The Stones Of Blood
(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 28/10/1978-18/11/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: David Fisher, director: Darrol Blake)
Rank: 154
'I know you've been watching a lot of news reports about invasions of aliens so I thought I would get you away from the television and out here camping in a field far away from anything. What? No those aren't Zarbi, they're just normal ants. That sound in the sky? It's not a Slitheen spaceship, it's a plane. The spider in your sleeping bag? That doesn't have enough eyes to be the Racnoss it's just a spider. No come on now, don't be silly, that can't be a werewolf howling - they only seem to be in Scotland for some reason. Honest, there's nothing here in this field except us. some bugs and some ancient standing stones that have been here for centuries...Wait...Aagh!...'
More antics with the ‘key to time’ as the Doctor investigates ‘The Stones of Blood’. Which sounds like a medical procedure, but don’t worry it isn’t. Instead it’s one of those witchy stories full of supernatural gothic horror and all the things Graham Williams was under strict instructions not to do by a BBC nervous of Mary Whitehouse. Yet it’s a bit different to the Hinchcliffe blood ‘n’ gore era and the title’s actually a joke: there’s no blood on screen...because the standing stones drink it all stone dry! Yes, they find human plasma a tasty treat but don’t like leaving a mess so this story has about the most composed de-composed chewed up bodies you’ll ever see as the Ogri don’t like leaving a drop. Wait, did I say standing stones? I meant...walking stones of course. Only Dr Who would come up with a horror story about blood that doesn’t show blood and standing stones that walk. But then, Dr Who can do anything in this period when it’s still pretty much at the cusp of its popularity and brimming with confidence that this show has an audience that will just go with everything (well, maybe not fifty mile squids as it turns out but that’s a problem for a future story). It really is amazingly popular given that the show has been running for fifteen years now: that’s twelve longer than the original Star Trek and longer than the runs of ‘Next Generation’ and ‘Deep Space Nine’ combined. This is, as it happens, the show’s 100th story and originally came with a ‘birthday party’ celebrating the fact before producer Graham Williams worried it was a self-indulgence too far (yes we’re on 335 now, give or take the whole Trial Of A Timelord/Capaldi 3 parters/Matt Smith 5 parter debate so a hundred doesn’t seem so impressive, but very few series ever got this far back in 1978). Even without the cut scene everyone is in a party mood and there was a fun atmosphere on set with none of the problems that hit practically every other story of this vintage. Shock horror, this might be the only colour story of the ‘classic’ era that wrapped early for both the studio and location shooting (it’s witchcraft I tell you!)
The problem is, though,
that this show has been running so long that nobody seems to quite know what it
is anymore. Writer David Fisher makes his debut here and he’s been trying to be
a part of one of his favourite shows since he first became a writer, sending in
a sort-of first version of this story to David Whittaker at the end of Dr Who’s
first year (it was about children discovering a spaceship under Stonehenge;
CBBC’s excellent ‘Silverpoint’, the best new drama in years children’s or
adult’s, shows how good it could have been – especially in Who’s first year
with all the extra layers of mystery and unpredictability). When an old friend
Anthony Read got the script editor’s job he got in contact (they’d worked
together on the series ‘This Man Craig’, which was basically a Scottish version
of ‘Please Sir!’) Read was only too happy to have a writer he trusted and,
what’s more, liked the idea of standing stones coming to life (he’d done his
national service in a camp where his office overlooked Stonehenge). However
Fisher still knew the series best from the days of the 1960s when it was weird
and spooky, while being enough of a fan to know that things have moved on to
frightening and spooky under Phillip Hinchcliffe. He wasn’t to know that new
producer Graham Williams has been ordered by the BBC to tone the horror down to
stop Mary Whitehouse having nightmares. So ‘The Stones Of Blood’ ends up being
one of those stories that keeps shifting by degrees. There are scenes when it’s
(fittingly) blood-curdling, perhaps the last time Dr Who is properly
behind-the-sofa scary until either ‘The Curse Of
Fenric’ (with more bloodsuckers) or ‘The
Empty Child’ depending on your disposition and/or fear of gas masks. There
are other scenes that are laugh-out-loud comedy, as Romana shows up her
ignorance of ‘The Doctor’s favourite planet’ Earth and the timelords banter
with a delightfully dotty professor and get a bit lost. Part of it is pure
‘Wicker Man’ horror, with a village full of strangers and druids and people
acting weird that taps into very English pagan primal fears (with scenes that
alternate between being as thoughtful and erudite as the best of ‘The Daemons’ and other parts as clumsy as
