Pyramids Of Mars: Ranking - 179

 Pyramids Of Mars

(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane,25/10/1975-15/11/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script writer: Robert Holmes, writer: Stephen Harris (aka Robert Holmes and Lewis Griefer), director: Paddy Russell) 

Rank: 179

'𓀓👽💤𓀁𓀄𓀒𓀠𓀡𓀫𓀿🌎🤯💢 

Ah the 1970s. A time when men were men, women were women, people who were in the middle were neither the way they always were across history but weren’t allowed to say that in public yet, Venusians did aikido, Doctors came with long floppy scarves and Sutekh was an immortal Egyptian God in Human form rather than a big ol’ CGI dog. Amazing to think that the gap between when ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ was made and now is really not far off the gap between ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ was made and when it was set, in 1911. Why 1911? Nobody quite knows including the man who wrote it, Bob Holmes, who inherited a draft script by his friend Lewis Griefer, keeping only the name and date (as too much research had gone into the story’s costumes to stop). The first showdown between The Doctor and Sutekh, it’s the Mummy’s curse story with scifi overtones, the one where Tom Baker and Sarah Jane Smith face down a giant mummy and an alien buried in a pyramid who turns out to have God-like powers. It looks gorgeous, beautifully filmed in the lush grounds of Mick Jagger’s property ‘Stargroves’, with everything designed to lodge firmly in the memory of a generation of children who saw it the first time (and there were a lot of them too: the omnibus repeat got 13.7 million in 1976) and a lot of influential people too, not least Russell T Davies who threw all sorts of references to ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ in his early work both Who (‘New Adventures’ book ‘Damaged Goods’) and non-Who (it’s the unlikely soundtrack to a notorious gay sex scene in ‘Queer As Folk’), so it was inevitable he would bring Sutekh back at some point, despite apparently being killed off one and for all at the end of this story (see ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’/‘The Empire Of Death’). Ask most fans and they’ll rank ‘Mars’ as somewhere near the top of the Dr Who period, full as it is of so many things people remember from Dr Who’s most famous era: a vengeful God with a creepy voice, alien robot mummies, lots of horror and gore and Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen sparking off each other like never before.  To many fans it’s the best single story DW ever did and pharoah nuff as it were – it does feature one of the best Doctors, one of the best companions and one of the best baddies after all.

As a fully signed up Egyptologist and Whovian (though some people don’t like that term. Whoover? Whore? What is the proper term these days?) this story sounds right up my street. It’s certainly not bad: the regulars give their all, Gabriel Woolf’s whispery turn as Sutekh is why sofas were made for hiding behind despite being in a mask throughout and only really having his voice to work with and as 1970s production values go I’ll happily soak up all the mummy costumes, model shots of pyramids and alien spaceships (even if, for once, the modern series did mummy effects quite a bit better). I confess, though, I’ve always felt there was something slightly hollow about this story, that it doesn’t give you the extras Dr Who usually gives you especially in this golden era. There are no shiny b-plots, no little bits of magic dialogue to make things sparkle(despite being written by Robert Holmes under a pseudonym whose usually so strong on that sort of thing), no twists or turns to keep the thing going. Like the pyramid itself this story only has one point throughout and that’s a straight fight between the Doctor and Sutekh; every scene pretty much revolves around this, without the usual Dr Who storytelling brilliance of detail, background and motivation. It’s just a bad guy who’s been asleep for several centuries who wants to take over the world, stopped by a good guy in a long scarf who wants Humans to be free. Even this basic story is recycled from Egyptian folklore, a little too obviously: there really was a war between Set (aka Sutekh) and Horus (Osiruses’ father and thus the founder of the Osirians, Sutekh’s home race) that ended up with the former being imprisoned for 7000 years. As far as I know he never did arrive in England in 1911, but an awful lot of Egyptian texts revolve around the fact that he will one day and what that might be like so it’s not that big a leap to make it a Dr Who plot. It’s a good job copyright ends seventy years after the death of a writer in fact – 2-3000 years is probably long enough for Bob Holmes to think he could get away with it.

Now that’s not unique to this story. A lot of the Hinchcliffe era stories are recycled from some other source and this is no different to the other popular stories around it that riff on Frankenstein or Dracula or Sherlock Holmes or (endlessly) Quatermass. However, this one seems even more of a cheat than usual. There are large parts of the story that seem so close to ‘mummy curse’ stories that it feels as if you’ve seen them before, while Holmes seems to go out of his way to include every cliché around: the tomb, the curse, the vengeful God, even the creepy music (there’s a fun bit in the first episode when you hear an organ and assume it’s the incidental music playing, but no – it’s Namin, trying to raise the dead). Other parts are taken wholesale from zombie films: the lumbering mummies walking around stiffly without any thought except murder. While other parts happily rip off Dr Who (what is ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ if not a mummy’s curse story? While even Sarah comments on how similar the ‘riddles protecting the tomb’ sub-plot is to the Exxillon city in ‘Death To The Daleks’. Which is a particularly odd bit of dialogue, given that she never went to the city herself. Presumably The Doctor told her about it, but still).

