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 Dr Who polls as one of the few 4th 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 ‘Underworld’ which is a little bit
underwhelming rather than terrible. The main story is a strong one, with lots
of very big Dr Whoy concepts that fills in a lot of series history and unlike
stories that dropped the ball such as ‘The Timeless Children’ or even ‘The
Deadly Assassin’ it does so in a very respectful way. It’s also one of the
deepest and most multi-layered of all Who stories, asking high-falluting
questions about why we’re all here – even if writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin
seem to get a big twitchy and duck out of the answers, instead spending their
time on a more mundane Dr Who plot of capturing and escaping. Taken as a whole
the bad maybe outweighs the good, but that makes this is mid-tier story rather
than a terrible one and even that’s more because of behind-the-scenes
developments which made this story a journey into Hell both in front of and
behind the cameras.
There are two things
people always say about why ‘Underworld’ goes wrong. One is the extensive use
of CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) aka greenscreen aka chromakey, the
semi-digital effect from the days before proper computer graphics which allows
actors to walk around model sets without the expense of having to build the
whole thing. There is more CSO in this story than any other and to modern eyes
it can look quite strange having actors walking without their feet quite
connecting to a cave floor or, in the two most notorious scenes, Troglodyte
extras running in the wrong direction from a rockfall (at the start of episode
two) and The Doctor’s face disappearing briefly (in episode three). But had I
been a viewer in 1977 I’d have been bewitched as it’s a technological tour de
force no other series had ever dared try – indeed as a viewer in the 1990s when
I first saw it, it didn’t look bad. Most fans chunter that they shouldn’t have
tried it at all, but honestly they had no choice: they couldn’t afford to build
the set. Producer Graham Williams, nearly three years into a stressful
relentless job, finally had the time to take a pre-booked holiday. Only his
pre-booking came at just the wrong time: script editor Bob Holmes had just left
mid-season to take up another post, which left a production team with no one
really in charge of what was going on. Williams wasn’t too worried though:
Baker and Martin were old hands on Who by now and the production team was
moving along as smoothly as it ever did. So it was much to his horror that he
came back to find that, due to a misunderstanding and a clerical error, set
designer Dick Soles had got a decimal point in the wrong place and made a
spaceship set that was utterly brilliant, gorgeously lavish – and so expensive
it took the entire set budget for the rest of the story, with other scenes
still to be built. It was too late to either scrap the set or have the script
tailored to one set (the spaceship alas disappears midway through episode two)
so the production team had to face the scrapping of either this story or the
one that ran after it, with a whacking great hole in the season. Ironically
Baker and Martin wrote the cave set in deliberately, to be kind, as it would be
an easy set to turn round and re-use (which would have impressed Terrance Dicks
after five years of trying to get them to budget!)
It was a combination of
production assistant Norman Stewart and vision mixer A J Mitchell (a Top Of The
Pops veteran who was used to weird and wacky effects) who between them hatched
a plan to rescue the story with only a model cave set needing to be built. They
together with the script editor, producer, director and set designer worked
through the night to come up with a plan of how the story could be chromakeyed,
working out where the cameras would be pointing, what props would be needed and
what marks the actors would have to hit. Between them they hashed out sixty-six
pages of illustrated scene breakdowns and figured they would have to record
maybe eight to nine minutes a day using this method to finish the story, back
in the days when most productions were considered lucky to get one. They did
too, just finishing on time without over-runs (which is more than quite a few
Tom Baker era stories can say). It is a logistical tour de force: the actors
had to hit their marks and the cameras had to line up exactly: an inch out and
it would have looked wrong. What’s more it meant a lot of intricate passes
through post-production (in a rare early ‘gallery only day’ booked to add
effects while other productions cleaned the floor and set up sets with sounds
of constant sweeping and hammering) but such was the quality of videotape in
those days that it was BBC policy to only ever have five passes: any more and
the quality wouldn’t be of a high enough standard to broadcast. The pressure
was on! No other production had ever tried this and, yes, it goes wonky in a
few places (everyone struck a deal where they would only spend a certain
allotted time per scene so they didn’t fall too far behind) but there are some
incredible shots in there too: the use of shadow, The Doctor and Leela hiding
in mining carts in a ‘fake’ tunnel that isn’t there, crouching behind rocks in
a cave that also isn’t there. What’s more they manage it without any of the
‘fringing’ round the sides that hit the 3rd Doctor era when CSO was
new. The fact that people’s feet don’t line up in a handful of scenes is a
small price to pay. 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.
