people rely on him and how much is resting on The Doctor’s shoulders. David tenant gives another typically bravura performance, running the whole range of emotions effortlessly, cycling from joy, despair, comedy, anger and frustration in quick succession. There are a lot of strong and memorable moments in this story: the cliffhanger when Wilf is trapped in a car with a Sontaron-activated sat nav taking it over and gassing him, with no Doctor around to help; the quieter moments when returning companion Martha gets to compare notes with Donna about how being in the Tardis changed her life, which makes both of them uncomfortable (she’s a lot tougher than she ever was as a regular, scaring Donna with what might happen to her, while Martha is a little spooked how easily someone else can fall into her shoes and be swept away by the adventure of it all); Donna’s attempts to go back to normal with her family and sensing how much she’s changed and how little they have. Especially Donna’s childhood nickname ‘The Little General’, which makes such a point about Donna learning to give orders from her mother, shouting at things she’s afraid of and how The Doctor’s learned to take this part of her character away a little – and her fears after meeting Martha that it might come back (Really of course The Doctor heals the character flaws, which are different in polar opposites Martha and Donna, creating independence in one and kindness in the other; I suspect these are Russell T additions these scenes, saying a lot in a few words that other writers of drama series would never think to include but which make his character seem real); Donna’s lonely wander through the Sontaron spaceship. It’s just that these little moments don’t quite coalesce into a full story, which needs to be either an episode longer or have one plot element less. The result is a story that isn’t the greatest journey in the world but neither is it the car-crash it might have been. Sontar-h/A minus!
Oh and p.s. be warned: presumably 02 didn’t know that Dr Who had used the name when they launched their ‘Atmos’ mobile phone, with a tagline in one advert about technology that was ‘out of this world’ for good measure. As far as I know it doesn’t gas the recipient, but I’m sure I can’t be the only fan who decided to skip that make…

POSITIVES + The way this story looks. Dr Who’s latest stately home used for location filming and standing in for Rattigan’s estate is Margram Country Park in Port Talbot, an adapted monastery now owned by the council and open to the public. It’s gorgeous and exactly the sort of place a dude like Rattigan would hang out, half traditional and half modern, not because he appreciates how beautiful it is but because he wants people to appreciate that he can afford it. I suspect Elon Musk’s house is pretty close to this. Probably a lot of Conservative MP’s houses too. Most of the episode then takes place in a disused shampoo/air conditioner factory in Pontypool which, ironically given they’re a bald race, works well as the Sontaron base too.

NEGATIVES – The clone subplot as a whole isn’t working, but especially the way it’s done, with an effect that looked more retro than any 1970s Sontaron story even in 2008. Usually the one thing better about filming in the modern series compared to the old is how the monster ‘actors’  are treated, but not this time. Kevin Linsday, who’s weak heart problems were accelerated by being stuck in Sontaron costumes, would have looked on enviously at the modern prosthetics but pitied poor actor Ruari Mears who was in the odd looking ‘clone’ suit. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear and had to undergo a full body wax in order for the suit to fit. Even the cruel ‘Sontaron Experiment’ didn’t do this to anyone! Pity poor Freema, too, who had to be dunked in the tank of gloop and timed her entry wrong, accidentally taking a big mouthful and choking on the first take, then having to do it all over again.   

I’d also like to single out the Doctor’s ‘intruder window’ pun as the single gag of the entire series.