You can forgive Holmes for recycling, though, given the huge time constraints in writing this story, the script editor cobbling the story together at the last minute after Greifer’s fell through (and picking the pseudonym ‘Stephen Harris’ at random, as script editors couldn’t be credited for stories back then, or it would look like nepotism at the BBC commissioning themselves, a big no no – though they all did it to some extent). Though using the Ancient Egypt angle was always Holmes’ idea, by his own admission the writer knew next to nothing about it: he was always far more interested in Who’s future stories than the past and happily did away without the historicals for most of his time as script editor. However he also recognised that one from time to time was good for variety and he knew his friend Lewis had extensive knowledge of Egyptian history to draw from that he’d never really used on TV (Griefer’s career had been spent mostly writing crime dramas, with the odd bit of work on the side like ‘The Colonel’ episode of ‘The Prisoner’, the one with the sped up learning machine that everyone forgets; by his own admission Griefer didn’t know much scifi and had never seen Dr Who but Holmes said that was alright because that’s where he came in). It seemed like a good plan, a kind favour to an old friend who was proven to be reliable on all sorts of shows. Only life started to get in the way: Griefer finally got his dream job, working as a lecturer in Egyptology in Tel Aviv, his day job working with facts not leaving him much time for fiction. He still wanted to work on it, though things became difficult given how slow the post was back in 1975 and how many letters seemed to go missing. The production team began to get worried but Holmes vouched for his friend and held out for him. Then poor Lewis got sick with prostrate cancer and ended up in hospital, too weak to work. Holmes continued to stick his neck out, assured that the scripts would arrive any day now.

When they did arrive they weren’t quite what he was expecting, written as they were through a haze of painkillers and a long way from the outline they’d discussed. Lewis had been asked to come up with a plot that used the real backdrop of Egyptian Gods as aliens, with all sorts of vague scifi stuff thrown in to explain it in a malleable plot. But that wasn’t Lewis’ background: he’s created an intricate layered story about a ‘crime’ of a stolen sarcophagus and seeds within it that were used by a Professor Fawzi to take off to Mars and terraform it into a new planet; something Holmes knew from experience would be hard to do visually on telly and would take centuries (this is before the Steven Moffat ‘timelines jumping all over the place’ formula became normal rather than something weird that might confuse the kids). The Egyptian God-aliens would return and, not happy about how they were being treated, would destroy our moon in revenge, which would change continuity rather (he didn’t even make it an egg! See ‘Kill The Moon’ for more lunar looniness). The plot now revolved around pyramids and spooky invisible ‘psi energy’, while the last episode especially ignored the other three and pretty much started over again, leaving lots of elements unresolved. There were lots of unexplained (and expensive) supernatural elements too: bandages that worked on their own to strangle people, Gods that could turns into animals at will and the eye of Horus bringing back multiple Gods (Barry Letts, still overseeing scripts, suggested they might be an old intergalactic federation, like in the Peladon stories, something which stayed for a redraft).  Holmes worried that children wouldn’t be able to follow the red herrings and clues and lose interest, while Lewis had either ignored or misunderstood the characters of the regulars and what Holmes wanted him to do with them (there remains in the BBC archives a wry letter from Bob to Lewis about killing off the Brigadier in a cliffhanger   that left him mummified: ‘Please don’t leave our poor old Brigadier in suspended animation for eternity – we need him for future stories!’) In the end the re-writes needed were too much so Holmes knew he had to start again from scratch. It was too late to commission anyone else and the costumes and sets were all ready to go, so reluctantly Holmes paid off his old friend and armed himself with lots of coffee and an encyclopaedia of Egyptian history (although he got lucky: director Paddy Russell, ready to start work on another Who story and rather horrified at what a half-finished state it was in, was a keen historian herself and suggested lots of ideas that plugged the gaps; if ever a director deserved a co-credit on a Who story it was her on this). 

