The Mutants: Ranking - 217

 The Mutants

(Season 9, Dr 3 with Jo, 8/4/1972-13/5/1972, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terence Dicks, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin,  director: Christopher Barry) 

'Sorry I can't write right now. The planet's just gone into retrograde and I've turned into a cosmic space squirrel!'

Ranking: 217

 

 Generally speaking the Pertwee era is the one where the show has its hearts in all the right places, as pretty much every story seeks to tackle bigger ideas than just another alien runaround. This means that the plots get bonus plus points from me for trying even when the stories can be a bit bland and the execution sometimes a little dodgy. No story sums that up better than ‘The Mutants’, one of those stories that ticks all the right boxes about morality and prejudice and how we treat people who aren’t like ourselves, while presenting us with yet another mad scientist with another outrageous accent, nearly three whole episodes of complete padding and dressing up a monster to look like a giant dust-mite. The poor ‘Mutants’ gets a bit forgotten by fans too, nestled between gaudier, more flash-bang-whallop stories like ‘The Sea Devils’ and ‘The Time Monster’ to the point where it’s never mentioned except as ‘that one nobody ever remembers’. In fact it’s not even the best remembered Dr Who story to be officially called ‘The Mutants’ (although I always call the first Dalek story ‘The Daleks’ because it fits it better). Like a lot of the 3rd Doctor stories though (in fact all of them bar ‘Monster Of Peladon’ maybe) the good outweighs the bad and all the ‘right’ things you’d expect from this series are there, albeit in a six-part two-and-a-half-hour story where they play out very very slooooowly.

That’s interesting because it’s the opposite of how it’s writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin usually work. They have a reputation within Dr Who circles for creating hugely imaginative adventures that are full of whiz bang action with bright colourful aliens in primary or secondary colours trying to take over the Earth in lots of budget=blowing ways with seventeen sub-plots in tightly packed four part stories that don’t leave you much to think about afterwards but are enjoyable when they’re on. Producer Barry Letts, seeing that stories like ‘The Claws Of Axos’ needed at least another hour to slow down and make sense, sensibly decided to give them the season’s six parter. The writers though have taken the time to look at what everyone else on Who was doing and how they used the futuristic setting to comment on things that had gone wrong in the present, coming up with a story straight out of the Malcolm Hulke book of racism and misunderstandings instead which plays out very slowly and mostly in shades of muddy brown (oddly enough Hulke’s story this same season is ‘The Sea Devils’, a bright and colourful effects-heavy romp with creatures who don’t speak near-impossible to put out with a BBC budget, which is just like a Baker and Martin story!) The one thing that does sound like the pair’s usual work is the optimism that somehow, despite nine years’ worth of stories usually to the contrary, the effects department can somehow create the impossible on a tiny budget, with an angelic being of huge power that can fly (though even then its an effect held back to the final episode. When it turns out to be a man wearing fake foil wings while a torch is shone on his face). 

We’re in the 30th century and nothing really has changed in how man treats, well, sort-of man even though Earth itself has changed a lot (this is another 3^rd Dr story where we’ve polluted our planet by burning fossil fuels, long before such ideas were mainstream). There’s a war between Solonian colonisers and the local mutt population, only it’s not really much of a war: the poor Mutts were there first and own the land but have no means to fight back, so the colonisers just swan in and take it regardless (the original draft calls them ‘munts’, both because it was rude in the original Zimbabwean – where it means ‘people’ as in ‘not like us’ and used by the blacks of Africa as a derogatory comment against whites – and sounded a bit too much like a slang word , which rhymes with Jeremy Hunt). The colonisers aren’t wicked and evil men, it’s just that the people high up who set the rules have never actually met one and they’re in the way so they’re seen as expendable, victims of the unstoppable machine of capitalist society rather than alien invasion. It’s a little like the Wild West, only the cowboys are men in suits and the horses are space-shuttles capable of covering huge distances and, like most Dr Whos, the oppressed Indians somehow win on points by the end.

