Underworld: Ranking - 146

     Underworld

(Season 15, Dr 4 with Leela, 7-28/1/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Norman Stewart)

Rank: 146

'Well here we are in space, Memnon. I fancy some food. Would you turn on your Aga for us? Oh no its that robot again HcTore, would you stop hectoring us please? Agh he's just hit me with his ray gun in my foot - me, A-Killies, look what you've done to my heel! No Ora the Panda, don't open your box or you'll let out the space virus and ancient Earth will be doomed! Now all we need is the 4th Doctor to turn up...'

 

 Poor ‘Underworld’. There it languishes at the bottom of DW polls as one of the few 4^th Dr stories nobody seems to like. I guess with a name like that a story was never exactly going to come top of any lists and well, its no top tier classic that’s for sure, but I’ve never understood the hate for this story which unlike, say, ‘Timeless Children’ ‘Orphan 55’  ‘The TV Movie’ or ‘Time and the Rani’ doesn’t get things disastrously wrong on any level, even if it ends up being blandly good rather than bloody great. I do think this story is badly misunderstood though. I seem to be in the minority here but I rather like the idea that this script is the old Greek myths of old coming true, just in the future. Rather than the ‘lazy secondhand writing’ reviewers damn it with I’ve always found it quite clever – I’ve been a historian for long enough to know that most of human history is just people repeating themselves over and over in different costumes and in different names, so why not in the future too? Myths do often have a grain of truth in them, as the Doctor says at the end, and the quest is the quest after all. I particularly like the spaceship P7E being the future equivalent of ‘Persephone’ and ‘Orfe’ being ‘Orpheus’, even if ‘Jackson’ for ‘Jason’ is a bit of a stretch. Switching the search for a ‘golden fleece’ to a search for ‘Minyan data banks’ that contain the gene-pool of the Minyos civilisation also works for me; after all the ‘real’ fleece was about the search for power and control – and as it turns out the one having the power and control in this civilisation is a power-mad computer. Humans are always on a quest for hidden knowledge – its the knowledge that changes while the quest is, err, the quest, wait no that catchphrase is catching, the quest is always the same. I like the Minyans too – a rare race as old and as powerful as the timelords, who had their own time-war with them a long time before the Daleks thought of doing the same and who come with their own cruder method of regeneration (though really its more of a ‘renewal’). The hint, so fans think, is that Minyos is a future Earth colony. But what if Earth is a past Minyan colony that was abandoned from the past? That makes more sense to me (and maybe explains why Humans know the old stories in a garbled sword-of-mouth way).That’s ‘Minyan’ by the way not ‘Minion’, though both are pronounced the same, which is a shame – it would be even better if they were yellow and ate bananas. Similarly I was disappointed that the modern ‘Jason’ didn’t turn out to have an ‘Aga’ set to ‘nought’. Oh well, there’s still time for fan fiction. Anyway, the story is a good one, wherever it comes from, there are some nice bits of drama and action to break up the talking and some nice comedy moments too (fans often complain at the ancient artefact stamped with ‘made in Minyos’ like its from a secondhand dealer, but it always makes me laugh. Which, admittedly, might say more about me than the story). Dare I say it, this might be my favourite Baker-Martin story in pure terms of script (though ‘Nightmare of Eden’ by Baker alone, is a good one too).  People laugh at the acting too, but these are meant to be crewman who’ve been trapped in space for so many centuries they’re bored out of their minds or Trogs who live in the darkness and have no understanding of excitement – the way I read the story the Doctor and Leela are supposed to be the contrast to this, space and time travellers for whom everything is an adventure and brimming over with enthusiasm. Unfortunately it doesn’t always come over that way on screen. This looks, from how everybody seems on screen, as if this is one of those months when Tom Baker was in a foul mood with everyone from his co-star down, so if anyone looks bored in this world it’s the Doctor. People who aren’t too busy laughing at the script or the acting tend to laugh at the CSO special effects, a consequence of the ridiculously high inflation around in 1977 that caused the director Norman Stewart (formerly DW’s regular production assistant on his first big job) to cut costs. Given that they couldn’t build the elaborate sets they wanted the production team was faced with a choice: take some of the scenes out and re-write them or build models and then overlay the actors on there. For my money that’s the better solution of the two: the CSO shots aren’t as bad as everyone says and while you can tell the actors aren’t in the same room at all you have to be watching out for the really big mistakes, such as missing arms or legs or shadows (yes alright alright, apart from the ‘rockfall’ scene where extras seem to be running madly from rocks that weren’t added in time because it was too complicated). Compared to, say, the Myrka or the Ergon or the Mara snake or Kate O’Mara dressed as Bonnie Langford its a shame the scene doesn’t look quite right, rather than a travesty of the highest order that pulls you violently out of what you’re watching. Set against this the money that went on the spaceship set is well spent – it may even be the best futuristic spaceship set of the lot (‘Pirate Planet’ is the other contender), wide, spacious, clean. To my eyes ‘Underworld’s worst crime is none of these things – its more that its a bit on the slow side, without enough happening to sustain four episodes and that it tries a little too hard to feel like ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars’ both on a ridiculously miniscule fraction of the same budget with a bit of dodogy acting here and there– but honestly there’s a lot of Tom Baker episodes you could say that about. It will never be my very favourite then but if ever a DW story was under-rated its Underworld and the myth about how awful it is has been greatly exaggerated to my eyes.

+ The model shots are spectacular again, especially in the scenes where spaceships are attracting giant boulders in space, which could have been horrible but looks about as good as any model shot in 1977/78 on any budget could (frankly its more believable than the spaceship chases in Star Wars released a few months earlier and the plot is a lot less stupid).

- The ‘floating’ scene. Gravity on Minyos makes the 4^th Doctor and Leela float ‘upwards’ instead of down. Which might make sense had anyone actually explained how this planet works and the effects physics had on this world before it happens, but just looks like a suspiciously easy way out of a typical DW dilemma to me.