Planet Of The Daleks
(Season 10, Dr 3 with Jo, 7/4/1973-12/5/1973, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, director: David Maloney)
The Skaro Subscriber: The paper So Right-Wing It Has No Left So Keeps Going Round In Circles
Doctor in Deadly Dastardly Dalek Derailment Double-cross Disclosure.The Doctor, sworn
enemy of the Daleks, put in a surprise anniversary appearance on Skaro where he
froze our glorious Dalek armies with ice and unleashed our carefully prepared
Dalek plague against us. We are all currently in lockdown and only essential
workers charged with the task of extermination are allowed out of the
city. Which of course is every Dalek! Also keep your eyes peeled for a talking
purple rug which may be a Spiridon spy! On other pages –
·
Get Bikini Beach Blob Body Ready! The latest Dalakenium casings that
everyone is wearing this radiation-filled Summer on Skaro
Ranking: 207
‘The Three Doctors’ may have got all the attention, with its reunion of the main cast, but I’ve always seen ‘Planet Of The Daleks’ as being just as much a tenth anniversary birthday bash. Only this time it’s not an anniversary of the programme in general but a specific story and the first truly direct Dr Who sequel, to the very first Dalek story back in 1963 – the one that may not quite have started it all but came a close second and made Dr Who a household name. Nowadays people forget what a big deal this was, in an era when the show is run by fully paid up fanboys and even a missing story like ‘The Macra Terror’, for which only a few seconds exists, gets in own sequel (‘Gridlock’ if you’re wondering). There weren’t DVDs, VHSes or Blu-rays around in 1973 and repeats of black and white telly in the era colour days was a big no-no, so the closest you could come to seeing a story again was to read the novel (Target having bought up the rights to all the non-Douglas Adams or Terry Nation stories in 1972). For a long time revisiting the past was the only thing this elasticated everything-goes series didn’t do; initially the plan was that the series would show something new every week, never landing on the same planet at the same time twice and without anything recurring beyond the Doctor and companions themselves. The popularity of the Daleks soon kyboshed that of course, but even when they came along for a re-match the emphasis was always on why the sequels were different to their previous appearances. Even here the production team have to fudge the idea slightly, by having this story take place on the planet Spiridon, which just happens to look exactly like the planet Skaro and have almost exactly the same group of Thals.
By the time of the show’s
tenth anniversary, though, enough time had gone past for older fans who were
around in 1963 to get nostalgic and talk about the stories they remembered to
each other, with increasingly hazy memories of the story that, for most of
them, was where they came in on the back of the success of The Daleks. Their
younger brothers and sisters meanwhile, or maybe even their children, had never
known Dr Who in black and white or seen the first two Doctors and were now old
enough to have become intrigued: why did the Doctor talk about his regeneration
as the third one? Why did The Daleks hate his guts so much? What had happened
in the early days of the show before they were born? Why were there books
printed with funny looking faces of people with the claims they were The Doctor
when they looked nothing like Jon Pertwee and had adventures on planets with
funny names like Skaro? There’s a rather sweet moment, early on, when The Thals
and the audience at home both learn that their impossible hero from the days of
old is the same man we’ve been following the past few years, a myth and legend
in his own time because he’s been around so long now. And unlike all those years
when Dr ho was about myths and legends turning out to be fallible people with
feet of clay, nothing like their reputation, The Doctor’s still a hero. It’s
worth remembering that few series if any had ever been in this position. There
were other long-running series of course, with Coronation Street’ just as old
as Who and ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ (started 1955) and ‘Z Cars’ (1962) even older,
but for their fans the answer ‘what did this show look like ten years ago
dad/brother/aunty?’ was much more boring: the answer was basically the same as
it looks now, only with the older cast members looking slightly younger and in
black-and-white. Dr Who had changed so much in its first decade, though, that
it felt like a different programme altogether. In another fifteen years or so,
it’s generally agreed, looking back and adding fa-friendly continuity
references will smother Dr Who so much that it will put the general public off
who assume this series is not made for them but for now Dr Who was so popular
and such an accepted part of the TV furniture that a bit of nostalgia seemed
like a good idea. ‘Planet Of The Daleks’, then, is a huge sea change in the way
this series operated, being the first story deliberately written to cash in on
this growing trend of fans who either wanted to experience or be reminded of
something from the past. Indeed, it’s not so much a sequel as a remake, as
close to ‘The Daleks’ as everyone could get, albeit in colour and with Jon
Pertwee as the Doctor, with Terry Nation offering an updated closing speech on
the lines of ‘it’s good to fight for what you believe in but what you really
want is peace’ to replace the sentiment of the original, that ‘peace is all
very well but you should fight for what you believe in (another ten years of
cold war antics has left the writer jaded).