The big problem with ‘The Mutants’ isn’t the ambition though but the fact that it ended up slightly muddled, with four very different sets of creatives all pulling in slightly different directions as – rather fittingly given the story‘s main theme – the story kept changing. The original basic idea started with producer Barry Letts who’d got chatting to the writers and talked about the early days of Who when he’d been a prospective writer hustling for scripts that kept being rejected. One of these, submitted for Hartnell’s final year in 1966, had been titled ‘The Mutant’ about a planet that made the animals on it change with every season, only each season would span a length of hundreds of years because being that far away from its sun would create such impossible changes in the environment that the animals would have to evolve hugely or die. ‘That’s interesting’ said Baker and Martin who asked to use the idea as a starting point for their next script. Only soon after Martin had another idea: his neighbour in Bristol, that he’d known without really knowing for years, was moving out to emigrate. When Martin asked where he commented that he was going to South Africa to ‘be a kind of master’ and ‘teach some sense’ into the natives there.  Martin was appalled, at having lived so close to a racist all these years without knowing it (while sitting at home trying to write incredibly leftie scifi stories about tolerance at that!) and at the fact that apartheid was still a thing in South Africa as late as the 1970s, with a hierarchical system that kept white and brown skinned people apart. Bristling at such injustice and shocked that he hadn’t heard about it, he called in on his writing partner to recount his odd experience who said they could draw attention to it by putting it in their Dr Who story. ‘The Mutants’ then became diluted from the original idea, metamorphosing into a story about a world with elongated seasons that had been colonised by a bunch of humans who treated the native population as animals, enjoying hunting them for sport and segregating them on their own planet. The script was duly finished and handed into script editor Terrance Dicks, who – no doubt expecting a fun but impossible script – blanched. Dicks didn’t see the apartheid connotations at first. His assumption was that Baker and Martin were poking fun at the decaying British empire, which had once stretched round the globe but was now having great problems keeping the union of four countries together – this is the era of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ in Northern Ireland and politically sensitive to say the least. Dicks assumed that the writers were writing directly about Britain’s bloody removal from the partition of India and the confusion and riots that caused (see ‘Demons Of The Punjab’, the historical that weirdly, is less historically accurate over what really happened than this story set in the 30^th century) Dicks was old school, admitting in interviews that it was his belief that the British were a good thing for most of the countries they invaded, that they brought civilisation and resources to planets that would have struggled without them and that if the story had gone out as written they’d have had hordes of elderly colonels surrounding BBC TV centre with blunderbusses. So Dicks diluted it, making it more about one bad man with all the power and his subordinates who knew he was wrong but didn’t have the power to stop him. For director Christopher Barry it was a different story again, a contemporary piece about Britain in Rhodesia  (now Zimbabwe) and how a UK-supported prime minister officially in charge of just the ‘white’ part of the country started bossing ‘black’ people around, causing them to create their own independent state and kick The British out. Which he hated: it was Barry’s belief that Dr Who was there to entertain not to make political comments, so he diluted even what was left, toning it down in the plot until it became about a general whose a bit shouty being a bit naughty. So that’s four different variations on where this story is going, all of them similar but slightly contradictory; no wonder it all turned out a bit messy.