‘K9 and Company’). There are others that
are pure science-fiction, with a lady who turns out to be a silver alien with a
square-shaped spaceship parked in hyperspace (some of the science is smart and
some of it is dumb). Episode three is pure courtroom drama (most fans’ least
favourite episode of the serial, it’s so static it makes you wonder how people
sit through whole seasons of this stuff. See ‘Trial Of A Timelord’). Sometimes
it’s a high stakes action drama, at others a convoluted scifi plot, at other
times a character piece. This is a story of twists and turns where you can
never guess what’s coming next – which would normally be a good thing, except
that each of these twists and turns somehow ends up being more feeble than the
next. Even the dialogue varies from moments of real wit and brilliance to being
crass (the exposition about the Black and White Guardians an the key to time –
inserted so that they could repeat this as a standalone story if need be,
though they never did – is particularly poor, Romana literally saying ‘yes I
know’ to most of The Doctor’s points. Because she was there and knows as much
as he does). It feels like everyone of those other ninety-nine first Dr Who
stories stuck in a blender and yet still manages to come out as something we’ve
never had before, becoming a story about a friendship (some might even say
‘relationship’) between two spinsters.
It all centres around
those stones though, which despite myths and legends of being the home of
witches, a fairy-ring to another world or living beings who have been petrified
(there’s even a legend that you can hear the heartbeat of one still beating
after thousands of years) because this is Dr Who turn out to not only be alive
but be a gateway to hyperspace and a hiding place for an alien criminal mastermind.
Standing stones that move are totally the sort of thing Dr Who should be doing.
Something ancient that can’t be explained and are somehow very English (a few
other countries have them too, but not as many and not as big) they’re perfect
as a subject to be ‘explained’ the ‘Dr Who way’ and it’s amazing they hadn’t
been used in the series before this. That might be because nobody expected they
would ever get permission to go to the real thing but, while Stonehenge is the
most famous and fiercely guarded (though they let Dr Who have one hurried bit
of filming there for ‘The Pandorica
Opens/The Big Bang’ thirty odd years later) it’s not the only set of Stones
in England. Though the story is set in Cornwall with hints that this is the
Boscawen-Un stone circle (which has a real legend about witchcraft that casts a
spell over people so they can’t count the amount of stones accurately and get a
different number each time), ‘The Stones Of Blood’ was filmed at the Rollright
Stones site in Oxfordshire, three miles North of Chipping Norton, are the
perfect alternative, suggested by director Darrol Blake who’d visited them on
holiday. Unlike Stonehenge which was a bureaucratic nightmare, they belonged to
private hands who were only too happy to let the production team on site for a
fee (and who made money from the sort of school parties who watched the show
anyway: indeed one coachload arrived during filming and were given the job of
counting the stones, getting into trouble with their teacher who hadn’t
realised ‘fake’ polystyrene ones had been added by the Dr Who crew in the
night!) Dating back to the Bronze Age, roughly 2500 BC, they’re an impressive
sight, full of mystery and wonder without the need to anything and with a very
Dr Who sounding myth of their own, that they were an army turned to stone for
attacking a witch. It’s a site reasonably close to TV centre, had a quarry only
a couple of miles away for the first episode cliffhanger scenes of Romana being
lured to her doom and the people there were so excited to have Dr Who in town
they even closed off the A34 that ran past it to keep the traffic noises to a
minimum. We don’t just get a couple of establishing shots of them either: we’re
right in the thick of the action, with an atmospheric night shoot that makes
this one of Who’s spookiest stories. Even the fake ones are impressive, clearly
lightweight compared to the real thing but which still look good when standing
still and with a light inside the three props so that they glow (a subtle
effect, but a very atmospheric one in the dark). It’s a measure of how mixed
this story is, though, that it then calls on them to move – and with all the
love in the world, a bunch of polystyrene menhirs being pulled on a trolley
isn’t going to scare anyone (the original plan was that they morphed into Humans
when they needed to move but, in another summary of those ninety-nine earlier
stories, they ran out of budget). The ‘De Vries’ mansion is another lovely bit
of location filming, looking like a posh stately home of the sort Mick Jagger
would own (see ‘Image Of the Fendahl/Seeds Of Doom’) even though it’s actually a
business studies training college. Legend has it a number of drunken students,
on finding the Tardis prop outside, decided to be ‘helpful’ and move it to the
nearest quarry two miles away figuring that’s where it was meant to be
(actually they’d filmed those bits already!)