In short, if I had to write a Dr Who story to order in a short space of time because nothing else was working and I had no ideas then this is exactly what I’d do too: look for a suitable text that already exists, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and embellish it. The entire story is lifted from the Egyptian myth of megalomaniac Sutekh destroying the Osirian homeworld for his own petty material ends and either his father or his brother Horus – the texts are unclear – seeking revenge by banishing him for 7000 years as killing him would make him a murderer too (Sutekh is a bit like Trump. Except for the ‘God’ part).  Moreover you choose one that’s in the news (it’s amazing we didn’t have a ‘Time Monster’ style Pertwee story about the tomb in 1972, actually, given that it was the 50^th anniversary, artefacts were ‘on tour’ outside their British museum adopted home for the first time and Tut tat was everywhere). In fact I’d have leaned even more into the myth: as much as Homes officially rejected Lewis’ script for straying too far from his idea of the Egyptian Gods we still don’t really get that much sense of the background and what the Egyptians were really like. There’s so much that could have been done with this idea – not least the link to ‘Mars’ in the title, honoured by Holmes as some publicity had already been sued for the new season with that name, which is barely mentioned. I’d love to have had more about the history of Sutekh and his kind: did they have a population on Mars? (Are they the ancestors of the more war-like Ice Warriors? They do have the same lumbering walk as the mummies). It always surprises me, for a story about Ancient Egypt, how little there is of Egypt in the story: one sarcophagus and an Egyptian in a fez. This isn’t a Tutankhamen style vault of riches.  There’s no reason why this story as finished is set in Britain (though Griefer’s original script’s first scene was a runaround in the British Museum, something Homes knew they would never ever give permission for – still no idea why he made it 1911 though). We don’t see any evidence of Sutekh’s special powers either, beyond a few gruesome deaths and his face breaking through the Tardis barriers (if a villain can do that he ought to be able to do anything). Even the curse isn’t used as much as it might have been: just think, this is the priory where UNIT is formed (hence why the Doctor and Sarah are passing through): if that place isn’t cursed in terms of alien invasion and weird vibes then I don’t know what is. For once with Holmes even the dialogue isn’t as strong as normal, perhaps showing what a rush-job this was  and it’s easily his most sombre story, with even less laughs than ‘The Power Of Kroll’, the story where he was asked not to crack any jokes (the only real comedy is the bit Tom and Lis Sladen added, the farcical bit where they nearly walk into the mummy then back off and walk away, something they added despite the director telling them not to!) More than that, though, there’s nothing here except the main point, with ‘Pyramids’ coming in one shade throughout. For a story that spends so much time discussing tribophysics (the idea of friction being three things in movement at once) it’s weird that there’s only one source of friction all story – everyone but Sutekh might as well have gone home.

For all that, though, I can see why so many people love this story as much as they do, because while Holmes is having a nervous breakdown writing at speed about an era he doesn’t know at all and crossing his fingers he doesn’t make too many mistakes, everyone else’s confidence is sky high. This is the first story the production team made after Tom Baker’s first season had finished airing. It’s always a nervous time of waiting and finger-crossing when the lead role changes and people forget what a big risk it was casting a relative unknown after Jon Pertwee, the show’s highest profile star thus far. As late as the location filming for ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ and the accident that broke his collar bone, Tom feared he might be replaced and it’s only now, with the benefit of hindsight, that we can’t imagine the Whoniverse without him. However he’s now a household name and brimming with confidence, while Holmes – for all his struggles with the story plot – has seen him in action enough to tailor his dialogue to suit the actor perfectly. The 4^th Doctor is by now deliciously alien and distant, starting off this story by reminding Sarah that he’s not like her and other Humans, he ‘walks in eternity’, with an eye across the story that’s always concentrating on the bigger picture, not stopping to mourn individuals because he knows if he doesn’t act soon everyone on Earth will die. In theory this Doctor hasn’t been this ‘free’ for a long time, without needing to come back to The Brigadier or have Harry to worry about and a whole universe to explore, but the years trapped on Earth have made him moody, newly aware of what responsibility lies on his shoulders as the only ‘good’ timelord out there willing to do the right thing morally (it might be his regeneration in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ has affected him more than we realised).  Interestingly, despite being more ‘mysterious’ than ever The Doctor is now offering up clues to his background like sweeties: this is the first mention that Gallifrey is in ‘the constellation of Kasterberous’ while The Doctor even gives out the intergalactic coordinates (good job it wasn’t a few minutes later when Sutekh was eavesdropping or Gallifrey might have been destroyed four Doctors early!) By now, too, Tom and Elisabeth Sladen are best friends in real life and that shows on screen: the moments of doubt and wishing the Doctor could be more like his reliable moral 3^rd self are gone: you know Sarah trusts this Doctor with her life, but they’ve now reached the space of the sort of quiet teasing that only happens with someone you know and like really well and are sure won’t be offended. Sarah is still herself enough to grouch and grump in this story, representing perhaps better than any other companion what most of ‘us’ would really be like in space and time, but The Doctor also knows and trusts her enough to handle a lot of his plan to fight Sutekh. They’re a real team in this story like never before and that’s the main reason I think so many people are fond of this story. Everyone at home watching wanted to be at least one of them, Sarah friendly and plucky or The Doctor distant and all-knowing and if you didn’t then you were probably a robot replica zombie.