The original idea, though, is sound and one already put to good use in many scifi books, so much so it’s a wonder it hadn’t appeared in Who before. John Wyndham’s 1955 novel ‘The Chrysalids’ might not get all the attention ‘The Day Of the Trffids’ and ‘The Kraken Wakes’ do but its probably inspired more books, a tale of a mutant in the future desperately trying to keep his malignant growth quiet while the church who fought the atomic war that caused the jutation hunts down his friends and kills them (the mutants end the story with far more practical special powers: telepathy that allows them to talk between each other. Like ‘Planet Of the Ood’ its most likely a reference to slavery and the ‘hidden language’ of song that kept their culture alive which their ‘Masters’ didn’t understand). Apartheid in any form, whatever the species or reason, is a horrible concept, the idea of telling people where to go and not to mingle the antithesis of Dr Who’s belief in equality, multi-culturalism and freedom amongst all species and exactly the sort of thing the series should have been doing, whatever the Director thought. The fact so many different people saw so many different allegories going on in this story only shows what a universal theme Baker and Martin had stumbled on. It’s actually very in keeping with where Dr Who had started, in the story sort-of called ‘The Mutants funnily enough, about the dangers of racism and xenophobia and how quickly it can turn into genocide when left unchecked. Had we got that story the writers really wanted to tell it would have been a really strong, powerful piece I think, about the horrors that happen when the wrong people get promotion and there’s nobody left to challenge them, with the very Dr Who message that if we protect democracies everywhere rather than dictatorships then (hopefully) there will always be somebody to put a brake on the most extreme people. There’s the very Dr Who message, too, that you should be wary of meddling of things you don’t understand and trying to control the outcome of creatures with free will: the Doctor was himself put on trial in Dicks’ ‘The War Games’ for meddling and while he changes his mind a lot (it’s hard to equate the 1^st Doctor pleading with Barbara to let The Aztecs run their course with the 2^nd Doctor wiping monsters out during invasions in set periods of history) mostly Dr Who is a series about free will, where people only get help when they ask for it. In which case I think this story is cleverer than it’s ever given credit for. At the start of the story the timelords get The Doctor to go on this mission for them, knowing that he can interfere where they can’t and that he’ll be chomping at the bit to go anywhere. That’s what all fans assume but, could it be that they’re subtly teaching him a lesson to ponder over in his exile? They know The Doctor is going to interfere and take down The Marshall, but he’s only doing what they criticise The Doctor for doing, getting involved with something that doesn’t concern him. Left to their own devices the mutants can more than take care of themselves after metamorphosing even when they needed help. Really the timelords have sent one meddler to undo the work of another meddler. Is this a lecture? A way to make The Doctor see the error of his ways? Are they already planning to send him after Omega and want to test how he reacts to basically having his faults painted out to him? If so sadly The Doctor doesn’t seem to pick up on this message.

Very cleverly, too, the writers incorporated Letts’ starting point by making this story all about transformation: civilisations come and go, especially in a series with time travel, and the countries who are top of the food chain won’t be the next so we should treat all places and people with compassion. No civilisations travel in a straight line from nobodies to somebodies and stay there: the idea of 1970s England, humbled by power cuts and strikes, invading another country halfway round the world and telling them how to behave was laughable. The fact that they would have done it to another culture, one that was probably not far behind us by the 1970s, seemed wrong (or at least it did to Baker and Martin, if not Dicks). All cultures have their own speed and it’s not a race – well, it only is in the sense that you need an army to keep the bad guys out anyway. Plus by now the universe or at least Earth should have cycled out of their primal prejudices: this is a universe so big and Earth so small that it would have made humans come together by now not start wars over something as small and innocuous as skin colour: it’s the Marshall’s way of thinking that’s out of date come the 30^th century no matter how many Marshalls were around in 1972 and living next door to writers.  Besides, what great culture do the newcomers bring? For the most part it seems to consist of the locals being hunted for sport, paperwork and shouting. What they have to offer might be technology to them but the natives of this planet don’t need it (most of it is adapting the planet to them – while they’re happy to adapt with the planet) and most of it is grey and drab, like most technological, the opposite to their bright colours. They haven’t come to help but to harm, whatever they call it. It’s one of the great ironic twists in all of Who that (spoilers) the Solonians, treated for so long by the conquering officials and paper-pushers of skybase as lesser beings who mutate into giant insects, turn into beings of immense power with another change of the cycles who can wipe them out as soon as look at them (but don’t because they’ve evolved past violence and revenge). It’s hugely satisfying as endings go, an ending that doesn’t simply have The Doctor press a button on his sonic screwdriver or point K9’s blaster at an invading monster but has him help the mutants stay alive long enough so that they can get justice for themselves. One sub-plot the writers were made to take out would have this point even more cleverly: you might ask, watching this story, why the invaders want this planet at all: its dead miserable and the Solonians aren’t likely to pay taxes in mutt form (Oh I can just imagine the disability forms they’d be made to fill in with their claws saying they can no longer work due to the planet’s orbit shift and its affect on their genetics – this lot of bureaucratic losers are too close to the DWP as it is!)  The answer is that they wanted it for a world where they could clone their people. This is, of course, the opposite to the Solonians who live there and breed naturally, who transform and progress; cloning means staying still, repeating yourself over and over. This only shores up the arrogance of the colonisers who think their way is the only way and too good a point to take out – especially given how empty most of the ideas that replace that idea is.

