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

 

 Despite their small number of appearances in the original series (four) and their even smaller stature the Sontarons are big in the DW 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 DW, though, the joke is that they don’t look like natural warriors at all, tending to be shorter and stouter than the rest 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 aline 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. There’s a lot of dramatic tension to get out of that in the old series, particularly the idea of a clone race who are unstoppable in numbers rather than as individuals, and a lot of comedy too from their straightforward nature, something that modern Who has leant towards in their growing number of appearances (mostly, I suspect, because of how naturally funny an actor Dan Starkey is, the go-to Sontaron of the 21^st century). This is their first appearance in modern Who 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 DW budgets could only dream of. Unlike the modern Cybermen the Sontarons look really good too, with better masks than before but the same classic joke that their heads actually fill their big round space helmets. The Sontarons have everything this story…except a real reason for being there. The main plot centres around one of those annoying millionaire yuppy brats DW like putting on screen every few series and car sat navs gone wonky; both worthy plots and very DW plots in their own right but neither seem like an obvious fit for the opportunistic and straightforward Sontarons, being too subtle and sly. During the course of the story the gas is kind of explained as ‘clone-feed’, the thing needed by the Sontarons to create lots of little Sontarons for battle, but its 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? I mean, how do Sontarons even know about cars? There weren’t any in their other invasions of Earth (‘The Time Warrior’ came too early and ‘Sontaron experiment’ too late, while we didn’t see any in the countryside of Spain in ‘The Two Doctors’ – equally Timelords didn’t have cars in ‘Invasion Of Time’) and they’re not the sort of alien race to do meticulous research like the Kraals or the Silurians. 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. The sat nav plot is a good one though (sat navs suddenly arrived out of nowhere a few years before this story went out and led to us trusting our lives to new technology we couldn’t explain, something so outside our natural day to day knowledge it could quite plausibly be the work of aliens – therefore as logical a thing for the modern DW series to build a plot around as holiday camps and airports in the 1960s, plastic in the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s), it just doesn’t belong in a story with the Sontarons. Similarly 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. There are though 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 (I suspect these are RTD 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); Christopher Ryan’s General Straal is a worthy Sontaron leader, every bit as well written and well played as the great Sontaron leaders before him (certainly it’s a lot better than his first appearance as a sort of space slug in ‘Mindwarp’) and basically any scene with David Tennant shines brightly (whose on top manic shouty pouty form in this one). Like Helen Raynor’s other DW work though (‘Daleks In Manhattan’) it’s a script that wastes a decent monster by putting them in a setting that makes no sense and then having to build up a plot around it which also makes no sense if you stop and think about it and a second two parter which loses its way badly in the second half after a promising start. All that said, though, this is still a good little story with some great little moments - it just lacks the greatness of DW at its best. Sontar-h/A minus!

+ DW’s latest stately home used for location filming 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, 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.

- 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 are 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. What’s worse is that they’re in the process of doing the same to Martha, whose become hard and cold, not to mention brainwashed into taking orders. Where’s the Brigadier? Or Bambera? This lot need sorting out – goodness knows how Kate Lethbridge Stewart got UNIT in line before their next appearance.

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’

 Previous ‘The Claws Of Axos’ next ‘The Daemons’

Smile: Ranking - 195

 Smile

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 22/4/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Frank Cotterall-Boyce, director: Lawrence Gough) 

'✋☺👍👌👂👌👀👍👈👉👽👽👽👽👽👾✊💢💣💥😍😱🙏'(the review of this story from this website's 744th edition, downloaded from the year 4563 via a black hole) 

Ranking: 195

 