Holmes’ story places a lot of emphasis on the guest cast too, all of whom give their all. Gabriel Woolf’s Sutekh is entirely different to every villain we’d had in the show before. He doesn’t shout, the way Azal, Omega or Eldrad (to name just three shouty villains, all played by Stephen Thorne): he whispers. This isn’t the performance of a villain who’s secretly so insecure he might just blow the planet up on a whim because you looked at him funny – this is someone so sure and confident that he doesn’t need to raise his voice to be scary. You’re forever leaning into the television  to hear what he has to say, even while you know one sudden movement and he will happily set you on fire (definitely one of the more memorable ways a villain has despatched people in Dr Who!) As for the people despatched, there are lots of them who all reach their deaths in this story – all of the speaking parts on screen and everyone, even the extras, in Terrance Dicks’ Target novelisation. Usually only the baddies snuff it from the supporting cast, but not here: archaeologist Marcus Scarman dies in the opening minutes and returns as a zombie, Marcus kills his own brother Laurence, Namin looks like the ultimate baddy but dies in the opening cliffhanger because Sutekh won’t tolerate any life even the ones who brought him back; Dr Warlock is shot and even The Doctor carrying him halfway across the priory grounds won’t save him (odd that he and Sarah don’t know their way round it better, incidentally, if it really is UNIT HQ: even I the house itself burned down surely the grounds are roughly the same?), even The Doctor is considered dead for longer than would normally happen on this show in case the kiddies get scared (and it’s typical of this script that rather than explain it fully Holmes simply events a ‘timelord respiratory bypass system’ that he’s never mentioned before and which would have come handy in all sorts of stories; presumably this is how The Master gets so good at ‘playing dead’ too).  Rather than your typical ‘Dr Who acting’ with glorified OTT hammy deaths, though, each of these guest stars gives their all and give such remarkably whole-heartedly ‘real’ performances that you believe every single one of the, everyone making things seem a hundred times more frightening than by rights they ought to be on paper. Special shout out to  Michael Sheard though in the best of his many Who performances (and so unlike his most famous role, Mr Bronson in ‘Grange Hill’, that most viewers don’t believe it’s him) and Peter Maycock as Namin, already believable as the near-perfect baddy before Sutekh steps in to take over. A mention, too, for actor George Tovey who has the brief role of Ernie Clements in episode two: if he looks slightly familiar that’s because his daughter Roberta played Susan in the two Peter Cushing ‘Dalek’ films in the 1960s (by 1974 she’s a 21 year old greatly tickled that her dad is following in her footsteps).

The scenery, too, is gorgeous and the perfect setting in the manor house nicknamed ‘Stargroves’ in Newbury, Buckinghamshire. The production team were reluctant to get in touch with Mick Jagger, aware that the Rolling Stone had no need for the BBC’s money and a reputation that suggested he would have no interest or knowledge in what was primarily a kiddie show, but his house had everything they needed and the Michael Jagger in private is a long way from his hell-raising image. He loved Dr Who and was eager to see his house on the telly, leaving his dad (who lives on the site) as caretaker while the Stones were off touring America. Though the BBC were legally obliged to pay a nominal fee for all location shoots, Jagger sent his to ‘Kinden Lodge’, a school for the blind in Wimbledon and asked in return only that the BBC didn’t damage his house (the final scene, where the priory is exploded in  giant explosion, is CSO if you hadn’t already guessed) and that they sent him a recording of the episodes to watch when he got back. So happy was this arrangement that it was used again for ‘The Image Of The Fendahl’ a couple of years later. It’s a real find: its olde worlde enough to legitimately seem as if it comes from 1911 (though I still have no idea why the story is set then), with a nearby stables, lots of walls for hiding behind, lots of paths for robot mummies to lurch down and lots of bushes to cower in. Though nobody working on this story knew it at the time and it was only pointed out later by a Rolling Stones fan who knew the history of the house, Stargroves was the perfect choice for another reason too: two owners before Mick it belonged to none other than Lord Caernarvon, co-discoverer of Tutankhamen’s tomb and one of the highest profile ‘victims’ of its ‘curse’.