This story came about
following ‘Day Of The Daleks’ the year before, intended by the Barry
Letts/Terrance Dicks production team as the big ratings winner for 1972. Only
in their haste they overlooked the fact that, technically, The Daleks weren’t
owned by the BBC but by their writer and had been written out of the series the
past five years so that Nation could take his toys with him for his grand new
planned life in America (it’s weird to think that the last episode Terry wrote
for Who before this was ‘The Feast Of Steven’, the jokey one that went out on
Christmas Day with silent movie stars and comedy policeman and that his last
words were ‘incidentally a Merry Christmas to those of you at home’). Only the
years hadn’t been kind to Terry. America was, for now at least, totally
uninterested in a quaint British programme still banging on about WW2 and
taking pot shots at American antics in what seemed like it was increasingly
going to be the next one. He’d tried a few other things that hadn’t worked out
then came back to Britain, working on other people’s programmes like ‘The
Saint’ (Roger Moore as a spy and not like James Bond at all, honest) and ‘The
Persuaders’ (err, ditto). By 1972 he really needed quick cash so when Dr Who
began cashing in on his great inventions his first thought was to sue and he
started off by writing a stiff letter; thankfully Barry Letts was closer to a
Thal than a Dalek and decided to make peace by
wining and dining Terry instead, taking him out to lunch. The two men
found a lot in common and a compromise was reached: rather than a court-case
both sides would invariably lose out on, why not write for Dr Who again and get
first dibs on a Dalek story each year? Terry hadn’t wanted to ever work for
what he still considered a children’s programme again and had left on rather
sour terms, criticising his old friend David Whittaker’s two Dalek scripts for
season four but, well, he really needed the money and wasn’t this what had led
him to create The Daleks in the first place? Maybe lightning could strike a
second time? So Terry wrote almost exactly the same script again. He even
included individual episode titles, something Dr Who hadn’t done since ‘The Gunfighters’ seven years
earlier (they’re close enough to the 1963 ones again too: ‘Destinus’ - the working name for ‘Spirodon’ - ‘Mission
Survival’ ‘Pursued’ ‘Escape Or Die’ ‘The Day Before Eternity’ and ‘Victory’).
All much to the amusement of his new boss and his new script editor Terrance
Dicks, who weren’t that keen on the story but figured the inevitable ratings
and good relationship was worth it.
Actually it’s a more
suitable pairing than any since the David Whittaker script editor days. Terry’s
scripts were always short and punchy, with lots of holes for script editors to
fill and add character touches of their own, but rather than Dennis Spooner’s
love of comedy or Donald Tosh’s love of drama he’s now working with a man, in
Terry Dicks, who shared more than just a name: they had both grown up on
Saturday morning action serials and believed in Who as, above all things, a
1950s adventure series that just happened to be set in space. So rather than
have the action subservient to the dialogue or ideas it’s once again front and
centre in this story, whose plot is made up entirely of ‘how is The Doctor going to get out of
this then?’ moments rather than any great themes or metaphors. The result is
the first script to be as big on the high octane thrills spills and Thal on
Dalek action as the original, where The Daleks are a foe to be fought rather
than stand-in Nazis or Vietnam troops. On the one hand it means all of those
developments that have taken place since ‘The Dalek Invasion Of The Earth’,
showing The Daleks up to be cunning and ruthless and with the shiver of
recognition of parallel timelines where the Nazis win or develop time travel or
take over the United Nations have been lost. On the other immersing yourself in
the similarities with where it all started was the whole point for a generation
who grew up expecting to never see the original story again. After ten years
they’d earned it and all the people at home trying to remember what the
original felt like or who’d been trying to picture it from the novel or their
elders’ memories now had an answer (although the resulting version admittedly
seemed a lot more brightly lit and, well, purple than anyone remembered the
shadowy grey originals).