The cast, too, start off
really interesting and then somehow descend into the usual Who stereotypes. The
rather wacky Human Vivien starts off being reserved and cynical, a believable
recluse of the sort that we don’t often have in Who. But there are so many
pointers towards her being an alien who knows more than she’s letting on that
the audience gets to the punchline too early (I mean, ET is less alien than she
is in human form by episode two). She has an interesting background as a
criminal who’s been in hiding on Earth for 4000 years but we never fully find
out why; her biggest crime seems to be locking up the Megara, the balls of
light who are pedantic policemen and lawyers, a bit like the Judoon without the
bodies, but they must have had a reason for pursuing her. There are hints that
she’s working for The Black Guardian, given that she holds the third part of
the key to time close to her chest (quite literally: it’s the Seal of Diplos
pendant she keeps round her neck) and acts as if she knows someone might be
coming for it one day, while The Doctor gets a cryptic message from The White
Guardian telling him to ‘beware’ (given that this scene got cut down to a
single line they didn’t bother hiring Cyril Luckham again but instead got
Gerald Cross, one of the ‘justice machines’, to read in for him). However the
script doesn’t lean in to that to make her a threat and after two episodes of
stern looks and cynical asides the script decides to paint her silver and stick
her in space. Her back story also makes less sense the longer the story goes
on: she’s not hidden herself very well (there are those whacking great stones
after all – and are all ancient monuments on Earth guarding rogue criminals? In
which case I dread to think what alien is behind the pyramids. Assuming that it
wasn’t an earlier infestation of The Monks from ‘The
Pyramid At The End Of The World’). It also seems ridiculous that someone
can live for that many years without growing older and yet nobody ever seems to
notice (at least when they try this again in ‘Shada’
Professor Chronitis is hiding in a Cambridge college with students passing
through and other lecturers who are all close to dying themselves). It’s a
great and very fun ideas, but somehow it’s not fully thought through. Stone me!
Similar happens to
Professor Rumford. Beatrix Lehman is one of the biggest name actresses to ever
appear in Dr Who and she did it not for the usual big star reasons (cash flow
problems caused by the taxman or because their children loved the show) but
because she was potty about dogs and really wanted to meet K9 (Fisher does
indeed give them many scenes together). She starts off being wonderfully dotty,
opening up to The Doctor and Romana straight away as if they’re old friends and
reacting to everything extraordinary that happens as if it’s another ordinary
day (the reverse of what we usually get in Who). There’s even a Russell T Davies
level of characterisation as she’s described off-screen in a way that sets up
her entire character: Vivian mentions her taking a truncheon with her to a
lecture hall as she was afraid of being mugged, only to get arrested for
carrying an offensive weapon instead! Tom Baker for one adored her (he
seriously pushed for having a character like her as a companion, just so her
could work with her again) and the scenes where the two are sparring
eccentricities is delightful. There are times when the script is hinting that
she too might be an alien, but it’s a distraction to keep our eyes off Vivian
and only semi-successful. By episode four sorry to say she’s just getting in
the way and slowing down the plot so she can make cute comments and bring the
story back down to Earth, something that gets less and less likely every time
she opens her mouth (the story ends with the revelation that her best friend
that she’s known years is really an alien who’s died and that the stones she’s
been researching her whole life are really a gateway to another world; her
response is to chunter that with three of the Ogri gone she’ll have to start
her research all over again). It’s a waste of an actress of Lehman’s calibre
(she was once so big that Christopher Isherwood dedicated one of his plays that
became ‘Cabaret’ to her) and a sad way to end her TV career (she died roughly
nine months after the broadcast of episode one; Tom was said to be devastated).