And CSO a lot better than the alternative, which was to use a drape across the
back of a set. Yes having a full size set would be better, but you know what?
It really doesn’t look too bad.
The other thing people
say is that this story is a lazy re-write of Ancient Greek Myths, simply
recycling them with a few name changes. This was an idea new script editor
Anthony Read had when researching another series ‘The Lotus Eaters’ and as a
fully paid up Whovian (arguably the first one who became script editor after
being a fan first rather than becoming one on the job – he was poached by head of
drama Graeme McDonald who admitted his work and weanted him for the BBC, where
he joked he would only if he got a decent job ‘like script editor on Dr Who’,not
knowing a vacancy had just come up) the aptly-named Read realised that it would
be a neat idea for a Dr Who story. He cast Baker and Martin for his first story
at his predecessor Robert Holmes suggestion, knowing they were a ‘safe pair
hands’ who could get scripts in on time (if not on budget: you might well be
laughing at that description if you’ve come here from ‘The
Claws Of Axos’ where the writers nearly blew the year budget in their first
scene, or ‘The Three Doctors’ with
its planet of anti-matter, or ‘The Hand Of Fear’
with its nuclear explosion and a planet made of crystals or the giant floating
God in ‘The Mutants’). Read almost
certainly didn’t mean a story set in space that re-told the Greek myths exactly
but even so, a tale of a quest past ginormous obstacles that’s really a story
about understanding and discovering yourself is a prime Dr Who plot if ever
there was one. I don’t really get the hate for that either when the exact same
fans praise ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ and
‘State Of Decay’ even though they rip
off Frankenstein and Dracula. Yes the way The Doctor points out the
similarities in episode four to anyone who hadn’t already got it seems a bit
clumsy and something they’d never done in any other story, but I find the name
changes rather cute: the spaceship P7E being the future equivalent of
‘Persephone’, ‘Orfe’ being ‘Orpheus’, Hedis being Hades, Tala being Atlanta,
Herrick being Hercules, R1c being Argossey and the Minos being Minos, 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 that just happens to
be called ‘The Oracle’. There’s also a similar chance of all-seeing ‘high
priests’ known as ‘The Seers’, who turn out to be three-eyed robots and even a
literal ‘Sword of Damocles’ hanging over the heads of victims sacrificed to the
Gods.
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 Humans are always on a quest for
hidden knowledge – it’s the knowledge that changes while the quest is, err, the
quest, wait no this story’s catchphrase is catching, the quest is always the
same. Other characters have significant names too: Rask is the real name of a
Danish philosopher who looked at how different languages seemed to splinter off
from one main one (he started with Ancient Greek, too). Tarn is the name of a
real translator, who was the first to procide English translations of many
Greek writers and philosophers (she is, in some ways, an ‘interpreter,
go-between the two races). A guard is also named Klimt, the Austrian painter
who was obsessed with murals of Ancient Greece while The Liebemann weapon is named
for a German artist: I rather like the idea that the real ‘gun’ uses to keep people
away from the ‘truth’ that a computer is God is art. Could it be, too, that
Baker and Martin have the Oracle’s great weapon, a pacifier ray, because that’s
what the Church did for the masses, pacifying them that there was a plan and
persuading them not to revolt? There’s a theme, running across ‘Underworld’,
that it’s taken 10,000 years for the Minyons to question their faith and revolt
against it by trying to take charge of their own future (and their own
genetics) – even though, in a great twist, for possibly the first time in the
history of Dr Who a religion is actually ‘right’ (even if it’s a computer that’s
God, rather than a deity)? The computer in charge of our ‘spiritual quest’ is all
wires and bolts, surrounded by robots who turn out to be telepathic. It’s the
Minyans’ desire for war that’s wrecked the grand masterplan, a warning to viewers
in the cold war Britain of 1977. For my money Baker and Martin don’t get
anywhere near enough credit for turning the usual Dr Who clichés on their head:
instead fans moan about yet another megalomaniac computer (even though the
whole point of the Oracle is that it isn’t – it’s following a computer code
that’s bringing the best chance of peace to the universe).