Nowadays of course that’s
all lost to us now we can all pull ‘The
Daleks’ off our shelves and just watch that any time we want. It’s a
comparison that will always make this story come off worst too: this isn’t a
pioneering moment of television but a hazy memory of one, it isn’t trying to
score political points about the terrors of nuclear war and a threat like the
Nazis but telling a story to a kiddie audience and it’s an exercise not in
storytelling but nostalgia, the memory of a story that’s already been told. Ravaged
planet with vegetation that’s more animal than plant? Check! Deadly swamps and
an underground cave system? Absolutely. A hero with paralysed legs trapped in a
Dalek cell and having to find a clever way out of it? You betcha. Deadly
radiation? Well there’s a plague that does almost exactly the same thing. Oh
and Jo picks up a sort of fungal infection. Ooh nasty! The 1963 original had
been full of imaginative answers to questions that had never been asked on
British TV before, about creating alien planets high on radioactivity and what
a future mutated life-form might look like after an atomic war. There’s none of
that here: imagination will always be more watchable than memory of
imagination. The Dalek stories that have come between have been impressive in
the way they simply refused to repeat a winning formula – and nothing hastens
the end of a popular series more than repeating yourself so often everyone gets
sick of you. While not everything is stolen wholesale from ‘The Daleks’ the
bits that aren’t all come other Terry Nation Dalek stories: the invisible
native aliens (‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’), a Dalek bomb (‘The
Dalek Invasion Of Earth’), the romance with the companion and a local
(‘Invasion Earth’ again), even Terry’s request that The Doctor should start the
adventure injured in some way (just like Steven in ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’ - interesting that he doesn’t recycle anything
from ‘The Chase’, not even a Time Space
Visualiser) none of which are used quite as well and all feel a bit recycled.
Just to rub it in the only two really new points don’t quite come off: the
lurid purple cloaks the invisible Spiridons are made to wear (but just look
silly) and the escape up a chimney using hot air currents (which does indeed
seem like a lot of hot air from a writer who can’t work out how else to let our
heroes escape). Coming so soon after ‘Day Of The
Daleks’ did something really new with the metal meanies it feels like a wasted
opportunity. In short, ‘Planet Of The Daleks’ is proof that you can’t reheat a
soufflé in a different kitchen, even with a Dalek whisk to beat the eggs, as
Oswin would surely tell you.
Times have changed though. I mean for the Daleks and Thals obviously (we’re about 300 years after ‘The Daleks’ here, enough time for The Doctor to become a myth passed on b y word of mouth) but for the series too. You’d think if anything the show is much closer in feel in 1973 to the sort of scripts Terry was writing, thanks to Dicks’ own similar sensibilities and pacifist politics. You’d think that the gung-ho third Doctor would suit such a fully action-plot, while the moralising over how far you can push pacifism when your home world’s being destroyed by metal interlopers without feelings ought to be at one with the moralising of the show in this era. But oddly it doesn’t feel right at all. The original story may have gone on the air in 1963 but it was your archetypal 1950s action series: heroes and baddies, a quest, big beautiful blondes (even though in Dr Who they’re mostly men) and not much dialogue. Terry very much wrote it as a WW2 adventure story, full of battles with soldiers and tanks you had to look in the eye-stalk, based partly on the stories he used to make up to amuse himself while stuck in a war bunker on his own in the dark for real. Already by 1963 there was the growing sense that war didn’t really look like that anymore but it’s completely hanged by 1973. If nuclear annihilation was going to happen it was either because of a misunderstanding or a mistake, super-powers getting hot under the collar and feeling suffocated by the other, won or lost by the amount of intermediary planets you could convert to your way of life (sort of what Terry had tried himself with ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, albeit with only one superpower calling all the shots). As much as the Pertwee years like to break up the action with a big fight somewhere and a massive chase sequence that lasted for hours, they were both away from the main plot: the underling guarding a trap built for The Doctor or a desperate get-away from the storm-troopers. By and large the baddies the 3rd Doctor fights are bureaucratic, the pen-pushers who uphold the little laws that let society sleepwalk into danger and negotiating his way towards peace (just look at previous story ‘Frontier In Space’, a story that doesn’t feel as if it belongs in the same series as ‘Planet Of The Daleks’, even though it leads directly into it). In the Barry Letts era there aren’t many examples of a baddy that’s all-out evil: even the ones that are either do so through hypnotism or manipulation rather than directly (The Nestene Consciousness, The Keller Machine, The Axons), or are unthinking beats doing what comes naturally (Drashigs, Dinosaurs) while many only become our enemies by ‘accident’ (‘The Ambassadors Of Death’, The Silurians, The Draconians). Only ‘The Master’ ‘invades’ us and his favourite technique is turning people against each other and getting them to do his dirty work. Even ‘Day Of The Daleks’ was a ‘mistake’, a timeline caused by guerrilla fighters trying to create a much better future for themselves and accidentally making it worse.