Even so, the fact that we have two strong
female characters – three if you count Romana, who is particularly well catered
for in this story – is a colossal step forward. There are so many Who stories
that are all male with the exception of the companion and it was a deliberate
move, Read noting that Fisher was always good at writing strong female
characters and asking for more to counteract the more butch stories of sword
fights and squid baiting in the rest of the season. It isn’t that Fisher
ignores male characters so much as switches things round, so that the girls
take centre stage and the boys are up in space for the second half, relegated
to ‘voices off’. There’s even a hint, as large as you could get away with in
1978 that Vivian and Rumford are Dr Who’s first lesbian couple (although ambiguous
enough that they could just be good friends who enjoy sleepovers if the
kiddywinkles ask). It doesn’t stop with the characters though: this is the most
‘feminine’ story of ‘classic’ Who, beaten only by ‘Survival’ at the last turn in the
original series. Unlike other Who stories dealing with magic this one is
specifically about witchcraft and the sort of mystical powers that have always
been traditionally given to women in folk tales. This is a story solved not by
laser battles but thinking and intuition, from The Doctor outwitting the Magara
in space to Romana and Rumford working out what’s going on down below from a
magazine and an early home computer. It’s a story driven not by a masculine
monster who wants to invade your town and eat you but a villainess shunned for
being ‘other’, for not playing the societal games plaid out for her. Some
reviewers also point out that ‘The Stones Of Blood’ takes place under a full
moon and involves bloodletting once a month, in tune with female bodily cycles.
While ‘Survival’ is a bit more
subtle and better written (It is actually by a woman, after all) nevertheless
this is a strong and pioneering bit of writing that avoids all the usual
clichés of doing a ‘female’ story: the leads aren’t young, pretty and concerned
only with the blokes for a start. In fact they’re two independent female
characters (again three if you count Romana) who have their own independent
careers and are perfectly happy about living alone. This is 1978 remember: it’s
amazing the character parts weren’t all blonde bimbos modelling for Miss
World. I really hoped we were going to get
more of this sort thing when Jodie Whittaker became the first female Doctor;
instead the closest we get is her being dunked as a witch in the decidedly
masculine ‘Witchfinders’, a story
that’s disappointingly a lot less ‘witchy’ than this one.
Mary Tamm, too, is really
enjoying herself. With The Doctor removed to a sub-plot she gets to do Doctory
things for the first time really, on the front foot and actually solving things
rather than having to ask what’s going on all the time. In fact Romana has a
great time ganging up on The Doctor and seems to have more faith in her two new
companions than him for much of the story (she genuinely thinks it was The
Doctor luring her to her death at the end of part one when Vivien throws her
voice). She also gets three outfits in just four episode, which is a record for
any companion who isn’t possessed and/or a robot duplicate (including an entire
scene that had to be re-recorded when someone noticed that she was in the wrong
one!) Professor Rumford has to point out how unpractical her footwear of high heels
is, a nice character moment that shows both how clueless Romana is still about
this adventuring lark and how oblivious The Doctor is to other people’s wardrobes.
As for The Doctor it’s good to see him so far out of his comfort zone for once.
Most of the things he tries this story, solving things in the usual way, don’t
quite come off. He stumbles into the plot and hints big hints that he knows
what’s going on, only for the story to go somewhere else and prove him wrong at
most turns. He nearly comes a cropper when he tries to outsmart the Megara once
too often by arguing that he’s as good as dead already as they turn off the
Oxygen supply. He’s trying to put his own (and in those days when Jodie
Whittaker wasn’t yet born purely ‘masculine’) stamp on proceedings and this
story doesn’t work like that. You might have expected Tom Baker to throw a fit,
given that this Doctor isn’t as heroic as usual but he really ups his game this
story and is on top form, sparking off everyone in the room with him (and
Beatrix most of all). It’s one of his greatest performances in fact as he
manages to remain his usual flippant self with just enough panic that things
are going wrong under the surface. When Tom was on form he really was the best
at this role and he lights up the camera in pretty much every scene. K9 too is
better served than usual, becoming the comedy interlude again rather than a
mere gun and the Tom Baker/John Leeson interplay is at its finest too (this is
the story with the famous anecdote about Tom doing the Times Crossword with
John in his usual van, delighting onlookers that The Doctor really was talking
to K9!)