‘The Mutants’ is also a great play on identity, with this the most Kafkaesque of Dr Who stories. There you are, living your best life, sure in who you are, when bureaucracy comes down and tells you that you’re something you’re not. Far from being human you’re an insect. You get told it so many times that you actually become one, all mis-shapen and ugly. As far as your colonisers are concerned that’s you pigeon-holed and you become cattle, an irritant in the way of them living their best life on your planet.  But the people who seek to conquer you don’t really know you. People are more than just the random bits of DNA, they change and transform and grow and adapt. In a series that’s all about change, where the lead actor becomes a different person every few years, it’s a great message to never underestimate other people. There’s a theme, too, of holding on to your identity even when other people come along to try and take it from you. Britain, more than most countries, is a land where people have invaded people over and over again. We started as multiple different counties beating each other up for control and power, each with their own cultural heritage and some with their own languages, moved on to England and Wales thrashing each other, then England and Scotland, then England and Ireland. And that’s without The Vikings, Romans and Normans laying claims to Britain. Yet still we remain British and throughout it all though the land’s original culture never died out: you can go to any county  and see things peculiar only to that region, while Wales still teaches Welsh in some schools (certainly it did back in 1972). The original intention in the script, sadly one of the many things that got diluted, was to point out how this was true for the colonisers too, who all had thick regional accents.The other clever thing about the script is that not all of the colonisers are the same either. It would be easy to make this a full on good versus evil story, where the locals are heroes and the new arrivals killers, but Baker and Martin are subtler than that. It’s The Marshall who swaggers around the planet giving orders, a character the writers based on Mussolini, so sure of his own brilliance that he doesn’t contemplate for one second that he might be wrong about that. Like many bullies, though, this show of apparent strength is really to cover up a weakness, the fact that he knows he’s barely keeping control of his workers and who knows they’d be better at this job than him but doesn’t want to give up the money or promotion (or the shouting). His underlings, though, know this too. They mutter behind closed doors, wince when he comes up with something stupid and try their best to do their job kindly. This story is split pretty evenly between characters who see the mutants and go ‘awww, poor dears’ and those who go ‘scum!!!’ (in case you’re wondering we know which side Pertwee would probably have gone: during the location scenes he befriended a mouse that had lost its parents and tucked it in his jacket, just like Worzel Gummidge will, before taking it home, naming it ‘Solos’ after the ‘planet’ he found it on). Nevertheless, though, ultimately they have to obey instructions because that’s how the rule on this planet works: a handful of good people aren’t a match for a single bad one with all the power.   

Unfortunately a lot of that good works gets lost with a story that doesn’t transform fast enough to keep your interest. So much of ‘The Mutants’ ends up just people running around and being captured and escaping (usually Jo, who turns out to be a great lockpick, a character trait sadly underused in her other stories). There are no sub-plots to hold our interest (you think for the longest time The Master is going to appear because this is totally one of his type stories but no, there’s no equivalent twist of whose really behind it all), no sense of something bigger going on in this planet and three episodes that make it sag in the middle more than if the mutant had transformed into an Abzorbaloff.  Odd to say but for the only time a Baker-martin story needs more imagination in here, not less. By rights you should be rooting for the innocent Solonians like never before, innocent beings who haven’t got the first clue about the politics going on above their heads, but they’re a singularly drippy bunch. The writer only really gives us one to get to know well, Ky, and reckons that giving Jo another romantic sub-plot where she falls in love with an alien will be enough to make us care (as well as showing off Jo’s greatest characteristic, her kind and open heart) but it doesn’t: he just comes across as yet another alien trying to get into her knickers and she comes across as a floozy ready to snog any alien who asks her, however unsuitable. At least when Prince Peladon fell for her it felt natural and even Bill in ‘The Claws Of Axos’ was exactly the sort of person who’d assume he was in with a chance and swoop poor innocent Jo off her feet, but he’s not her type and she’s older and smarter now, less of a girl making goo-goo eyes at all the men and more a character in her own right standing on her own two feet. Cotton and Stubbs are a good idea, a Holmesian double act who take the mickey out of their work like two sniggering schoolboys in the back row, but they’re not as funny as they think they are and don’t really come off on screen. In fact the supporting cast are pretty ropey all round, with actors playing bored crewman who ware always moaning so well that it’s hard to tell whether they’re brilliant actors or bored witless in real life.