There are lots of striking images in these grounds that stick long in the memory: Sutekh invading the Tardis (how did he do that?! The director took lots of shots of Gabriel Woolf in costume and showed them to Elisabeth Sladen, watching her reaction for the time she gasped the loudest), the mummy let loose in the grounds while Sarah Jane desperately tries to shoot it to no avail, the mummies (actually students from the Guildhall School of acting) building a (rather unconvincing) rocket in the back yard (everyone needs a hobby!), the mummy that turns out to be the Doctor (the director persuading Tom Baker to be in the costume himself when none of the extras could copy his distinctive walk! He was annoyed to find, like most extras, he was left behind and forgotten when everyone stopped for lunch…), The Doctor – usually so firmly in control – on his knees pleading for Sutekh’s release, the moment he’s quite prepared to give his life to fight Sutekh with a sombreness we never usually see in Tm Baker’s Doctor, the organ that continues to play even after Namin has left it and been reduced to a smoky pulp by Sutekh, err the much loved fan moment when the production assistant’s hand holds down Sutekh’s cushion on screen when he gets up to rant (even Egyptian Gods can’t control their own cushions, I have the same trouble). Easily the strongest and most moving moment of the story though, comes when The Doctor takes Sarah forward in time to 1980s to show why they can’t just leave Sutekh because he’ll destroy the Earth: a really effective use of time travel and one he’d never done before (why 1980? Umm, I’m not sure about that dating either, though as no two people could decide on when the UNIT ‘near future’ stories were set it might be Homes hedging his bets by having it midway between the 1970s and 1980s). Holmes wrote it in partly because of a disagreement he’d had with Terrance Dicks over ‘The Time warrior’, that children can’t be scared that the Doctor won’t put things right when they’re physically living in a timeline that’s all sorted (because until those credits roll and the fat Radiophonic workshop machine is singing everything is up for grabs).

There’s lots here to burn itself on the inside of your brain and never leave you, which is why this story was such a popular one in the days before home video, when the only thing you had to go by old stories was a battered copy of one of Peter Haining’s books and your fading memory. This one stays in the consciousness even after many better stories have left it. So popular is this story that it was an early choice for VHS and an early choice for DVD too, but that’s where this story’s reputation comes unstuck slightly too I think: the more you watch this story you more you see the holes and realise that the plot is slightly disjointed and the holes in it that doesn’t add up (a minor but telling point: Holmes has Sarah randomly decide to rummage in the Tardis wardrobe and put on a Victorian dress, even though at the time she’d heading to present day and has never been interested in it before. In another story’s time he’ll be accusing her of being a Kraal android for less weirdness than that. he’s no better though: he claims the last person to wear that dress was ‘Vicki’ – there’s no way Vicki from the 25^th century would be caught dead in something like that so everyone assumes he meant ‘Victoria’, but it’s a costume that’s way too revealing for her too, not to mention she only left in the Victorian clothes she was wearing that day. Sarah is a conveniently good shot with an early 1900s rifle, too, when the plot needs her to be, against all odds given a robot mummy is looking at her when she fires). Admittedly all DW stories have gaps in logic if you look at them and squint long enough, as with most fiction, but this one has more issues than most. Sutekh takes an awfully long time to get back to full form as a God for someone so powerful (surely he could take over the Earth with his first breath?) How come in all this time no one has noticed the mummies on patrol outside? There isn’t even a rumour about something strange going on. I mean, surely they had a paper boy or a visit from the council? Why are we in England in 1911 after all? Shouldn’t we be in Egypt?!? And why didn’t the Ice Warriors intercept the beam from Mars before us? – it’s their home planet after all).While the ending, stuffing Sutekh in a time corridor for 70,000 years, is gobbledegook of the highest order. How come sending Sutekh through a time corridor ages him anyway – shouldn’t it be like the Weeping Angels in reverse so he just comes out the other side the same age?