BEST QUOTE: Staal: ‘The bravery of idiots is bravery nonetheless’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS:  ’The Last Sontaron’ (2008) was the story that kick-started the second series of ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ and marks the only time a ‘classic’ monster was in the series in amongst the newbies like the Judoon and Slitheen. The story is an actual bona fide sequel to the main series and was broadcast roughly three months after ‘Stratagem’, with Kaagh The Slayer – the only Sontaron survivor from ‘Poison Sky’ -  intent on taking revenge out on Earth. He really is a most unlucky alien, given that his ship happens to land in a forest very near to Bannerman Road and the home of a former foe. Sarah Jane is astonished to come face to face with her third Sontaron after all this time and her reaction of horror, while her gang reckons he looks like a squat pushover by their standards, drives a lot of the story. Otherwise it’s a typical Sontaron story of vents, both the probic one at the back of the Sontaron’s neck and the ventilation shaft Luke and Maria crawl through to get help, in one of the simpler and more generic Sarah Jane stories. To be fair to writer Phil Ford, though, he had a mammoth task: Yasmin Paige left the series rather suddenly and she and her dad (the first ‘Alan’ in Dr Who!) had to be written out properly in a story that gave her all the good bits without killing her off (which wouldn’t have gone down well in a kiddies series, though the series comes very close to killing off Sarah herself more than once) while the series’ manifesto had to be hammered home to viewers who hadn’t seen series one. Treat it as a period light-hearted series opener (like ‘Smith and Jones’ or ‘Partners In Crime’) and there’s a lot to enjoy, while Anthony O’Donnell makes for an excellent Sontaron.  

A sort of crossover between Dr Who and ‘Gardener’s World’, ‘The Taking Of Chelsea 426’ (2009) is a 10^th Doctor from his ‘gap year’ when he travelled without a companion and visits the most unlikely places while trying to avoid certain death. One of them is the Chelsea Flower Festival: surely, you think, nothing can go wrong there – maybe a Krynoid or a Vervoid or two but nothing else. But this is the future, with an entire planet that’s a bit like the Eden project that Humans have created on Saturn. Who’s the last person you’d expect to take over this world? That’s right, the clod-hopping Sontarons. Did someone confuse them with real potatoes?! Memorable tag line from the back of the book: ‘The Doctor meets a deadly foe – and they’re not here to arrange flowers’. I’ll say! This is certainly a unique twist on the usual ’base under siege’ story as we’ve never had one on a plant-filed base before… David Llewellyn’s book is a real oddball: the premise is one of the silliest in the series and yet it’s treated with a sombre and serious tone in keeping with the run of stories towards the end of the 10^th Doctor’s run when he feels his time is running short and doubts his every move. The Saturn colony is well observed and The Sontarons come over better than they did on TV, while you even get to see them battling The Rutans at last, though as is the way with a lot of these books there’s not enough room for the plot to breathe and you can probably see where the book is going from the minute The Sontarons and their three green fingers turn up.  

Previous ‘Planet Of The Ood’ next ’The Doctor’s Daughter’

 

Colony In Space: Ranking - 194

  Colony In Space

(Season 8, Dr 3 with Jo,10/4/1971-15/5/1971, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Malcolm Hulke, director: Michael E Briant) 

'Dear Interplanetary Mining Corporation, we believe that you recently bought a mining colony on Uxarieus. Unfortunately that mineral has now been outlawed on Earth where, after coming into contact with anything in the atmosphere and some jiggery pokery with the sonic screwdriver, it turns into a copy of 'Time and the Rani'. Good luck paying off the loans you took out to scare away the miners! Love, Dr Mysterioso. 

Ranking: 194

In an emoji: 🦎

Or ‘A Doctor’s colonoscopy in space’ as one of my medical friends genuinely thought this one was called when she saw the spine of my DVD and asked me why anybody would create such a thing. No, thankfully it’s not that, it’s another of those misunderstood but very Pertwee-ish Pertwee stories and another morality tale by the expert of the genre Malcolm Hulke, perhaps the leftiest writer on the most leftiest of series. This one has rather fallen through the cracks though and been forgotten compared to the brighter, bigger, bolder stories alongside it maybe because, like so many Hulke stories, it has no monsters except what humans do to other humans (and no, an imaginary twenty-foot lizard designed to scare off colonists doesn’t count!) and nothing to make it instantly memorable the way the best Dr Who stories are. Which is different to saying its bad: like so many Pertwee stories it makes for an absolutely fabulous book and one of my favourite novelisations (renamed ‘The Doomsday Weapon’), full of pithy lines, back stories, colourful characters, lots of twists and a plot that grows, and indeed glows, by the page. On screen, alas, it’s a padded six parter where stuff happens kind of randomly and everything seems terribly brown and bland, from the supporting cast to the backgrounds. It’s also, I think it’s fair to say, a disappointment to viewers the first time round who’d been waiting two whole years to see what the Doctor’s first trip into space since exile to Earth might be like – and discover the Tardis has just landed in a quarry. Again. 