As for the script, it
works well when it’s having fun with stones but loses its way when it’s up in
hyperspace and like the Ogri ultimately bites off more than it can chew. It
just does too much for a four-parter, without room for any background detail (you
think you’re going to get backstory for Cessair and Diplos as a planet, but it
never comes). I still don’t know how we ended up going from witchcraft and
paganism to legalise in a spaceship: it’s like the writer started it stoned and
ended it stone cold sober. This story throws so much into the mix that there’s no
stone unturned as it were – and no turn un-stoned by the fandom, given that
each revelation makes the story seem dafter and dafter. The first episode is
easily the best when it’s being atmospheric and ambiguous, before it has to tie
itself down to an actual plot. There are hints at something older going on
here, that we’re seeing the playing out of an ancient legend. ‘Battlefield’ was
the one to come out and call The Doctor ‘Merlin’ but this is the Dr Who story
that first dealt with Arthurian legends. Vivien Le Fay is surely based on
Morgana Fay, the villainess of the tales of Camelot who once turned Arthur into
stone (Merlin turned him back and then lured her off a cliff to her doom, much
as Le Fay tries with Romana here). Then there’s the clue that Cessair is referred
to as a ‘Cailleach’ – a druid name that literally means ‘old woman’ but also
means ‘witch’ (though admittedly in Welsh/Irish/Scottish Celtic lore rather
than Southern England. Maybe she decided she didn’t like the weather and got
her stones to walk with her South?) Cessair itself is from an Irish myth about
an early coloniser of that sceptered isle after the Biblical flood. Not
forgetting the ‘Maegera’ as they’re called in Ancient Greek myths, the three
furies that traditionally punished people for crimes that were preventable
(usually infidelity but good luck getting that into a Dr Who script in 1978!)
This story works best
when it’s hinting that the stones are part of some ancient legend, that they’ve
been overseeing humanity since the dawn of civilisation and that the Ravens are
passing on knowledge to an ancient powerful being. It all goes downhill when we
learn that Cessair of Diplos is in hiding, that she’s just randomly parked her
spaceship, that the ancient Stones are more guard dogs than anything and that
the ravens are (most likely) natural. The conversation about hyperspace is
particularly confusing: it’s the first time Who cashes in on the success and
friendship of former script editor Douglas Adams (after he cashes in on Who in
Hitch-Hikers a few times), with a mention of hyperspace. Only here it’s a
different dimension separate from the laws of relativity rather than an unlikely
place where whales turn into petunias – yet somehow just as illogical. Given
this is the only Who story that ever mentions hyperspace you’d think they’d
make more of it, but here’s it’s a background detail not the focus of the plot.
While it’s nice to see some old friends in Cessair’s spaceship, a sort of hijacked
prison van (basically costumes that were at the top of the props cupboard, a
dead Wirrn from ‘The Ark In Space’ the dusty
remains of a Kraal from ‘The
Android Invasion’ and, in a cut scene, a ‘Sea
Devil’). These only point to a more interesting story about her escape,
which never comes (if this was modern Who they’d do it as a flashback but that
just wasn’t a style really back then), while things are solved way too easily,
the fact that seal (the third key to time) is also a teleport device is just as
bad and unoriginal a solution as pointing K( at something and shooting it. This
wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story to fail to make the most of a good idea and
fall apart badly in the last episode (and it certainly won’t be the last), but
it’s one of the worst culprits in the sense that what was being promised seemed
so good. It would help, too, if the revelations when they came seemed like the
big moments they are, but the script rather tosses them out in passing. Oh yeah
by the way, I’m an alien. Oh yeah, I’m on the run. Oh yeah, the stones are
actually alive and can kill people. Now let’s banter again for five minutes.
The Megara fall between
the two extremes: the idea of petty bureaucrats who are more fussed about The
Doctor unknowingly breaking the law by undoing a seal and rescuing them than
the villain who locked them up in the first place is priceless, exactly the
sort of target Dr Who loved aiming for. The fact that they’re aliens who don’t
see the bigger picture and are what we would normally say unimaginative and ‘Earth
bound’ is all the funnier. The trouble is we then have to have elongated
speeches about legalese which even Dr Who can’t make interesting. They’re a
one-joke alien race that outstay their welcome rather, as if Fisher can’t work
out what to do with them. Their design, too, is clearly a side effect of the
cheaper budgets this year and like many a Williams monster look woefully cheap
(see The Vardans and Nimon in particular). This lot don’t even have full
costumes, not even a bit of baking foil: they’re round sparkly fairy lights
worked by puppeteers dressed in black against the balck background – amazingly they
don’t show (the director had worked on ‘Rainbow’ amongst stints on Who’s
biggest rivals ‘Quatermass’ ‘The Tomorrow People’ and ‘Doomwatch’ and hired his
old friends – it’s also where he first met John Leeson inside the Bungle suit).