For all this story’s strengths then (the Doctor-Sarah relationship, the location filming, the cast who all deserve a medal, the direction that’s always finding something ‘extra’ and clever to do) Dr Who still hasn’t quite done Ancient Egypt properly in other words, even though it seems the most obvious time and place for him to go to. That’s a crying shame as with the mythology and the scifi leanings there’s a potentially brilliant story waiting to be written there rather than the slightly rushed one we get here. It’s a real shame Holmes didn’t have more time to either craft the script more (he’s one of those writers who gets better with each draft) and that he didn’t have more time to use Griefer’s work, because what this plot really needs is a few sub-plots and those on psi energy and pyramids as an ancient power source would have filled the gap in nicely. There were lots of other things Holmes could have done too, not least another of those amazing coincidences surrounding this story: the omnibus repeat went out a year after the story was first screened and right about the time the Viking probe was sending back images from Mars for the first time, the start of beady-eyed onlookers spotting what looked like pyramid shapes on the planet. There’s so much more that could be done with a character this good and a backstory that rich that never made it on screen (perhaps one reason why so many Who writers have had a bash at writing a sequel, with an extended section compared to normal). Russell T, usually so good at writing ‘sequels’, disappointed a lot of fans with ‘The Empire Of Death’ by fans who felt it didn’t live up to their memories, but if anything it’s too faithful to the original and shows up how empty the script really is without Tom and Elisabeth to plug the gaps.  Even so, a great breathless runaround with Tom Baker at his peak facing off one of the best baddies the show ever had is more than worthy of a place mid-tier in this ranking, if maybe not quite as high as other fans would put it. Holmes, busy nicking tiny bits out of a children’s encyclopaedia to make this story and a keen believer in education for the masses, would also no doubt be tickled that this story gets a full entry in the scholarly tome ‘An Encyclopaedia of Mummies in History Religion and Popular Culture’, a serious discussion of our changing attitudes towards ancient times with the more we learn (and the more we discover the Ancient Egyptians were ‘like us’). Author J Johnston – president of the ‘Egypt Exploration Society’ – gets some things spot on (he sees this as a spoof of Hammer Horror films) and others not so much (he thinks the robot mummies were inspired by a rock painting of a possible God/astronaut/alien discovered in the Sahara Desert in 1950, rather than designer Barbara Kidd racking her brain for how she can possibly design a walking mummy wrapped in bandages when real tombs never had individual legs on display).

POSITIVES + Sutekh. It’s not everyone who can pull off a 7000 year old alien with magic powers even though their face is hidden by a mask, but Gabriel Woolf is the first in a long line of whispering Who villains who manage to be all the creepier for the fact they speak in low voices not shouted rants. Sutekh nonchalantly offering up ‘my gift of death’ without a second thought as he kills off all the cast alone puts him in the top tier of creepy Who villains. And it is a gift compared to his other threat: being kept alive for centuries wracked by excruciating pain with a shredded nervous system (though as an m.e. patient I can safely say someone beat you there in my case, Sutekh). For a while there he really does seem unstoppable and is arguably the least concerned at The Doctor’s attempts to stop him than anyone we’ve seen outside Davros, as if The Doctor is an annoying insect. If the ‘real’ Set was like this no wonder Ancient Egypt built so many pyramids in his honour, just to stay on his good side.

NEGATIVES - Talking of which, where are the pyramids? I know Sutekh has one for a spaceship but...this is a story about ancient Egypt and all we see of the ancient wonder of the world is one blooming door of a boring tomb with the eye of Horus on it (no guessing what symbol most Dr Who fans would pick first on quiz show ‘Only Connect’!) Instead of the really interesting backstory and discovery of the tomb in one of the most fascinating places on the planet, we’re stuck for four episodes in one English estate in 1911 (why 1911? Sorry it still bugs me. I mean, make it 1922 and an artefact from Tutunkaham’s tomb) that badly needs some decorators (no don’t be cross Mick, I meant the BBC set of the inside not Stargroves). We don’t even get to see Mars properly and we’ve been there so many times by now they could have mocked the planet up in five minutes.

BEST QUOTE: Dr:  ‘I’m a timelord’ Sarah: ‘Oh I know you’re a timelord’. Dr: ‘You don’t understand the implications. I’m not a human being, I walk in eternity’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Lots! ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/Empire Of Death’ for starters, the 2024 season finale that told us that Sutekh wasn’t really defeated at the end of ‘Pyramids’ but has been sleeping in the Tardis ever since. 

…Which does slightly contradict the ‘Missing Adventures novel ‘The Sands Of Time’ (1996) by Justin Richards, where the 5^th Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan encounter the Egyptian God during a story set in Victorian London. It starts off much like the abandoned Grifer first draft of the story, with our heroes going for a nice quiet walk round the British Museum, little knowing that a band of fanatical Egyptian scholars are also there and they’ve kidnapped Nyssa! It turns out that Sutekh has foreknowledge of the Doctor’s visit and has even arranged a hotel for him under his name where he can stay while looking for her – spooky! Soon Sutekh’s mummies are walking at night around and an Egyptian curse set to come to fruition in the 1990s is in play all thanks to the shadowy Sadan Russel. It looks like…no it couldn’t be could it?...I mean he’s dead right? Like all of Justin Richards’ novels he’s a safe pair of hands that delivers exactly what you’d expect of a Dr Who re-match with Sutekh – no more, no less. It’s kind of the opposite of ‘Ruby Empire’ actually: had they put this on TV no fan would have complained at unresolved plot points or that the story went in a weird direction they weren’t expecting, but neither does this story have quite the scope and wild ideas to throw us off our feet that Russell brought to it. Or maybe we’re just cursed never to get a fully perfect Egyptian story in Dr Who? Atkins the time-travelling butler steals the show and almost makes up for the fact that Nyssa, who ought to be right at home in Egypt with its many similarities to Traken, barely gets a word in all story (Ann Talbot, her double from ‘Black Orchid’, appears in a cameo though, weirdly). 