Cotton, especially is a mistake: I can see the director’s good intentions as he read a script about racism in the future and who thus decided to cast a Jamaican actor in the role, making a comment on how what seemed ‘normal’ racism in 1970s Britain is long gone in a thousand years’ time. But the writers were being subtler than that: Cotton was written as a Cockney, a Southerner who made friends with a Northerner and all his dialogue was written to match (there were parts specified as being for Americans and Australian too as if all these once colonised regions were working together; instead all the cast ended up being English). Giving that dialogue to poor Rick James to stumble through, when even other English people often don’t understand, feels cruel. Even calling a character who may have had slave descendents ‘Cotton’ is pushing it in the taste lines quite honestly.  Jaeger, named for the writers’ friend and the actor they thought might play him (Frederick Jaeger from ‘The Savages’, who sadly was busy) could have been interesting as a man who isn’t cruel so much as completely uncomprehending than lower life forms can have feelings, based loosely on Joseph Mengel, the Nazi scientists who undertook experiments on work camp prisoners he considered less than human. Professor Sondergaard is a great part on paper, a rare Dr Who scientist whose not mad so much but enlightened, prepared to sacrifice his life for justice to the Mutts - but then actor John Hollis apparently saw the ‘prejudice’ theme and played with him an outrageous accent just shy of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and all subtly is lost. I know why it’s there (this end of Europe are still seen as the ‘enemy’ in 1972 however unfairly but their ‘crimes’ are long gone by the 30^th century) but there are scenes especially where these two characters with outrageous accents have to talk to each other where it’s nearly impossible to work out what’s going on. The Marshall, too, is a stereotypical baddy who doesn’t get to d much except shout and never feels like the threat he ought to be. We need to believe him when he says he’ll blow the planet up with missiles, but he comes across as a substitute teacher, one his men laugh at behind his back and who has no natural authority without his badge.

There are problems that land squarely with the writers too though. Some of the science in this story makes even an ignoramus like me’s head spin while I’m surprised the likes of Sydney Newman and Kit Pedler weren’t surrounding TV centre with pitchforks. To take just as mall sample (the ‘About Time’ books have more, lots lots more): there are holes in the wall to the outside vacuum of space that don’t seem to do any damage, air on a planet’s surface that changes between being toxic and breathable from character to character (and not just species to species but everyone), the gas masks that everyone carries but forget to wear and the particle reverser that not only defies all science and logic but is pointing the wrong way (the soil would end up in the air and suffocate anybody anyway). The biggest problem, though is the dialogue. In terms of ideas this is easily Baker and Martin’s best story, an intricate and complex web of deceit and prejudice that can’t be solved in the usual way and where the  rules are all topsy-turvy from how they should be. In practice it’s a world where everyone declaims at everyone else rather than talks and a story where every other sentence is accompanied by three exclamation marks!!! (My favourites: ‘Die overlord die!!!’ and ‘You are a fool…A fool!!!!!’)  Nothing feels natural about this world and it needs to for us to care about it and if you don’t care about a story like this then the message won’t work. And boy do the people on this planet talk: the scenes in this story are some of the longest without cuts in the series, as one set of characters talks to another set of characters, then walks through a door to have it out with another set of characters, at length. Even The Doctor isn’t his usual self this story, a beat behind everyone else and having long drawn out conversations  without him actually doing much (he helps Sondergaard tinker a bit with his already built machine and tries to make The Marshall, unsuccessfully, change his mind: that’s it). Almost nothing happens physically in this story: there’s a rebellion near the beginning, a bit of locking up, some business in a cave and the transformation at the end when Ky turns into a big hippie and kickstarts 500 years of peace. Hopefully.