 That said, though, the fact that this is the first trip into space for a while is kind of the whole point and fittingly for a story that uses the ‘bigger on the inside’ phrase for the first time there’s a lot more going on in this story than meets the eye. Hulke was the biggest critics of the ‘exiled to Earth’ format and has been pushing script editor and close mate Terrance Dicks for some time to finally be allowed a trip back to the stars. And now he gets one. The year is 1971 and its two years since man first landed on the moon, with another year of lunar voyages to go. Apart from the hiccup of tragedy and ingenuity that was Apollo thirteen man’s greatest most ambitious step into space is in danger of looking routine, like an everyday trip to the shops (so much so each new landing wasn’t even making the top of the new anymore). Scientists are already casting their eyes forward to the next big giant leap – a colony somewhere away from Earth, probably Mars – and even though, like the Tardis, everyone knows it might not be for a while yet surely it’s coming sort of soon (nobody watching this story could have guessed that half a century on we still haven’t managed it yet). For many people watching they’re imagining a golden future for themselves away from Earth, without pollution, interfering governments, living in ‘rabbit hutches’ and all the other things settler Mary lists in her grievances in this story. There is, indeed, a whole new stream of utopian scifi being written in this time about how mankind finally gets his act together somewhere in the stars leaving difficulties on Earth (just check out the superlative Jefferson Starship record ‘Blows Against The Empire’ which was even nominated for the scifi Hugo prize for its plot). However in Hulke’s eyes leaving Earth solves nothing if mankind is just going to carry their problems around with them and he turns this story into a repeat of the Wild West, American cowboys appropriating Indian land and where idealists get swallowed up by the system anyway, bought out by big corporate conglomerate companies like the IMC (Interplanetary Mining Company). The script makes a reference to the colonists feeling like ‘battery hens’ on Earth – the alternative, though, is going free range and having no supervision, risking being killed by the elements as the price for freedom. On a smaller scale, you see, that’s what’s happening to the Doctor too: all this time he’s wanted to leave his Earthy problems (i.e. red tape and shooty soldiers, as personified by the Brigadier) behind, but they’re such an intrinsic part of Western culture now that he’s now on a planet full of Brigadiers keeping tabs on the money and bringing him down to Earth (even though technically I suppose it’s down to Uxorious). 

This is a story where, like so many a Hulke script, no one wins. I love the idea at the heart of this story about who has the most right to planets and natural resources, a tale of the ages that will sadly always be relevant whether it’s a whole planet as here or your country, your county, your street or your house. In this tale of Cowboys and Indians Hulke’s heart goes out to both sides. Primitive the local natives might be, with their war paint and their spears and Uxorious definitely not luxurious, but they have a right to this land and were here first, by a matter of a few million years. They’re kind of happy as they are too, even if they don’t have much in the way of creature comforts. You can tell Hulke sides with the settler farmers cowboys too though, the pioneers who spent all their savings and risked everything for a better life away from the shackles of Earth, although their long-sought for freedom turns out to be super hard work, barely sustaining themselves in the process. I love the way that the spaceships – such glossy sleek things of scientific beauty on the news bulletins of 1971 – are more like settler’s wagons or garden sheds, crammed full of objects (though not named on screen the model was called ‘The mayflower’ after the first European ship – err…maybe anyway, given the Vikings at least seemed to get there first if not the Knights templar or Egyptians - to colonise America). Really the two sides have more similarities than differences: they’re small communities that have come to rely on each other and which have rejected building up any great industry in order to be free. 