More than that, though, I
love what Baker and Martin have done with the ancient Greek Gods and their
relevance to both the future and the present day, in a legend that sounds
remarkably like the British Empire (continuing the theme the writers had
tackled in ‘The Mutants’) but also,
as with so many ‘classic’ Dr Whos, the cold war
which was still raging in 1977. For in this re-telling the Greeks/The
Minos are the Minyos and the timelords are the Ancient Gods. As The Doctor says
the Minyons went their own way ‘went to war with each other, learned how to
split the atom and discovered the toothbrush’ – they’re us. The Minyos are a
rare race every bit as old and the timelords were once their suppliers, who
granted them everything they ever needed (much like colonialist Brits). Only
the Minyans got too greedy and kicked the timelords out so they could fight
amongst themselves, using their own technology designed for ‘higher’ purposes
in an endless war of their own making. They even use a sort of botched form of
regeneration, although really theirs is more of a rejuvenation, with a machine
that everyone enters at the age of eighty-five and comes out looking in their
twenties, with all that extra knowledge in a younger body. It’s the perfect
metaphor for a race that have lived long but seem to have learned nothing and
are still at war and much how anyone from above must be looking at Humans in
1977. Only – much like the CSO funnily enough – the quality degrades over time
and the copies aren’t perfect, so the Minyons are developing all sorts of
unpleasant side effects. The timelords were disgusted and vowed to create a
policy of non-interference in ‘inferior life-forms’ – the one The Doctor was
put on trial for breaking in ‘The War Games’.
It’s a highly plausible backstory, explaining a lot about why the timelords
look on other lifeforms like children. Its clever, too, in that it threads in
nicely between both ideas of the timelords – the omnipotent ‘old testament’ headmasters
that Terrance Dicks created for ‘The War
Games’ and the corrupt hypocrite ‘new testament’ timelords Robert Holmes
had created fort ‘The Deadly Assassin’.
Like ‘The Mutants’ (a story about
how every civilisation has a right to rule over itself without interlopers) but
in reverse, it tells the tale of why greater beings have a duty of care to
those behind them on the civilisational ladder, to make life better where they
can – after all, The Doctor puts things right in four episodes which the
timelords could easily have done generations earlier.
It’s an even bigger story
than that though, with a theme that a lot of fans miss. The clue is when The
Doctor explains to Leela about a theory of how the universe was created, using
a Victorian era model that by 1977 had been all but overtaken by the big bang,
the ‘steady state principle’. This is the theory that the universe both creates
and destroys in equal measure, that every time a sun turns supernova and
gobbles up its solar system another one will spring up to compensate. It’s a
very karmic Dr Who way of looking at the universe, to have everything in
balance and indeed Graham Williams has been thinking along much the same lines,
coming up with the ‘Black’ and ‘White’ Guardians for his key to time project
the following year. Far more so than the sudden random violent idea of a ‘big
bang’ that created everything and has continued spreading outwards from source.
In that sense having the Oracle, the equivalent of ‘God’ in the original Greek
legends, turn out to be a computer is extremely satisfying rather than the
copout repeat of ‘The Face Of Evil’ people claim.
For, in as close as the writers can get in a family drama on at Saturday
teatime, the Oracle is the ‘real’ God of everything. It has everything fully
under control and all it needs to work is ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ that it knows
what it’s doing and has everything under control, if only we follow it’s
patterns. It’s free will and self-determination that cause our problems, Humans
and Minyans going their own sweet way without seeing the bigger picture. The
Minyans come here in search of the physical, of their ‘race databanks’ and don’t
quite realise that they should have been on a more spiritual adventure, to ‘crack
the computer code’ of life. The hints
are there for the audience though, such as Leela eating an apple from the tree
of knowledge (‘against the rules’), Herrick’s line that ‘The Gods use us for
their sport’ and even the ‘fight’ sequence, which was scripted to seem ‘like a
choreographed dance’, as if the soldiers are following a pre-made plan. It’s
very much an Ancient Greek view of religion too, the idea of as above so below
– that only by copying the Gods can mortals understand how life works. It’s
just that the Minyans have got the wrong end of the stick and copied the act of
regeneration not the thinking behind it: they haven’t learned why, merely
copied blindly. But is that in itself closer to the grand masterplan as worked
out by a computer? Or did all the breadcrumbs left for the Minyan
revolutionaries lead them to where they ought to be, to take over the Oracles
and prove that they’ve ‘grown up’ enough to deserve free will? Whatever the
writer’s feelings, it’s clear they’re getting at something here and it’s
fascinating to hear them going in such an opposite idea to ‘The Mutants’, which was all about the
power of self. Of course, some fans
laugh, it’s all set in the future so how can it be a Greek myth? Well, if the
timelords are involved this story is kind of timeless, possibly echoed by all
the echoes from Minyan history. 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). We are the
Minyans but without even the technology to renew ourselves, doomed to never
quite ‘get’ something above our comprehension. 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, but even that’s probably a
pun: the minions are doing the God’s, the Oracle’s, work for them.