And boy is that not worth waiting for, even in an era of the series that demands your patience more than most. For five whole episodes writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin have been taking into account everything their bosses have told them and come up with a mature, serious look at big themes that could be made on time and on a BBC budget, rather than an epic colourful fantasy full of visual effects that would be hard to pull off in Hollywood now (it probably helped that the ,ain idea was producer Barry Letts’ and the story was one he’d been half-trying to write since the Troughton era). And then, in episode six, the Mutts mutate into angels, levitate, fly through walls and communicate across time and space all while turning into translucent other-worldly supernatural beings. In 1972. On a Dr Who budget of sixpence. It looks like some dodgy CSO effects, a torch with a multi-colour beam, a bit of string and the actor waving his arms around. Because that’s, in all likelihood, what it was. That’s not enough material for a single episode, never mind six. I’d love to say the novelisation was the best way to get the full flavour of this story, the way it is with so many other elongated slow-burning episodes, but that only shows up how there isn’t enough plot to fill up the usual 180 pages. You can’t help feel that, what with everyone diluting the original concept, far too much of it got taken out with nothing left to put back in place. As forward-thinking as this story is in terms of race, too, at times the lack of gender equality leaves a lot to be desired (Jo is the only female character in the entire story and while it’s a good story for her character for the most part she’s still basically running around following her love interest and doing what he tells her). Other Baker-Martin stories tend to do this too (Sarah’s the only female character in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ for instance) but it feels worse in this story somehow, with more characters running around to begin with.

It doesn’t help either that this story is so static. The spaceship is one of the most boring ever seen on Who, full of drab grey corridors and rooms that all look the same. We spent roughly two-thirds of the story there with nothing to look at except the boring wallpaper and the boring costumes (which look like every other spacefleet ever assembled). The high points of the story by far are when we finally get outside and end up in  Bromley's Chislehurst caves and the nearby Bluewater quarry (now a shopping mall) which are exactly the sort of place Who always films in but more cramped and dark and hard to see than exotic. Although it’s a wonder they got any filming done there at all after a number of mishaps: this was filmed during the power cuts of the ‘three day week’, a planned early start down the caves going down the drain when the power went off and the runner’s alarm clock failed to ring, so he didn’t wake the rest of the crew and cast on time. Then the lights failed due to the power-cut, leaving the cast scrabbling around in the dark.  No sooner were they back on when there was a lightning strike that temporarily knocked out the generator. The costumes are just boring space designs, the makeup too from a designer in Joan Barrett who’d never worked on Who before and played things a little safe (she went straight from school to Monty Python and on to Dr Who – Pertwee himself loved pointing out how similar the opening shot of this story is to the ‘It’s man who would rise from the swamps, ragged and torn, to declare the opening titles most weeks). The Mutts themselves don’t quite work either – they’re too scary to be cute and too cute to be scary (though that didn’t stop the head of drama telling an incredulous Barry Letts how sweet she thought they were for him to snap back ‘you were supposed to be frightened!’) They look too much like men in costumes (john Scott Martin, taking the week off from being inside a Dalek; no wonder they walk so oddly – after all that time on Skaro sets he’s forgotten how to use his feet).Throw in the fact that the story’s one and only major special effect, when Ky turns full butterfly in episode six, is ridiculous and you have lots of reasons for thinking that the production team were out from the beginning to botch up the writers’ ideas as best they could. In pure terms of looks The Mutants’ is one of the worst stories of the 1970s, alongside the rubber models of ‘The Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’.

