The Robots Of Death: Ranking - 111

                   The Robots Of Death

(Season 14, Dr 4 with Leela, 29/1/1977-19/2/1977, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Chris Boucher, director: Michael E Briant) 

Rank: 111

  'The robot butler did it. Well, sort of. Well, not exactly. Well, ish'. 

 

 Another Doctor Whodunnit next and arguably the best of the handful of murder mysteries the series has done, not least because what we’re tracking down isn’t just the murderer but the android they used to kill with. Though, like many a Hinchcliffe era story, this one borrows heavily from other sources (Frank Herbert’s’Dune’ and Isaac Asimov – not just the more famous ‘I, Robot’ stories but the ‘Black Widowers’ series, which is a bunch of scifi murder mysteries just like this one) the way Chris Boucher’s story weaves these two plot strands together and throws some Agatha Christie-isms in there too makes this one of the more memorable cases of DW recycling. This is a story that’s always shifting gears and a story that’s as deep as you want it to be and all things to all people: it can be just another DW action in space if that’s what you fancy, with lots of crazy space sets and costumes (oh the costumes!) to look at if that’s what you like best; it’s a pretty decent crime story for other fans who get more caught up in whose going round bumping off Sandminer workers than they do, say people getting killed off by potted plant Vervoids or giant wasps; if you’re big into the Doctor and Leela then this is a story all about them trying to prove their innocence when they naturally fall under suspicion, arriving just as people are dying (great timing there Tardis!); there are lots of scenes exploring this new world and mankind’s far future with its quirky characters and class system;while on another level this is a deep allegorical story that asks that age-old DW question of what throwing robots into a human world would do to them – and to us. At times the Humans are much more like the robots than the Vox and the Dumbs, robots with different degrees of intelligence, scheming and distant towards their companions. On the other hand the robots themselves have their own society that feels as real to us as anything the Humans have. While some of the other Hinchcliffe stories are all about the horror and having fun with the source material and twisting it to fit a DW concept, this one feels ‘real’ – of all the 1970s writers Boucher had one of the best eyes for human observation and these people feel plausibly like us despite the differences of the age and times. You really do care when these characters die, or are hurt, or how they feel when the Doctor points out the lies they’ve been living their whole lives. Boucher’s trump card as a writer is not just making other worlds come to life, which a lot of DW writers do well, but in making three-dimensional characters you understand even when you don’t agree with them – he does it by making the baddies sympathetic here and its surely a big reason why Dalek creator Terry Nation ‘poached’ him for ‘Blake’s 7’ the following year, when we end up totally on the side of bandits murderers and thieves for four series. Often the future in DW can look ridiculous and some of these costumes do look a little on the silly side (mind you, if thick eyebrows and orange tans can come back into fashion again whose to say crescent moon hats won’t be all the rage in a few millennia?) but by throwing a few ‘old’ designs in there too (notably the art deco designs coming back into fashion again) this one seems more plausibly futuristic-real than maybe any other in DW, realising how every age borrows from the past rather than ramming headfirst into the future; it’s certainly more memorable than yet another stainless steel spaceship that looks like a hospital. If there’s a downside, well, its the whodunnit angle. With such a small cast and so many of them getting bumped off there’s only a small number of people the killer can be – and two less than the characters realise given that we know it can’t be the Doctor or Leela. After (spoilers) Poul is revealed to be the future equivalent of an undercover cop (suffering from robophobia – here named ‘Grimwade’s Syndrome’ as a Tom Baker in-joke after production assistant and future DW director Peter Grimwade complained that every story he worked on seemed to involve robots somewhere) the suspect is even more obvious. Bigger spoilers: It’s Taren Capel, a scientist who believes robots are superior to humans. Which you should have guessed because he’s practically the only one left, And the person in charge of all the robots. And because he’s seen full screen in episode three in a truly ridiculous reveal (hardly a three-pipe problem for budding Sherlocks that). A few tweaks and the whodunnit aspect could have worked nicely – certainly the motivations of the people involved ring true, even the ones you can rule out - but you can’t help but feel that Boucher just isn’t interested in that aspect – he wants to explore this world and the dynamics of a world where everyone thinks robots can’t hurt humans, but mistakes, complacency and paranoia can do funny things to their programmers. Most interesting of all is what this does to the robots themselves – D84 has a true existentialist crisis and its surely no coincidence Douglas Adams is writing his first draft of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy’ when this story goes out (and will be DW script editor himself not long after); he’s the serious version of ‘Marvin’ and what happens to robots who understand how futile their role in life is and how few rights they have. What with AI opening up many of the same questions, ‘Robots’ feels if anything more timely now than when it went out. This is Leela’s second story and as her creator Boucher gets her character spot on and her mixture of action and intuition, working off instinct and body language in a world where robots don’t have any and humans are covering up all sorts of secrets, makes for a worthy contrast against the robots and the soppy humans who’ve become used to robots doing everything for them. Her dialogue is littered with maxims from her homeworld and she’s even more of a pupil to the Doctor’s teacher than ever – albeit a reluctant one (her reaction to the scene where the Doctor tries to describe the dimensions of the Tardis and how it works – ‘that’s silly’ – is priceless and always turning up in clips compilations). Tom Baker isn’t quite right this story though: he’s in one of his cross-patchy moods and is, unusually for him, lowkey and all but wiped off the screen by the other actors (maybe its because his is actually the most ‘normal’ costume on screen for once?!) In fact its the acting all round doesn’t quite match the script, though David Collings (that’s Silver in ‘Sapphire and Steel’ to you – and indeed me) is excellent as ever and the robots are all first-class (err, whatever their class) the other humans are a hammy lot this week, often on the verge of hysterics, tears or fits. Although even that somehow works: this is the first (of many as it turns out) DW stories set in the future where, far from being traditional action heroes or clinical scientists getting on with their work calmly, they’re just like ‘us’ at home but in space, the constant sea of robotic faces making humans ever more emotional and less robotic. Its the sign of a writer whose done a lot of thinking about his world before he ever put pen to paper – I just wish they’d done a bit less of it, that’s all. For the most part though ‘Robots’ has it all – arguably the best robots in DW in design and character complexity, one of the better modern day sets, a plot that’s simple but is a useful launchpad to asking difficult questions and some cracking dialogue. So much so that even some of the people in my life that hate DW quite like this one and don’t ‘throw hands’ in horror every time I watch it. – even the ones who ‘throw hands’ at me for watching it don’t blow the fuses they normally do. Which might explain why its the one non-anniversary/Dalek story that was picked for early release for both the video and DVD markets, a useful entry point to the series even if no other story quite goes where this one does.