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) as it’s the one they’ve clearly
thought through the most. In addition to the ideas above they’re the one
set of writers who actually understand how impossibly big space is: the Minyans
have been travelling for 10,000 years and still haven’t reached their
destination yet. In fact the spaceship has been travelling so long that it’s
begun to attract rocks to form round it, becoming its own planet in a very
visual sequence. Admittedly, though, this is a script that’s really good at the
big ideas and maybe less so with the smaller ones. There are lots of times when
I also sympathise with fans who find this story deeply boring: these concepts
are hard to turn into a plot and the one that we get, the Minyan raid on the
Oracle, isn’t enough to sustain four episodes. Indeed, the first three are some
of the shortest in the series, even with longer-than-usual recaps. We need a
sub-plot, a side quest, or at least an emotional scene-per-episode where we
find out what these characters are thinking and feeling in a story where
everyone reacts but nobody really does anything. Instead most of the time we’re
following. The sense of endless life, for instance, is raised for the first
time in a non-timelord and it’s the source of some really emotional future
stories (like ‘Enlightenment’ and the better half of ‘Mawdryn Undead’) –
Terrance Dicks has a lot more of the sense of inner despair in his novelisation
of ‘Underworld’ where the crew are ‘wearily condemned to life’, an old person
still even in a young’s person body, in great contrast to the typical
adaptations of Greek legends where they’re all toned, tanned and muscular; a
little more of that in the TV versions and this would have been a winner. Had
Anthony Read been better embedded as script editor and had he not been having
to cope with an abandoned script (replaced by his co-write ‘The Invasion Of
Time’ at the 11th hour) we might yet be singing this story’s praises
instead of kicking it as the runt of the 1970s litter. Instead it’s two episodes
of arguing interrupted by The Doctor and Leela playing ‘hide and seek’ in a
tunnel. The dialogue, too, leaves a lot to be desired: ‘The Quest Is The Quest’
isn’t a catchphrase to compare with ‘Eldrad Must Live!’ and most of the time we
see the Minyans they’re declaiming to one another, delivering exposition like
they’re in a Greek play. Clever on paper, but something of a chore to sit
through. The sad truth is you just don’t care about anyone in this story,
besides Leela – even The Doctor is at his most blunt and alien here. There are
a few mistakes along the way too: The Doctor seems to have forgotten that it
was him who suggested the wooden horse trick (in ‘The Myth Makers’) crediting it to
Ulysses, while some of the science in this story is a bit rocky to say the
least (especially the ‘upside down gravity field’). Similarly I was
disappointed that they missed a joke that the modern-day ‘Jason’ didn’t turn
out to have an ‘Aga’ set to ‘nought’. Oh well, there’s still time for fan
fiction. I do like the joke about the Minyan artefact with ‘made in Minyos’
stamped on the bottom, another reflection that really we’re talking about Earth
here whatever the planet names. It doesn’t help, either, that ‘The Sun Makers’
took all the allocated location budget meaning this story was always going to
be stuck indoors at TV centre – and often looks like it too.