 Bill’s first time on an alien planet is a memorable one, a re-launching for the series following the new look and a clearly budget-bound debut that reminds me a lot of ‘The End Of The World’ – a statement of intent of just how big and epic DW can look and how wide the possibilities are. ‘Just look at what we can still do that we’ve never done before’ seems to be the motto and Steven Moffat throws everything at this story after a more subdued opener: some of the best location filming in the show’s history (in Valencia, where ‘The Two Doctors’ was filmed, but this story makes far better use of the location, notably the impressively futuristic City of Arts and Sciences building), a great tracking shot across an alien field (DW is really getting the hang of what CGI can do in this era and it really sets the scope for this being an alien world) and emojibots (of course emojis are going to be the official universal language of the future, it seems so obvious in retrospect!) Even though it looks new though in script terms it’s a lot of tried and tested DW standards from the ‘old’ series that surprisingly hadn’t really been tried that often in the new series: an Earth colony in the future cut off from the rest of civilisation where something has gone wrong that the Doctor and Bill have to solve for Humanity to survive, at least out here; it’s ‘The Ark’ with emojirobots as a more high-tech replacement for the Monoids and ‘The Ark In Space’ with a plague filling in for parasitic insects. There are two things those stories never had though - beautiful atmospheric scenes where this world is empty and silent and alien and an emphasis on seeing this new world from Bill’s eyes, someone who’d accepted she was never going to see more of life than a university canteen just two stories ago. We also see how how being with her – a more subordinate, less worldly wise pupil compared to the near-equal Clara at least tried to be – changes the Doctor, bringing out both his more  protective and lecturery sides. Neither fully trust the other yet and seeing what the future does to humanity, both as a species and to individual people’s morals, is as scary for Bill as ‘The End Of the World’ was for Rose, while reminding us that the Doctor is an alien whose as comfortable here as he is in ‘our’ time, with one of Peter Capaldi’s better blends of dashing hero and grumpy old git. For the most part I like this one and the mystery at the heart of it an awful lot, it’s just the resolution that turns my Smile upside down. The Doctor and Bill are so good together and the empty environment such a change of pace that it’s a real shame when other colonists start to wake up and fill the place with their stilted chatter, while the deaths we see on screen don’t have much of an impact because with only a few minutes of running time left we don’t get to really know anybody. Oddly the stakes were higher when these future Humans were strangers, not extras. The Vardy, robots who’ve got out of control and interpret their orders of being told to keep people ‘happy’, that they should kill them if they’re not (an emoji has never been so scary!) are also just a re-tread of ideas from ‘Curse Of The Black Spot’ and ‘The Girl Who Waited’ too, even if their emoji faces give them an extra twist the more ‘repair’ robots didn’t have. (spoilers) ‘Re-setting’ the machines so colonists and newly sentient robots gets to live together in peace is a very DW solution, made without war or bloodshed, but one that feels a little too pat and simple too. I mean, I don’t know about you but if an alien was trying to kill me, even for good reasons, I’m not sure I could fully trust it again; heck I’m reluctant to turn my laptop back on after it’s been in one of its moods in case it electrocutes me. That doesn’t stop this being a nice little DW episode with a lot to offer, mind – it’s just with so much competition it’s enough to stop it being a truly great one higher up the list. 

  
+ I’ve long wondered which DW companion most resembled who I would be if I was taken across time and space. At different times I’ve considered Harry (perpetually clumsy), Rory (comic relief often out of his depth), Peri (alternating bouts of sarcasm and weariness) and Vicki (giving cute nicknames to ugly looking monsters about to eat me). I really think that it’s Bill though: she’s mostly one step away from a breakdown, constantly bewildered by real life never mind life with the Doctor and her fellow Earthlings often feel more alien to her than the aliens she meets. This could so easily become irritating, but Pearl Mackie somehow manages to make Bill adorable, fearless, loyal and empathetic rather than just lost and wet. Because of the way the handover between showrunners was made (Moffat getting an extra year he really wasn’t expecting because Chris Chibnall wasn’t ready in time) Bill only got one season in the Tardis and less time on-screen than any other modern Who companion bar Martha and Dan, but even by her second story she feels like a real rounded believable credible character we both recognise and can sympathise with.      

- I’ve loved him since his breakthrough role in ‘Two Pints Of Lager and A Packet Of Crisps’, he’s one of the best DI’s in ‘Death Of Paradise we’ve ever had and I’d long hoped Ralf Little would be in DW one day maybe even as the Doctor but…well he’s not at his best here, mis-cast as a Human colonist and and struggling to shine in a role that gives him precious little to do. They should have saved him for a better part.  

The Sontaron Experiment: Ranking - 196

 The Sontaron Experiment

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 22/2/1975-1/3/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Rodney Bennett) 

'Well Marshall, the great Sontaron masterplan ordered by the Grand Strategic Council of getting a puny Earthling to watch and rank all Doctor Who episodes in order is complete and about 4/11ths of the way to being uploaded for your perusal. Based on first evidence of Human limitations we will be subjecting all future earthlings to viewings of 'the Timeless Child' 'Orphan 55' 'Voyage Of the Damned' 'The Paul McGann TV Movie and 'Time and the Rani' in a continuous loop until their brains rot.  Sontar-hahahahaha!'

Ranking: 196

 