 ‘Scarab Of Death’ (1994) is a short prose story by Mark Stammers from the anthology ‘Decalog’ which also features the 4^th Doctor and Sarah having fun with alien pyramids. Our daring duo are taking a well deserved holiday on the planet Beta Osiris where The Doctor is making a nuisance of himself to the tour guide, pointing out all the things he’s got wrong! Sarah finds the dead body of a Human who is clutching a scarab beetle. The Doctor alerts the authorities and when they don’t seem interested tracks down the man’s hotel room and discovers that the beetle is a priceless treasure he was planning to sell. The Doctor is mistaken for the dead man and kidnapped; Sarah follows and disguises herself as a cleaner to break into the gang’s hideout and help him escape. It turns out that the baddies are part of a secret sect, ‘The Cult Of The Black Pyramid’, who plan to raise the God Horus from the dead. It turns out that the scarab isn’t real treasure but a key that will unlock the sleeping God, who might as well be Sutekh in all but name given his special powers. The Doctor, however, snatches the scarab without the bad guys noticing and it sets off a trap, killing them with psionic energy as The Doctor and Sarah duck. You’d never know this story was written nearly twenty years after the fact so cleverly does it conjure up the feel of a season thirteen story, right on the cusp between tense horror nd being too daft for words.   

Equally contradictory is ‘The Triumph Of Sutekh’, the umbrella title for Big Finish’s second box set of ‘The New Adventures Of Bernice Summerfield’ (2015). It’s a colourful adventure more like a superhero comic strip mixed with Indiana Jones rather than Big Finish’s usual fare, with just a hint of ‘Stargate’. As an archaeologist Benny is a natural for a story like this one, which starts in ‘The Pyramids Of Sutekh’ when she’s most astonished to uncover an Egyptian artefact that’s addressed to her. It turns out her old friend the Doctor needs help – he’s a bit tied up fighting a losing battle with Sutekh. Her very Bennyish solution? Lock the Doctor up in a sarcophagus for his own safe keeping while she works out how to defeat the God! There’s an interesting twist where the Doctor imagines an inner pyramid in his mind, ‘Sherlock’ style, only to find Sutekh’s invaded his thoughts and corrupted that too. Benny, meanwhile, has woken up two guardians of the tomb, one of whom always tells the truth while the other always lies. She also uncovers an ancient artefact buried with workman’s tombs that, when injected, gives her the powers of the ancient Osirans which enables her to evade a lock Sutekh put on his pyramid and opens a time-space tunnel of her own. She controls the local Egyptians and gets them to kill Sutekh, but he re-directs the bullets and has them kill her instead. It’s left to a recovering Doctor to whisk Benny to safety at the last minute, removing the Osiran DNA she injected into herself. Ace turns up and helps just in time for second adventure ‘The Vault Of Osiris’, which is just as well as there’s a bunch of Nazis at the door trying to gain entry. Aiming to flee to the 1990s to see the damage Sutekh has caused and search for the eye of Osiris, the handy gadget that gives him power, they overshoot and end up in 2015, discovering that the Nazis have looted it back home. With the Doctor missing, Benny goes undercover as part of the cult of Osiris where they discover a whole temple has been built around the eye and Benny grabs it and spots a hieroglyphic of herself on the wall.

This leads neatly into part three ‘The Eye Of Horus’, which mostly takes place in 1924 when Mars is the closest to the Earth  in orbit it has been in living memory, with a radio blackout as scientists try and study the planet. They hear Benny’s screams instead: since we last saw her she’s been kidnapped and taken to the red planet, oddly enough not by The Ice Warriors but Hatshepsut, the Egyptian King whose been living here with fellow ruler Tutmosis and…The Doctor! He’s been there as a guest so long he can’t remember her at all and is about to get married to Hatshepsut, much to her shock. Can she trust him with the eye? Well (spoilers) she can: he’s been biding his time building a ‘psychic network’ to knock out Sutekh while Mars is so close to Earth only he needs the eye of Horus to power it. He does and Benny has a dream that makes her write her own hieroglyph on the wall and send herself the message that got her in this mess in the first place. All that’s left is to defeat Sutekh, which happens in story four ‘The Tears Of Isis’. The most ‘normal’ of the quartet (a relative term) it’s a big showdown, in Surrey of all places, where the cult of Sutekh are now based. They’ve waited for Sutekh’s return because it means they will be the only people spared at the end of the world – which is exactly what happens (and it sounds great on audio!) Needless to say Sutekh doesn’t see any point in sparing followers and soon starts handing out his gift of death like cheesy nibbles at a party. Only (more spoilers) it’s all a big trick: The Doctor’s conned both Sutekh and his transported followers into thinking he was in the wrong century and his promised destruction is eight centuries later than he said! An enraged Sutekh creates another time corridor, only that’s a trap too and it ends up being a timeloop, Sutekh and the Doctor trapped in one long perpetual fight bounced from one century to the next, only for the Doctor to be saved by Alyx, the adopted daughter of the Surrey boss who is reborn as the new Isis with special powers and remembers The Doctor was kind to her.  Sutekh is trapped forever (or at least until ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’) and the Earth saved again, although it’s forever changed Benny’s relationship with The Doctor who, like Ace before her, is appalled at how cold and calculating he has become, sacrificing lives for a greater good. Quite the epic this box set with four linked but very different tales by four very different writers that never quite adds up to a cohesive whole but one that has a lot of fun trying. Certainly, compared to quite a few Big Finish box set spin-offs, you can never accuse this one of being boring…