Of course what happens the minute they start to make some money? In comes a corporation the IMC, with more finances than sense to take it for themselves and when they can’t buy the colonists out for all their hard work and time they try to frighten them off instead and get the planet for free. ‘What’s good for the company is good for the planet’ say the newcomers, mirroring what general Motors used to say about America, but it’s blatantly not true: the soil loses its resources, the people end up as slave labour for a pittance and the same problems happen all over again on another planet till another colonist ship breaks free and flies away. The hint, too, is that after all the talk about how the humans had to escape the Earth due to pollution in their time the same thing is just going to happen over again now the companies have got involved and that one small step forward is just going to end with us going round in circles, repeating old problems we haven’t learned to solve. Hulke spares his wrath for the corporations that follow the settlers out there, who’ve (spoilers) discovered a rare mineral in the ground and want to have it for themselves, scaring the settlers off and ruining their crops. They have none of the imagination, none of the vision, none of the courage – and all of the money, which is what allows them to get away with this trick again and again across the universe, in just the way the bureaucrats and government officials always get in the Doctor’s way on Earth too. What’s more it’s a daft strategy longterm: they make more of this in the book than on screen but the company fuels its spaceship by using a metal named duralinium. And what do they do with this duralinium? They, err, go round planets digging up duralinium ending up back where they started. It’s more than that though: for Hulke the days of cowboys and Indians were romantic and a tale of survival, where in the early days most of the time the land was big enough for both of them – it’s when the money got involved, the gold-rushes and industries, that mankind took a wrong turning for all their greater comforts (and just look at how plush the IMC spaceships are: they’re an executive office in a rocket without the personality of the settler spaceship and you suspect all the IMC rockets out there in space look exactly like this). In a sense, too, this is a story about agriculture versus the industrial revolution: life is hard for peasants in all eras, but in very different ways: is it worth selling out your soul and freedom for creature comforts? The moral of this tale, as in so many Dr Who stories, is to be explorers, not pirates – to discover what’s out there and accept it at face value rather than trying to exploit it. 

Stirring things up and with his own, admittedly rather confusing, reasons for wanting to explore the planet is (more spoilers) The Master, which in some ways is a bit of a shame (the story was moving on without him quite nicely and turns into a replica of all those other Doctor-Mast battles) and in other ways is great (I mean, those Doctor-Master battles are excellent, some of the best things about this era of the show). Roger Delgado switches quite brilliantly from the sort of smiling fawning diplomat who’d charm the pants off you and the psychopath who’d steal your underwear after just for fun, ingratiating himself with the IMC like he built the place. Some fans think this plot strand doesn’t work at all and it is something of a surprise but it kind of works: if The master is truly the Doctor’s nemesis and opposite then he needs the weight of a faceless company behind him, to challenge the Doctor’s individual eccentric. I still think Roger might just be the best actor who ever appeared in the series, somehow managing to be warm and cosy yet cold and threatening, so very human yet so distinctly alien, in every scene he’s in. He’s at his silky best here, a believable baddy who nevertheless has a range and an intellect that makes him a bigger, wider threat than a xenophobic Dalek or a single-minded Cyberman. The revelation that he’s behind it all ought to be one of the biggest surprises in the series, given that he’s not usually in things for such Earthly reasons as money, except that a) they don’t keep the reveal for a cliffhanger the way they ought to but show it a few minutes into episode four b) They hadn’t included an opening scene of timelords discussing The Master at the very start of the story (though admittedly, seen at the rate of an episode a week, you have kind of forgotten by then) and c) The Master turns up in every story somewhere in season 8. Incidentally listen out for an in-joke in episode one: when discussing where The master might be Jon Pertwee jokes that ‘last week they even arrested the Spanish ambassador thinking it was him’. Something tells me producer Barry Letts added that joke as he first met Delgado when he was playing an extra opposite Roger’s Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, in the 1962 drama ‘Sir Francis Drake’ – Patrick Troughton was in the cast too but, sadly, not the same episode. Before Dr Who it’s the role that most people would have recognised Delgado from most. 

 The Master’s masterplan isn’t anything so home-grown though: he’s after the doomsday weapon, a device of impossible power that was left behind by an ancient brilliant race on Uxorious. In a delicious twist (yet more spoilers) it turns out that the ancient brilliant race are the descendents of the primitives who were the smart ones all along. There are still some ancient masters hidden away in the caves overseeing the nuclear weapons, but they long ago rejected over things technological because of exactly the problems the humans face here: technology is a curse as much as it’s a blessing and he Uxarions long ago decided to reject it all because they didn’t feel safe or free, choosing to go forwards by going backwards. When we first land on this planet we assume they’re our past – but it turns out that they’re our future, having made lessons the hard way when the corporations control our trips into space and our problems follow us out even to the final frontier. It’s also quite prescient: we’re a full twenty years from the fall of the Soviet Empire but this story is very much reflected in the tales of all the countries overthrowing Russian rule in the early 1990s who find nuclear weapons easier to pick up than bread and crops. This is a civilisation that got its priorities all skewed and so, all things considered, have we. Alas we don’t really get to see what the doomsday weapon can do exactly, despite the detail that the crab nebula, which looks from earth like it has been in a big explosion, was shattered after it was first used, which is very Who (officially it’s because a sun turned supernova in the middle but, hey, Who’s to say Who didn’t get it right?) 