+ The robot designs are gorgeous. Forget your bog-standard supermarket brand own faceless drones seen in other stories, the art deco masks and the gold hues make these seem like the deluxe models. Combined with Gregory De Polney’s acting skills you’ll care for this robot more than any other in scifiland. After K9 and Marvin the Paranoid Android anyway. Allegedly one of the reasons it all looks so good is that producer Phillip Hinchcliffe was told during the making of this story that owing to the pressure from Mary Whitehouse he was going to be taken off the series and replaced by Graham Williams, so decided not to worry about money anymore and make his last stories look amazing, letting his departments splash out knowing that they couldn’t fire him twice. Though unconfirmed, certainly this story and ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’ look a lot more impressive than most other 4^th Dr stories – and its notable just how cheap the following season looks by comparison.

- ‘Robots Of Death’ is, for the most part a serious story – the tension builds up across three and a half episodes precisely because it feels as if this story and the outcome is important. And then we get that ending where (spoilers) the villain is defeated by flooding the room with helium gas so Taren Capel can’t give orders to robots and talks in a squeaky voice. Then in the joke at the end Leela starts talking in a squeaky voice too and everyone laughs, like we’re in one of those bad sitcoms from the 1980s with tag excruciatingly smug tag scenes rather than a high class scifi drama.

The Haunting Of Villa Diodati: Ranking - 112

   The Haunting Of Villa Diodati

(Series 12, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz, 16/2/2020, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Maxine Alderton and Chris Chibnall, director: Emma Sullivan)

Rank: 112

   'Hello I'm the Doctor and I'm here to tell you my ghost story, all about a being on the planet Sarn who was brought to life by a mad scientist and...Wait, no, oops, Mary Shelley present, forget I said that. How about this planet full of Vampires, these pale-faced eternals who can't die except for a stake being driven through their heart and...wait, no, I can't do that one either. My bad! Err…umm…How about an alien that came to life in a Victorian manor house and started collecting people while they started evolving from husks. What do you mean you don’t believe that story? At least mine really happened!'