People laugh at the
acting too and there are times when everyone is a bit under-par, a side effect
of the technological issues probably, with actors having to wait an
interminable length between scenes then under intense pressure to nail their
marks and get their lines right in one take (the first episode, mostly in the
spaceship set where no one needs to worry about such things, is of a far higher
standard all round). But even that’s somehow in keeping: these are meant to be
crewman who’ve lived the same life round in circles for ten thousand years over
and over, from young age to old age, and have been trapped in space for so many
centuries they’re bored out of their minds. Or they’re Trogs, the one reference
that isn’t to Ancient Greece with a race of troglodytes 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 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 going through the motions (it may well be that the CSO meant he had to
keep to the script, without his usual improvisation she added to keep people
amused). It’s probably lucky for us that Imogen Bickford Smith’s Tala wasn’t
the new companion, despite a report in the Sunday Mirror that she was going to
replace Leela – a rather opportunist move by her agent when he read that Louise
Jamieson had handed her notice in. Smith went along with it telling the papers
‘I’m happy to stay with the series as long as they’ll have me’ – which turns
out to be episode four (it would be even funnier if she’d said ‘till I’m in my
old age’ given that Tala is the Minyan we see being ‘rejuvenated’!) Only Alan
Lake overturns his stereotype as a brute butch masculine type of character by
providing Herrick with a layer of gentle sensitivity (a surprise to anyone
who’s seen his other work or indeed his background. He was married to Diana
Dors – the Beatle’s mid 1960s choice of pinup who’s even on the Sgt Peppers
cover - and might well have been cast in the hope that he would persuade his wife
to be Tala; certainly he has a very ‘protective’ aspect many fans would have
recognised from the tabloids. It’s a sad story: they worked on a film together
and fell in love, she bought him a horse, he had a nasty riding accident that
nearly paralysed him and they had a miscarriage, which between them saw
him turn to drink a little before
‘Underworld’ and they split up soon after. He turned his life around and they
re-married – only for her to die of cancer. He couldn’t cope without her and
shot himself just seven years after this story went out on air). It’s a strong
story for K9 to, his creators returning to write for him for the first time
since he’d been taken on as a companion and a story about a super computer
passing on messages is perfect for a robot dog. They missed a trick not having one
of the Minyans get confused and name him ‘Argos’ though (the dog in Greek
myths, who is more or less made out of space age flatpack furniture!)
Goodness knows I’ve sat
through stories with dodgier acting and worse effects though, not to mention
ones that move at a more glacial pace than this. ‘Underworld’ is just an
unlucky story where the most memorable, instantly visual parts are all the bits
that went wrong. The real problem with poor ‘Underworld’ was the timing: this
is the Dr Who story that went out at the time when ‘Star Wars’ opened at the
cinema and scifi fans looked at the cheap effects in this story and the slow
speed and laughed. To me, though, ‘Underworld’ is by far the superior: ‘Star
Wars’ is cheap recycling from various action films with a scifi theme grafted
on top but no proper scifi ideas beyond a robot and a hairy alien. It has no
scope, no depth, no goals – it’s a soap opera about a dysfunctional family that
just happens to be set in space. Though really ‘Underworld’ is more like Star
Trek than Star Wars: it’s a story very much about the ‘prime directive’ of ‘non-interference’,
on a planet that turns out to house an ageless God (even the rocks look
plastic). Being Dr Who, though, ‘Underworld’ digs deeper than both, telling a
metaphorical story that’s more than just a punch-up, with lots of moral
debates: is it better to be in charge of your own fate? Or leave it in the
hands of something that knows better than you? Especially in an age when
mankind risks wiping himself out in an atomic war. ‘Underworld’ is Dr Who at
its most thoughtful, a story that uses scifi the way it should always be used,
as a way of saying the unsayable and trying to put the human condition in the
context of a bigger story. Even if at times it’s a bit slow and repetitive it’s
definitely not the journey across Hell many fans take it to be: for ideas alone
‘Underworld’ deserves a mid ranking, even if it’s a story that doesn’t always
make the most of them. No it will never be my very favourite story, but just
listen to it rather than look at it – or even better think about it afterwards
- and ‘Underworld’ seems so much better than a slightly slow, slightly ploddy
story. ‘Underworld’ is in many ways the under-dog of the Graham Williams era,
blamed for lots of things that are either unfair, untrue, exaggerated or that
couldn’t be helped. Really it’s a triumph by all concerned that we got anything
at all, never mind a story as intelligent as this. In short, if ever a Dr Who
story was under-rated its Underworld.
POSITIVES + The model
shots are brilliant, which is just as well because we have a lot of them. The
scenes where the RC1 attracts giant boulders in space are particularly good,
especially when it crashes lands into a tank full of slurry (sorry, planet P7E).
It’s a three foot model, bigger than they were usually allowed to build, and
looks more substantial and less wobbly than usual, with Ian Scoones basing it
partly on the spaceship in the first ‘Planet Of the Apes’ movie he so admired
and partly on our old friend ‘Concorde’ (see ‘Timeflight’). However what really
makes this model shot come alive is the decision to have the camera move in the
shots of it moving rather than the model itse;f makes it seem far more
realistic. This mirrors what happens in
the original myth of course, Persephone being the guardian of the Underworld.
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