If there’s any ‘monster’ in the 3rd Doctor era then it’s humanity itself, creating its own problems due to a ferocious combination of paranoia and excessive paperwork. Hearing myths and legends of how the 1st Doctor dashingly defeated the Daleks in an all-out war suddenly sounds wrong (not least because Ian was doing most of the dashing around, while The Doctor just wanted to explore, something else that’s unthinkable now that Jo’s the companion). There’s no space for the ‘war is bad, we should have done differently, let this be a warning to you kids’ moralising that the Barry Letts-produced era excelled at (well, only at the end when the Doctor tells the Thals ‘not to glamorise war’ and talk about ‘the people who won’t be coming back’, which always sounded to me like the 1973 era screaming against the 1963 era, because glorifying war as action pieces is exactly what this story is all about; I’d bet my Dr Who scarf that’s a Terrance Dicks or Barry Letts speech, not a Terry Nation one. I like to think that’s Terry getting his own back by having The Doctor beat up a Dalek and comment ‘you know for a man who abhors violence I took great satisfaction I doing that!’, the smartest line here). Not forgetting the misogyny of course: Terry’s scripts were always male-heavy and had the women either in the background unless they were in the foreground screaming, like most everything else on British TV in 1963, but not in 1973 you can’t: Terrance’s comments to Terry get increasingly fractious and desperate as he pleads with Terry to write in a female character and give her something to do (she becomes Rebec, named after the ‘other’ big event in terry’s life since he last wrote for Who: his daughter Rebecca. He’ll write a whole, rather weird, children’s book for her ‘Rebecca’s World’ in 1975, back to back with the adult bloodbath ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ of all things. Rebec still gets very little to do, Terrance at one point asking ‘what does she have to offer us exactly? Apart from the big boobs?’ Well, it was 1973).
Worse than that, though,
they don’t get to do what Daleks do best: rant and rave and scare. There’s no
sense of backstory here; they just do Dalek stuff because they’re Daleks and
that’s what they do. You’re never in any doubt here that The Doctor plus Thals
have the upper hand and while in 1963 it was a close run thing, the rigidity of
Nazism defeated only by their enemies working together in a way The Daleks
never could, this is just The Doctor trying to talk the pacifist Thals into
being brave and having a go. That’s not quite as satisfying somehow. Throw in
some of the weirdest looking costumes in the series (what is with those fading
yellow-orange spacesuit with the big heavy piping that seems about as hopeless
as camouflage goes as, well, English Redcoats - see ‘The Highlanders’ – that
make even Spirodon purple seem a viable colour scheme?) and you have a series
that’s gone from cool to uncool in ten easy years. Had you not seen the
original Dalek story then you’d honestly wonder what all the fuss was about or
why they made such an impact the first time round. The answer of course is that
there was nothing on television anything like ‘The Daleks’ in 1963; by 1973
there’s been lots and this story isn’t distinctive enough to stand out in any
way shape of form. By 1993, when this story was repeated on BBC2 (the first
time in over a decade!), complete with monochrome third episode, and I pestered
all my schoolfriends into seeing it the story was an even bigger disappointment
(those who got through the opening scenes teased me about it mercilessly for
the rest of term about how awful it was). Whisper it quietly but this story is
pretty boring, especially in the middle when it badly sags and we get what
feels like an hour of preparing to float up a shaft using air currents, and if
you’ve got a story with one of the most exciting alien races ever created
that’s turned out boring then there’s no hope.
There is at least one
thing that’s new, well sort of: The Daleks have been working on invisibility,
closely analysing the natives, the hapless Spiridons. Back in 1965 Terry
‘invented’ invisible aliens as a neat budget saving device – the ironically
named ‘Visians’. The idea is brought back here with the extra detail that The
Daleks are themselves learning to go invisible with a non-reflective lightwave.
Which might work if they’d, y’know, learn to shut up when they were invisible!