 The real problem though is that, not for the first or last time, all those cleverly worked out plot details and nuances in the script with complex characters battling difficult situations, a chess match of tension and skulduggery that builds up to a gradual climax on paper, ends up on screen as a boring boxing match, a lot of actors spouting exposition and occasionally shouting at each other. Hulke’s scripts tend to be the one with lots of talking but this one, especially, feels as if it only consists of talking – yes there’s a wrestle in the mud in part six, a buggy car chase in the middle (which Pertwee took for a spin between takes and dented, before a ballast prop fell apart and dented a wheel, costing the BBC a whopping £74 in repairs), a (projected) menace (which was left out in the rain and cost £60 to repair – so much for this being the cheap’ story of the season!) and five (rather repetitive) cliffhangers but none of them make much of an impact and still leave about twenty minutes per story for standing around talking. It would help if the characters were better formed but by Hulke standards they’re not: the cast are excellent (especially John Ringham as Ashe, whose so different to the last time he was in Dr Who, as hunchback killer Tlotoxl in ‘The Aztecs’, there’s only a certain look about the eyes that helps your recognise him at all) but there’s just nothing much to get your teeth into – there’s no sense of the homes they left behind or the homes they hope to create here, just bickering about the hardships of the present. The IMC bunch are weak too, without the gravitas the Doctor needs to fight against although they were meant to be more interesting. Director Michael E Briant (who also voiced the computer in the first episode) thought that the script was weak for female parts (unusual for Hulke) so switched Morgan the leader round to being a female, basing her on the first female naval recruits that were going onboard merchant navy ships in the early 1970s extra-macho to survive in a masculine job, going so far as to cast Susan Jameson in the part to play her as a sort-of Servalan from Blake’s 7 (she’s best known nowadays for being Brian’s long-suffering wife Esther in ‘New Tricks’ but back in 1971 played a similarly tough role in Take Three Girls’ which is kind of a 1960s prototype version of ‘Friends’ without the awful laughter track and made Pentangle famous with their catchy theme tune ‘Light Flight’). It would have been quite a coup for the series at the time when her star was in the ascension, but head of drama Ronnie Marsh got worried about having a tough female in a suit in charge of a lot of boys and made the director change it round again – to this day Jameson is the only guest actor paid in full for a performance they didn’t get to make in the series because someone changed their mind on casting (as opposed to someone having to pull ut because of changed dates and industrial strikes). Tony Caunter (an actor Briant got on well with when working as floor manager on Who story ‘The Crusade’ seven years earlier – Bernard Kay playing Caldwell was hired for the same reason, while one of the blonde colonists in the final episode is a cameo by Briant’s wife Monique) got promoted into the role from lower down the cast list but hard as he tries he’s not a natural for the part. It’s a real shame: as it is none of these characters really stand out as being different to one another and the one who does (Mary) sets feminism back about ten years as it is. 

 Somewhere around part three you simply stop caring, so tired are you of yet another colony inter-squabble and another betrayal from within – and that’s the moment you realise with a crushing weight that this is a six parter. Hulke made even seven parts of ‘The Silurians’ fly by but there just isn’t enough to sustain this story fully and - Master aside and perhaps the ending - you can see all the plot twists coming, from the IMC scaring people off with twenty-foot lizards that somehow fit inside six foot doors to the insider ‘betrayal’ sabotaging their equipment. It would help a lot if this was just four parts not six but, well, that’s BBC budgets in the 1970s for you – they had to spread the costs of that spaceship somehow (the novel notably cuts a lot of the middle padding section and a good job too). 