  

 

What is this vision I see before me? Surely not a phantom, for it is form is fully formed. It actually has a beginning and an end and a middle (oh what a middle!) Forget your usual half-formed being made of ectoplasm that gets pushed and pulled out of shape, or the slight imprint of a being that is only sketched in part of the way, or the semi-ideas that haunts a story rather than fully lives it: at long last this is a Chris Chibnall story that’s fully solid and inhabited by characters that feel real. Even if it’s a story all about ghosts. Though I’m fond of ‘Rosa’, a story that couldn’t have been done as well in any other era this is the first time s Chibnall story would have been great even if it had been dropped into the middle of any other Doctor’s run. What’s more it feels like a Dr Who story – partly because we go right back to the show’s roots and the ‘godmother of scifi’ Mary Shelley with a story that tries to do for the ‘Frankenstein’ author what ‘Timelash’ tried (and failed) to do for the ‘godfather of scifi’ H G Wells,  show them that they were ‘right’ with visions of the Whoniverse that no one else from their era would possibly understand. And partly because it’s a story the show had done before, on Big Finish, where Mary Shelley even travelled with the 8th Doctor for a time. It is, if you will, the ‘Dalek’ of the Chibnall era, a story that had already proved popular on audio re-written for television to be fit the new fittings but turning out more or less the same. 

This story takes the unusual step of being both a horror and an out and out comedy - and against all odds succeeds pretty well at both, my candidate as both the scariest and funniest of the Whittaker run (at least until ‘Eve Of The Daleks’ anyway, which again mixes both; they should have tried this mixture more as it seems to work with the 13th Doctor particularly well). Writer Maxine Alderton was a newbie to the series who’d once worked on the excellent children’s series ‘The Worst Witch’ (Harry Potter with more laughs) and this was her favourite time period and, unlike a  few historicals in this era, it feels as if she really has done her homework, taking real events that happened that leave her just enough space to weave a Dr Whoy type story round. She really captures the gothic-romanticism of a meeting of friends, lovers and poets in 1816, the famous ‘holiday’ at Switzerland’s Lake Geneva when Mary Shelley, her sort-of husband Percy Shelley (very modern!), their baby, Lord Byron and a couple of friends and partners spent a particularly rainy Summer indoors telling ghost stories. This is where the first draft of ‘Frankenstein’ was written, a book which has as good a claim as any to being the first scifi story with its use of science to revive as man from the dead(see ‘The Brain Of Morbius’), so it feels only right that it should have a scifi inspiration (at least in the Whoniverse). You sense Mary Shelley would have approved of a series that was so inspired by her paying homage to her in this way, unlike some other more grounded celebrity historical figures we’ve met in this era (Rosa Parks, James I, Ada Lovelace, Nikolai Tesla, especially Thomas Edison) who would probably have  been horrified at the idea that their great gifts were all ‘inspired’ by something other-worldly. It’s a clever idea that wraps up so many legends about this meeting: not just the weather but the fact that for a short time during the meeting Percy went missing with no one quite sure where he went and the fact that so many popular stories that lasted the ages were all written in this place at this time. It also explains, perhaps, why such a prolific holiday, that led to the creation of so much art, was never tried by any of these writers again (because they were too scared of re-awakening the ghosts?) Something special clearly happened in Villa Diodati in 1816 that captured so many imaginations all at once – and that something might as well be Dr Who in origin; after all, it’s not as if any of the parties involved would have dared to write the truth down for the history books. Often when Dr Who tries to fit into historical fact it comes a cropper but this one of the few stories where there’s nothing contradictory to records of what ‘really’ happened, with the added caveat that as the events of the night were interpreted by a bunch of imaginative writers they’d have altered the facts for their readers anyway. 

What’s more it’s a plot that, like ‘Unicorn and The Wasp’, was based on a real mystery – the reason so many writers were stuck indoors telling stories was that 1816 was the ‘year without a Summer’. Most people in  and while the scientific explanation is the explosion of a volcano, Mt Tambaru, that sent a cloud of ash into the skies over Europe that lasted months, I’d be quite happy to buy the scifi explanation that it was all the fault of the Cybermen. Most people in Europe didn’t know why at the time and blamed all sorts of things from ghosts to phantoms to the Devil but we now know the scientific reason was that exploding volcano Mt Tampuro sent so much ash into the sky that even as far away as Indonesia it blocked out the sun for most of the world that year.  Even the word ‘volcano’ was quite new and had only been around a hundred years by this point: the idea that something so far away could cause such chaos was beyond most understanding back then. No wonder, then, that so many explanations were given and rumours flew as to what supernatural entity had caused it – and what better hole for a Dr Who plot to fill than this? Add to that legend has it that Percy Shelley really did go missing just as he does in this story and woke up with part of his memory gone, unsure of quite where he’d been – while the truth was probably more that he got drunk and got lost, whose to say he hadn’t had his brain fused with a cyberellum and been attacked by a rogue time-travelling metal man from Mondas?