Only the experiments go wrong and leave the Daleks sick. This idea, far-fetched
as it sounds, is something that The Nazis were supposed to have been
experimenting with right at the end of the war, their ‘super weapon’ that they
were going to unleash on the West if only they could get the stable prototypes
ready. Some day they did: after all, would we have noticed?! The same goes for
the ‘bell’ shapes Dalek spaceship, which was another supposed Nazi invention,
which could defy gravity and hover in space: to this day many ufologists think
a spate of sightings in the late 1940s were rescued Nazi scientists perfecting
their idea for The Americans (possibly in Area 51). It’s an interesting angle
to take, with the potential of a Dalek you couldn’t see or hide from terrifying
while adding to the frisson in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ of what might have
happened next if The Nazis hadn’t been stopped, only he doesn’t do much with it
at all: it’s a detail dropped into the script for colour and then dropped
again. The idea of a virus that makes invisible people is fun though: they
tease you with the fact that you’ll never see what a Spirodon really looks like
and then it’s Roy Skelton lying down with a green face. Not like covid then,
the virus that seems to make the people suffering from it invisible. As for
Spiridon itself it’s more interesting than Skaro in many ways but you never
feel as if it’s really explored properly: what with the blazing hot days and
freezing cold nights it’s no wonder the wildlife has become so violent. But the
story doesn’t linger on this intriguing idea: instead even the vegetation is bad
and something to fight, with nobody pausing long enough to think about it.
So is there anything
worth watching this story for? Well, all the bits that worked in 1963 still
kinda work: the Dalek city, with its doors that humans have to duck down to
pass through, remain unlike anything else television ever did. The idea of a
racist master race who’ve become distorted and mutated with radiation from
their own atomic weapons now intent on wiping out the ‘mutants’ who’ve remained
beautiful is still a very clever idea with lots of mileage left in it that had
been shunted to the back of Nation’s other scripts. The Daleks tend to get
overshadowed by Davros these days or have another Dalek that does all the
talking but here they are a team of terror, with their own warped idea of
democracy taking down anyone who doesn’t think or look like them. All the
tension between good and evil, purity and xenophobia, peace and extermination
are well drawn and make a change from the moralising of what is a very preachy
season. Nation relishes having an all-out hero in the lead without having to
write for a slightly shadowy and untrustworthy 1st Doctor and for
some reason finds it a lot easier to write for Jo than Ian, Barbara or Susan,
having her take on all her predecessors’ characteristics at once. Sometimes her
big heart and give-it-a-go heroism in her attempts to save The Doctor come what
may makes her impulsive and brave, risking all against the odds. Sometimes
she’s the wise head whose had more adventures than these weedy Thals and who
starts mothering them all. Then of course there are times when she’s a scared
little girl out of her depth who needs rescuing by someone, usually when a
cliffhanger comes along (with my cynical head on I would say these changes
roughly equate to the bits the two different Terrances wrote). Other
companions’ first thoughts at being stranded alone on an alien planet are how
they’ll get back or what danger they’re in but Jo only cares for the Doctor,
not her, something that’s very in character. While Jo’s clumsiness makes her
automatically endearing to this dyspraxic, sometimes her clutsiness is so
over-written it becomes borderline irritating, but here she’s at her sweetest
and most admirable and brave. Her romance with Latep is arguably the weakest of
all her many many suitors in space though: he’s a big drip and not right for
her at all; if King Peladon couldn’t tempt Jo then he’s got no chance, while
even Leela and Andred had more chemistry than this. The Thals are big drips in
both versions but at least there’s great guest cast making the most out of the
little that’s there on the page – regulars like Bernard ‘Gulliver’ Horsfall,
Prentis ‘Salamar’ Hancock and Roy ‘Zippy’ Skelton, doing double duty as the
dead Spiridon as well as a whole army of Daleks. Even so I wouldn’t have lost
too much sleep over their deaths, as Terry originally intended to kill everyone
off the way he nearly did with ‘Masterplan’ leaving just The Doctor and Jo at
the end (another thing that had changed since the 1960s was the amount of
violence that could be shown on TV: Ronnie Marsh, head of serials, worried
about the impact this might have on impressionable children. Although the only
thing this story ever impressed on me was not to wear purple. Dicks’ apologetic
memo to Terry is worth repeating as it’s the antithesis of the last time he
worked on the show in the time of the ‘Masterplan’: ‘in the current climate we have to be careful
about violence, massacres and gloom’, all the things Terry was so good at).
