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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