The voices were added afterwards to hit the beats of each blinking light and
you can tell: they don’t match up or feel part of the action at all (actually the
actors were making up lines at random so their voices would blink in time, according
to visitors in the studio gallery: ‘Abracadabra, don’t go to sleep Doctor, I
hope I don’t burst this microphone with all this popping, pop pop POP!’ The
Judoon are one-note monsters too but at least they’re used against other villains
as a more comic foil – we only get to see them negotiate with The Doctor at length,
which makes for pone of the longest and least fun scenes in Dr Who you’ll ever
see.
Even so it’s not a bad
little story this one. The location shoot is brilliant and the night shoot atmospheric.
There are lots of little moments I really love, from the ravens sat out on the
Tardis to the cleverly paced scene where The Doctor finally learns who Cessair
is intercut with Romana meeting up with Vivian not realising the danger she’s
in, to the double pun of Vivian’s revelation she used to be a ‘brown owl’
(Romana, not yet used to Earth and English customs, doesn’t know it’s like the
scouts for young children, although given that Vivian is really an alien who
can transform herself maybe that is what she meant after all?) The Ogri are a really
worthy addition to the Who pantheon of monsters (especially when they’re
standing still) and I long for them to come back in the modern series so we can
see more of them (hopefully they’ll have found a way to make them move without
looking silly by now too). We don’t have that many ‘country’ Who stories given
how city-bound so many are and this story does a better job than most at
picking up on the traditional English folk-telling angle, of cut off villages
with their own set of rules and regulations. If we’d just had a bit more mystery
and a lot more background into the Cessair of Diplos rather than having her
transform from colourful and interesting to grey and boring this story could
yet have worked a treat. Certainly a lot of fans do like them, one of the
Graeme MacDonald, head of serials at the BBC, who thought it the best in years
(though asking to tone down the goat sacrifice ‘which could cause a lot of concern
for children, adults – and me’). Then again he hated ‘The Pirate Planet’, a
story that really is brimming with invention and makes the most of its
quadzillion ideas, something this story never quite does. ‘Stones’ is
ultimately a bit of a hodgepodge, with bits that work brilliantly alongside
other bits that don’t belong. Like
pretty much all the key to time season (except maybe the ‘Armageddon Factor’ finale) there’s a
great little story in here somewhere with a lot of promise and parts of it are
first-rate; it’s just that getting a brilliant coherent whole out of it is
like, well, getting blood out of an Ogri. This 100th story is not
unlike the 200th story in fact (‘Planet
Of the Dead’), a story with so much promise that never gets used. Not stone
cold brilliant then, but you’d have to have a stony heart not to enjoy any of
it.
POSITIVES + The big
horror scene in the opening, a rare case of Dr Who killing off innocent
bystanders who are recognisable normal people rather than mad professors or
comedy yokels, is really well done, with the night shoot lighting, the music,
the sound effects and the very real sense of panic from the actors (one of whom
is DJ Pete Murray’s son Jimmy) all judged to perfection. It’s all very creepy
and unexpected and makes you think this story is going to be scarier and more
horrifying than it turns out to be. All the more impressive given that it was a
last minute bit of desperation when it was realised that nobody had worked out
how the Ogri kill people and the idea of killing people by falling on top and crushing
them (as they do with K9) was vetoed for being too silly.
‘Vengeance Of The Stones (2013), the 3rd
Doctor entry in Big Finish’s multi-Doctor 50th anniversary set
‘Destiny Of the Doctor’, recounts once and for all (again) how Captain Mike
Yates joined UNIT. He happens to be the junior lieutenant officer on duty in
North-East Scotland when The Brigadier and the 3rd Doctor wander off
investigating ancient stones in the North of Scotland (similar to ‘The Stones Of Blood’
but less creepy and more moral, in the style of most 3rd Dr
stories). Yates is captured by the Armidians (sounds painful!), a race who came
for Earth’s natural resources but were attacked by the natives before they
could finish the Stones and have been seeking revenge ever since. The Brig,
impressed at the young man’s calm head in a crisis and knowing he won’t have to
explain alien threats, enlists him as his new UNIT captain at the end of a story
that’s good but predictable.
Previous ‘The Pirate Planet’ next ‘The Androids Of Tara’
No comments:
Post a Comment