 In their other stories Bob Baker and Dave Martin tended to bring the more child-friendly fare to the Who table: K9, orange-coloured Axons, big giant hands in nuclear power stations, that sort of thing. This little two-parter, though, is one of the most gruesome in the DW canon and makes the universe suddenly seem a far less cosy or safe. Usually DW writers tend to be optomistic about the future, give or take the bureaucracy and the odd (and I mean odd) leaders, but here Earth 10,000 years in the future has been ravaged and left a deserted wilderness except for a few straggling astronauts who are incredibly unlucky to end up back on this planet just in time for an invasion. For some reason the Sontarons still fancy a go at colonising the Earth even though it’s basically a pile of rocks and rather than invade en masse they’ve been busy conducting experiments into the Human body and discovering all sorts of nasty details about how fragile they are in preparation for their full plan. Throughout the course of this story Humans are chained up, tortured, starved, waterboarded, deprived of sleep and attacked by weapons. The only thing they aren’t put through is listening to The Spice Sontarons, the girl group from the future: ‘If you wanna be my lover you gotta kill all my friends the fight against the Rutans never ends…’ It’s like Guantanamo Bay, only it’s the whole planet wide and we’re all the prisoners and – what with ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ next up in transmission order – suggests that the production team had been paying a little too much attention to the 1970s trials of convicted Nazis for their ideas for comfort. The result is quite different to every other Sontaron appearance, particularly now they’re mostly used as comic relief, but you can also see where it came from: in Robert Holmes’ hands Lynx talked a lot about being merciless and his low opinion of humanity during ‘The Time Warrior’ but actually the people who did most of the fighting were either Humans or timelords; for this story Baker and martin pick up on his words rather than his actions. It’s pretty different to most other DW stories too. Now torture is a part of life and war and action series and is an inevitable part of any scifi/fantasy/was/action franchise eventually, it was always going to turn up sooner or later in a format as elastic as DW’s. There are fans who like this sort of thing and hold up the Phillip Hinchcliffe eras and season 12 in particular as the zenith of DW. I can’t say I’m one of them; there are many many things that DW does brilliantly and horror is not my favourite of them and while few stories are really that horrible given the teatime slot and family viewing tag, this one does get a little too grim for comfort at times. ‘Vengeance On Varos’, a future story that spoofs viewer’s enjoyment of violence on TV, had stories like this one in mind when it showed families taking sadistic delight in watching pain and suffering. All that said, if you have to see torture on daytime television this is the way to go about it. None of its gratuitous and there’s no blood or sawn-off limbs, just good acting; also it’s not done for sport but for character: it’s exactly how the Sontarons think as, of all the alien races in Who they’re the most naturally warlike and committed to vitory at all costs. And it’s not just the Sontarons who are coming up with cruel experiments either: this is a two parter entirely shot entirely on location (still the only DW to have no shooting on a studio set whatsoever) during gruelling filming in the wilds of Dartmoor, which gives it a feel quite unlike other DW stories. The bleakness of the rolling hills is the perfect setting, adding a feeling of danger and desperation you would never have got on a studio set (though plenty of hazards in real life too; Tom Baker fell and broke his collarbone and had to be airlifted to hospital while still in costume which really confused the nurses in the days before his stories had been transmitted; the scarf hid the brace he was put in for the rest of the shoot). The acting is first rate with Kevin Lindsay also going through hell and risking his already declining health to play his second Sontaron, General Styre. This also leads into another of my favourite bits of DW trivia: as walking down the hill to the catering van or taking off the layers of make-up was too much of a strain for his heart Lindsay sat on his own during breaks reading the paper on a stool. A dogwalker passed by, the Sontaron forgot he was in costume and nodded ‘morning’ and she ran off screaming. Elsewhere the astronauts are great too, particularly Glyn Jones who (ranking spoilers) wrote my favourite ever DW story and is here doing his only turn in the series as an actor – he was the only person in DW to write/speak lines in front and behind the camera in DW till Mark Gatiss in the modern series. Given that this story only has fifty minutes to play with it covers a lot of ground too, with perhaps more jeapordy per minute than any other story of the 1970s. The conclusion, when the Sontaron gets what’s coming to him after a rare Tom Baker tussle, is hugely satisfying even if it comes too late for most of the poor Humans. A great, if bleak, script pushes this one up several notches too. Indeed the only thing that’s less than stellar is the rather flimsy Sontaron robot, which seems a little too basic for both the might of the Sontaron empire and filming on a bleak Dartmoor hill. By and large, though the experiment pays off, when everything is said and done, though, while it’s a very well made bit of television it’s still a well made bit of television about torture. Which is a bit uncomfortable to watch. Sort of the point I guess. Not the sort of story I can truly say I love then, even if I still admire it a lot.

+ The Sontaron’s spaceship is a brilliantly inventive design, quite different to the usual flying saucer shapes and looks like a golf-ball. Honestly, that’s probably the most aerodynamic design an alien race could have, losing all the square edges and taking all the short cuts (Sontarons are nothing if not efficient and practical – no superfluous flashing lights and bossters for them) and adds to the classic gag in the first Sontaron story about their heads being as round as their helmets.

- The Sontarons become the first alien race in DW to use what we would nowadays views as a video or a skype call rather than a radio or a walkie-talkie. What’s wrong with that you might ask? Well, they’re the one DW race that doesn’t need one. The Sontraons are a clone race. They don’t need to see what each other look like because they all look the same. Just to rub it in Kevin Lindsay plays both Sontarons in this story in exactly the same way…