Instead this is a story
near enough like last time, including all the parts that worked in 1963 that
could never work in 1973 (we’re even back in Laporte Industries’ Beachfield
Quarry in Redhill again, the most Dr Whoish quarry ever. yawn) and a bunch of
bits that never really worked in 1963 to begin with. There are times when it
all goes hilariously wrong: one of the (unintentionally) funniest scenes in all
of Who is when Taron finally pours out his feelings for Rebec with a romantic ‘I
love you’. Right on cue, before she can reply, an alien something or other
roars rudely drowning her out. They can’t even get the basics of this one
right. However in other ways and in the
right mindset that’s just part of its charm. Unlike, say, ‘The Two Doctors’ at
least it’s reverential to that past rather than rude, but there’s no point to
this story, it has nothing to say – it’s just there so that Terry Nation can go
back to earning a wage again and so the Dr Who team can get the benefit of all
the tie-in publicity with The Daleks; there’s no more ambition to it than that.
It’s not that ‘Planet Of The Daleks’ is woefully misguided or a total misfire
like some other bottom of the pile stories (‘Monsters Of Peladon’ for instance)
so much as that it’s just bland and uninspired. Other Dr Who stories,
especially Dr Who and the Daleks stories, are about something. This story is
about two and a half hours long. And about two hours longer than it needs to
be. Coming after the promise and invention of ‘Frontier
In Space’ and ‘Day Of The Daleks’ both,
stories that find new things to do with old formats, it’s a real anticlimax.
But, well, the anticipation of birthdays are usually better than the real thing
aren’t they? Thankfully everyone will up their game for the following year and
‘Death To The Daleks’ the following year by
taking the Skaro scaries out of their comfort zone and while that story has
more than enough problems of its own at least it’s ‘new’ mistakes it makes, not
old ones. No wonder my friends switched off in 1993: there’s no magic this time
around, no enthusiasm, no purpose, and so not much point, with the only thing
more purple than the Spiridon robes being Terry’s B-movie prose. In the end it
just feels like an episode of ‘The Persuaders’ with Jon Pertwee instead of Roger
Moore and Daleks instead of German spies – a series that was going out at ITV
with Terry Nation written episodes at the same time as this story.
We haven’t had a
production story for a while have we? This is one of my favourites. Someone who
was new to The Daleks was the make-up lady Jean McMillan. Her contract
stipulated that she had to prepare all actors for work under the studio lights,
making sure that their faces weren’t too shiny in the camera glare mostly. She
wasn’t sure if this amounted to Daleks or not and whether they might be seen
through their casings. So, in order to be better safe than sorry, she opened
the casings and covered the protesting Dalek operators John Scott Martin,
Murphy Grumbar, Cy Town and Tony Starr with blusher one by one. For the next
scene they decided to have a bit of fun and wheeled themselves in, casings
open, dressed up in drag while Roy Skelton and Michael Wisher gave The Daleks
suitably camp and feminine voices. Sadly it was never filmed and no one thought
to take a picture!
POSITIVES + The opening:
This story follows straight on from ‘Frontier In Space’, which was unusual
itself in this era (some Pertwee stories occasionally refer to other Pertwee stories
but none of them overlap in quite this way). We think we’ve been following The
Master’s evil plans for six stories but it turns out he’s just a patsy luring
the Doctor back to Spiridon and suddenly he’s been shot and dying. Jo is trying
her best to be brave and look after the Doctor but she doesn’t understand how
timelord bodies work and when the plant life starts t suck the air out of the
Tardis she runs outside to try and find help (little knowing that the Tardis
has infinite rooms and probably quite a lot of air, while The Doctor’s body is
just doing a timelord thing and will recover if left alone) despite being on a
jungle planet full of plants about to eat her. The rest of the story never
lives up to this promise (the Doctor’s simply placed himself in a coma – shame
he didn’t tell Jo that really instead of wasting breath asking her to
tape-record everything – the plants don’t seem to like the taste of 70s
mini-skirts and we never see the Master for the rest of the story) but for ooh
about half an episode there this looks as if it’s going to be one of the
greats. Significantly it’s also the one part of the story, perhaps any 3rd
Doctor story, that we know for definite is Terrance’s work, cobbled together in
a hurry after ‘Frontier In Space’ over-ran and had to be changed at the last
minute when the monster came out looking too stupid even for Dr Who and which
finally ties up with Terry’s start somewhere around ten minutes in. The Doctor
recovers mighty quickly though, even for him, which rather undoes all that
jeopardy as early as the end of episode one (at least when Steven got stabbed
at the end of ‘The Myth Makers’ his
being delirious stayed a plot point for a lot longer).
Previous ‘Frontier
In Space’
next ‘The Green Death’
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