It would help too if there was more to look at between the rowing, more spectacle and colour, but the production team have equated mining planets to mining towns on Earth and made this planet the most dull and grey Dr Who globe of them all - and that’s just the studio filming, never mind the usual Dr Who quarry they used on location (well, technically it’s Old Baal China Clay Pit in Carclaze, Cornwall and far more dangerous than the usual gravel pit – so much so the whole cast and production team were given a lecture on the dangers before starting filming, although mercifully the worst injury was to pride, when the production portaloo blew away in fierce winds when Katy Manning was using it! – but it looks just like the usual quarry seen on screen). For an audience starved of trips into space it must have been galling – even sitting through it today, when you can watch it out of sequence, it’s a struggle. A lot of the effects are poor, too: the lizard, the first animal seen in the series for real since Monica the elephant in ‘The Ark’ five years earlier and borrowed from London Zoo, but it was far worse behaved than the pachyderm and spent the entire session trying to bite the production team so very little of it is seen in the final episode and then not properly. The doomsday weapon itself, a mobile nuclear weapon of impossible size and scale in the novelisation, consists of a single panel and some flashing lights (while in keeping with the idea of nuclear codes being kept in a briefcase on earth, to better make this an allegory, it’s still a disappointment given how much they’ve built up its properties across the story). Even the costumes are a disappointment: for all the settlers’ talk of how weird Jo’s clothes are and how fashions must have changed on Earth since they left a year ago they’re basically in dungarees like they’re on ‘The Good Life’ (a show that’s very in keeping with the mood of this story but won’t be on for another four years yet – well, they are digging I suppose). At least they’re in individual clothes, however – the corporation have special suits but even these are all too clearly jumpers with hi-vis stripes like they’re working at the council. The sets are boring to look at too, if a bit more functional: I love the way the colonist dome is built round simple plastic triangles that slot together like Lego, which the colonists might have taken with them a piece each, the way the settlers in the Wild West carried their resources with them on their back then put their wagons together at night for extra protection and safety. As for the Uxarions, primitives and rulers both, they’re the sort of dodgy special effect in Who that non-fans laugh at, all too obvious masks and wigs over fake looking costumes and as close to Who creator Sydney Newman’s fears of the show degenerating into a B-movie about green bug-eyed monsters as it ever came (at least in his lifetime). 

There are, it’s true, some really lovely moments here. Especially those moments shared between the Doctor and Jo. Alas there aren’t that many of them. Once again the Doctor is the face of reason against people who won’t listen to him on all sides, the only person who can see the bigger picture. Pertwee gets lots of chances to do what he does best: huff and puff and moralise and sweep in heroically, before finding that the solution isn’t quite as simple as he thought it was, before solving it in the end anyway. Incidentally if Pertwee seems a tad shell-shocked during this serial compared to normal that’s because it was while making this story he ended up on ‘This Is Your Life’, in a show that went out in between episodes 1 and 2 of this story. All the production team and most f the cast were in on it: Pertwee thought he was being asked to do some extra pre=-filming for this story as a test for new experimental cameras and was grumbling about it before Eamonn Andrews pulled up in one of the buggies used in this story! 

 Meanwhile Jo is our eyes and ears in space even more than she was back on Earth, suffering culture shock during her first trip in the Tardis – she really struggles to take in that the Doctor can travel through space and time, despite all the things she’s seen in her first two stories, and is the first ‘accidental’ traveller we’ve had since Ben and Polly (she makes way more fuss about it too – on the plus side she is the first person to mention the Tardis being ‘bigger on the inside’, a seminal moment if ever there was one). Unfortunately the culture shock seems to rub off on her and she’s never quite the same plucky thing of her first two stories (where she could do action sequences with the best of them, break into locked doors and get the Doctor out of trouble): this story needs her to be as out of her depth as ‘we’ would be, which means she mostly sits around looking sad and asking daft questions; sadly it’s this aspect of Jo that future writers will pick up on rather than her resourcefulness. It’s such a shame: in Robert Holmes’ hands she’s a plucky but naïve innocent abroad who means well. For Don Houghton she’s almost an equalto the Doctor, using her own initiative and standing uyp to The Master. For Baker and Martin she kind of gets left behind but is also the sane rational voice the Doctor turns to when he needs it. Here she’s just a peril monkey constantly in danger or doing the washing up. This story is the start of her character ending up the butt of all the season’s jokes and I don’t like it. Even here I don’t like it: Jo is at her best when with the Doctor and this story splits this pair up quite early on too and they don’t get to share much screen-time together, given that they both explore different side of the story on different sides of the planet, which robs us of the single best thing about this era of the series. 