‘The Mutants’ is a sometimes truly awful piece of television, where nothing much happens and most of what does looks bad, but that’s different to saying its truly awful Dr Who. This story feels’ right’ for the series, in a way that true turkeys like ‘The Monsters Of Peladon’ and ‘The Dominators’ don’t and when left to their own devices to write their hearts out Baker and Martin shine on a story close to their hearts, one about exploitation and corruption and prejudice that’s the very beating heart of what Dr Who is all about. It’s sometimes hard to believe that this is the same writing team behind the colourful but empty cartoons of ‘Claws of Axos’ and ‘The Invisible Enemy’. You can tell that they care about this one, that they’re right there with The Doctor trying to right wrongs, rather than throwing wacky ideas at a script and trying to earn a wage packet.  It’s everyone else who messes up: if Terrance was really that fussed about how colonialism was being handled then he should have let this story through then written a diatribe of his own that said the opposite, that’s how clashes of ideals were always handled on Dr Who in the past. Barry, usually so good at matching personnel together and knowing who would work together, should have got wind of what the director was up to and quietly moved him to a different story more to his tastes (he’d have added more zip to ‘The Time Monster’, a rare Pertwee story with no politics at all). The actors maybe should have had less fun at rehearsals and treated this story as a big dramatic powerplay and treated the mutants as if they were just other humans, not actors in bad costumes. There are quite a few stories in the 3^rd Doctor era that ‘got away’ but they’re usually because of one major flaw: the idea that we needed a sequel to ‘Curse Of Peladon’ that undid all its good work, the marmalade-dipped Gel Guards in ‘The Three Doctors’, ‘The Invasion Of The Wonky Dinosaurs That Have Seen Better Days’, ‘The Planet Of The Plastic Spiders’.  ‘The Mutants’, though, is one of those stories where everything seemed to go wrong at once leaving even the best intentions rather muffled. 

Certainly fans couldn’t agree on whether this was meant to be a ‘scary’ episode or a ‘thoughtful’ episode as it didin’t quite come across as either, while no less a thinker than Salman Rushdie completely missed the point when he included this of all stories in ‘The Satanic Verses’, as one of his characters watches it on TV and reflects how prejudiced people are against things that look ugly and how awful it is that something like that should be allowed on television to encourage racism (you’d think if he was going to pay enough attention to put it in his 1988 book he’d have at least hung around till the conclusion in episode six; the text describes the mutants as ‘bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called Mutilasians; children's television appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war’. Quite). ‘The Mutants’ is also something of a lost opportunity what with this being an era when the Tardis spent most of the time stuck in the 1970s/80s./whatever era UNIT is set in this week and leaving Earth was automatically special that this story doesn’t feel more, well, special. Ironically, though, perhaps the biggest problem with this story is that it feels stuck in a rut with elements we’ve seen before in Who thousands of times not done as well as usual. For a plot that’s basically all about how mutations and evolution in general is something to embrace and not be scared of, that’s more of a problem than it would normally be. Somewhere out there though, in some parallel universe where Dr Who was never taken off air and I wrote my review of the original unimproved un-mutated version of this story while wearing an eyepatch, ‘The Mutants’ is one of the all-time greats, seen as a powerful tale about the awful things man does to those he has power over and how we should be thankful that the ‘monsters’ who have power over us are far more benign. In some parallel universe this story helped ease the tensions in India,  healed the rifts in Rhodesia and is taught in schools about the dangers of having an empire while its writers won a Nobel peace award. Sadly in this universe they’re a bit miffed at how this story turns out on screen but are instead invited back to have another go with a tenth anniversary party filled with wobbly jelly monsters and anti-matter custard where forever after they’re forever known as Who’s ‘silly’ writers good for a laugh and the people to go for when the series is getting too heavy.   

POSITIVES + Well, at least someone’s working hard. The model shots of colony world Solos and particularly the spaceship Skybase One that orbits it are triumphs for the model team. They don’t get many opportunities to do much in space in 1972 when The Doctor is mostly exiled to Earth so they really go to town here and it shows. If only as much care had gone into the insides of the ship as the outsides!

NEGATIVES – The music (if you can call it that). Tristram Carey hasn’t worked on Dr Who since his rather good score for ‘The Gunfighters’ (‘The ballad Of The last hance Saloon’ notwithstanding) and after watching the new-look series decided that as it has a modern space age feel he would give it a space age score. Oh dear. What sounds a promising idea in theory ends up sounding like a hyperactive toddler whose had too many sweets let loose on a synth kettledrum that nobody knows how to turn off. For two hours. Even coming straight after ‘The Sea Devils’ (where Malcolm Clarke delivers a similarly out-there score) it sounds wrong in so many ways, distracting from the mood rather than enhancing it to the point where I almost wished for Murray Gold to come in and tell me what I was supposed to be feeling. This was Tristram’s last score for Dr Who. I can’t think why.

BEST QUOTE: ‘Grey cities linked by grey highways across a grey desert. Slag, ash and clinker, the fruits of technology’

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