The 4^th Doctor meets Sutekh again in the seventh series of Big Finish’s Fourth Doctor Range (2018), a two-parter made up of ‘Kill The Doctor!’ and ‘The Age Of Sutekh’. This one’s most interesting for Leela’s very different reaction to Sutekh, who’s a killer megalomaniac after her own heart: she knows this type of monster and her instincts come in very handy, though she almost admires his callousness at times. Although it’s really a girl named Ramia (played by Sophia Myles, making her first appearance in Who since being ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’) who has created her own datastream network (a bit like Google, but better) and has psychic gifts that adds the knowhow of how to fight Sutekh. Which is just as well because he’s hell bent on revenge, with an inversion of the Silence’s plan from ‘The Impossible Astronaut/Day Of The Moon’ as Sutekh floods the data-stream with the subliminal message to kill The Doctor on sight. Like much of the 4^th Doctor range the plot itself is arrant nonsense that borrows heavily from elsewhere but it’s so good to hear our old friends back that you don’t care and it’s a lot of fun, especially if you concentrate on the one-liners rather than the plot. 

Finally, there’s the seventh ‘Tales From The Tardis’ based around the memory Tardis, but this one is the odd one out: it came out six months or so after the rest, wasn’t technically for the 60^th anniversary celebrations and was first broadcast on BBC4 rather than being an i-player exclusive. Most of all, of course, it actually features in the episode ‘The  Empire Of Death’ where the 15^th Doctor, Ruby and Mel (who presumably is in the loo or gone out for coffee. Was Bonnie not available? Or had Russell not worked her into the script yet?) take time out from trying to save the world so the Doctor can tell his friends about what happened last time, getting viewers who hadn’t seen the original up to speed. It does rather slow down the action – and badly needed to happen in the cliffhanger between the two episodes so we could feel we were watching it in ‘real time’ rather than halfway through the first episode, but it’s a novel idea that both worked in the context of the episode and cemented the fact that the other memory Tardises we’ve seen are ‘real’ and not simply a dream, an illusion or inside the fevered brain of a twelve-year-old Russell T Davies’  a la ‘The Mind Robber’ (my favourite pet theory till then, I must admit). It always seemed odd we’d never had a ‘4^th Doctor tale’ to go with the others (probably because of Tom Baker’s ill health and the fact that of all his companions still alive Leela and Romana II were busy, while in the context of the series Adric is dead and can’t appear even if Matthew Waterhouse wanted to) so having the 15^th Doctor revisit ‘Pyramids’ redresses the balance somewhat. Sadly it’s not the best: the other Tales are sweet nostalgia fests, warm and cosy, but this one is meant to underline the horror the Doctor’s facing and just what a big powerful baddy Sutekh is, which gives it a very different flavour. The ‘new’ bits run a tad short, amounting to a mere three minutes at the beginning and end, with not much more other than ‘I was a different man back then – you wouldn’t recognise me, with a friend like you called Sarah Jane Smith. We had some good times…’ and ‘All this time I thought he was dead, but he was just waiting…Last time Sutekh was the size of a man but this time he’s evolved into a titan. How do I fight that?’, ending with the Doctor’s pained question ‘what do I do?’ I have to say, though, that after the painful experience that was the cut-down and CGId version of ‘The Daleks’ shown for the 60^th the new edit and effects weren’t bad: I’d still prefer the homely charm of the original (prop man holding down Sutekh’s chair-cushion and all) so don’t know when I’d ever watch this version again, but unlike the messing around with history that was ‘The Daleks In Colour’ I can at least see why these changes were made for a modern audience and there were no grating edits or modern music cues this time.  

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