The result is a story that feels as if it ought to work better than it does. Usually stories fall apart in Who because of something flawed in the script itself but here it’s not the script itself that’s the problem – although that said the ending (which kills the innocent Uxarions minding their own business as well as the bad guys) is a tad disappointing after six weeks of waiting for something to happen. Equally other stories have managed to be better and more rewarding despite dafter special effects and bigger mistakes, Nobody talks about the Uxarions the same way they do the Ergon or Myrka or Abzorbaloff, for instance – it’s just an idea that didn’t quite come off rather than something that makes or breaks an episode that has other problems to contend with. The real problem with ‘Colony In Space’ is that it does too good a job of putting the hardship sand repetitive monotony of such a life on screen: there aren’t many surprises, very little to come along and interrupt the flow and arguments between settlers we don’t know aren’t a substitute for, say, the constant explosions of ‘Claws Of Axos’ the story before. Sometimes this series can be too erudite for its own good and sadly this is one of those times, with parts of this story a real slog. Just for the book alone, though, I can’t bring myself to put this one any lower in the rankings because Hulke is still one of my favourite writers telling a tale that needed to be told and the seeds sown in this story are exactly the sort of morality tale Dr Who should be telling particularly in this era. In idea, dialogue and character it’s one of the most colourful Who stories of them all in fact; it’s just the translation of it on screen that makes it seem so beige and doesn’t allow the crops to take full bloom. 

 POSITIVES + The Doctor and The Master have already crossed swords a few times (this is The Master’s fourth story) and will often in the future, sometimes (as in ‘The Sea Devils’) quite literally. This is one of their best confrontations though that says so much about their differences despite their similar status as intellectual timelords far from home. The Doctor stands for justice, fairness, hope, the rights of the civilisations he meets to be themselves without restriction and the belief that people should be allowed to do what they want to do with their natural freedom. The Master wants to control the universe so that everyone does what he wants them to do and doesn’t care at all for who they are or what they’ve done, just as long as they support him. It all comes down to a single conversation: as The Master tries to get The Doctor to rule the stars with him and he refuses, in one of those scenes that sums up this series so well and really ought to be better known than it is, used in every clip show going (see ‘quotes’ below). It’s clever too because it’s a mirror for what’s going on in the story: no wonder The Master is working for the company, while the colonists are paying their way like the Doctor, exploring the universe and only taking what they put in. 

 NEGATIVES - In the book the Uxarions, the ‘real’ owners of the mining planet, are incredibly powerful, magical and awe-inspiring, a lost civilisation whose scientific powers rival anything seen in the series. No wonder The Master wants the weapons they created – and no wonder that ultimately (spoilers) they’re smart enough to have made the weapon not quite what it seems. What do we get on screen to represent this momentous discovery? A very unconvincing puppet. While other scifi series on a budget did this sort of thing all the time (looking at you Blake’s 7!) this is the only time in Dr Who’s long history that we have a puppet playing a ‘person’ (as opposed to an’ animal’ like a drashig or a dinosaur). It’s a mess. There’s no human eyes to look at, no great acting and it all looks incredibly fake – even a person in a costume would have been more impressive than this. Usually I can live with Dr Who’s poor budgets but this, this is a real low. 

BEST QUOTE: Master ‘Just look Doctor, all those planetary systems can be under our rule’ Doctor: ‘But what for? What’s the point?’ Master: ‘One must rule or serve. That is the basic law of life. Why do you hesitate? Surely it's not loyalty to the Time Lords, who exiled you to one insignificant planet?’ Doctor ‘You'll never understand. I want to see the universe, not to rule it’

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