More than just the inclement weather or poets with amnesia, however, it’s this era that feels so right for Who. We haven’t visited the Georgian era much in Who and when we have it’s been in Scotland or France, never England. It’s long overdue: it’s at least as interesting in a ‘they’re just like us but oh so very different’ way as the succeeding Victorian age we seem to be in every other week and yet isn’t so far ago it seems like the distant past either; the Doctor can legitimately twiddle something in this era and have the ripples still affect our own (unlike Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, the Stone age, etc). This show fits in nicely with the romanticist notion of the day, as explored by many of the writers we meet in this story, that the universe was weirder, darker and scarier than any mortal could comprehend, while the 8th Doctor practically dressed like a romantic Georgian poet to begin with. This is an age when all is possible, when science has started pinning things down so people understood how the world worked more than their predecessors but where every revelation seemed to confirm the wonders of the universe, not take away from them. It is, in so many respects, my favourite era, at least in anno domini: the sense you get from reading texts of the time is of discovery in all forms at once, not just in science but in arts. And what series ever combined the two sides of that better than Dr Who? 

The plot isn’t that far removed from this notion either, pitting the literary giants of the day whose brains were full of imagination and creativity, against their arch nemesis, a literal giant in a lone Cyberman named Asshad who is driven by logic and cold hard emotion, a half-dead poet comes to disrupt their society. They come from two very different worlds in parallel (the Cybermen having originated on Earth’s sister Planet Mondas) but have grown in very different ways, one side of love and open-ness (to the extent that Mary and Percy have what modern viewers would consider an ‘open relationship’ and Lord Byron flirts with everyone and everything) and the other seeking to control. In a lot of Cybermen stories, especially modern Cybermen stories, they’re a ‘threat’ because they want to take mankind over and that’s an end to it but here they are two opposing ways of life and while it makes for a plot even more bonkers than usual it makes aesthetic sense that the Cybermen should be defeated by the figureheads of Romanticism, the idea that life is rich and joyous and there to be embraced. The Shelleys and Byron are, if you will, the epitome of the Doctor’s anti-Cybermen speech in ‘Earthshock’ about the wonders of a ‘well prepared meal’, of life’s little enjoyments and enrichments. The Cybermen would  never understand the thrill of being scared in a safe place, by something not quite alive and not quite dead: they live in a world where the one can become the other, like binary code. They want the world to be scared of them too, because they’re a real viable threat in a way ghosts of the Imation aren’t.  It makes sense too that it’s Mary Shelley who appeals to the Cyberman’s human side, still buried deep within his metal casing or even realises that he still has one. The sight of a Cyberman quoting Percy Shelley, so daft on paper but making perfect sense within the confines of the story, is the sort of mad juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary this series was made for (even if Asshad speaks in the same monotones of many of my old English teachers). The Cybermen too are a natural inspiration for ‘Frankenstein’, the story she supposedly started writing on this holiday, the fake-man who was put together through a combination of body parts and electricity to rise again. Fittingly this is a Cybermen put together through different cyber body parts found in the cupboard too rather than just being the latest design: he has a cyber helmet from ‘Nightmare In Silver’, legs from ‘Rise Of The Cybermen’ and an arm from ‘World Enough and Time’, just like Frankenstein’s monster.   More than perhaps any story in the ‘Chibnall’ era ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diodati’ feels like a rounded story that the author has laid out and worked through from beginning to end, a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces fit and where the A B and C plots complement each other.   

All five writers portrayed here are as close to their ‘real’ selves as you can be in a bit of fictionalised TV and what I particularly like is that they’re all at least semi-famous before the Tardis even turns up – it’s not another of those ‘they only became great because they met the Doctor’ tropes that have become so tiring and so, let’s face it, rude; you understand that these people aren’t just of their time but somehow beyond it. This is something a lot of Dr Who historicals struggle with (because let’s face it, you’re either meeting Royals and nobles or people who change the past in some way and so are somewhat above it – not the stinking peasants who best represent the era, by and large). Mary is curious, courageous, funny and slightly scandalous. She is most unlike the traditional idea of mothers of the day, barely noticing where her baby or estranged husband have got to. Percy is taken over for most of the episode but is sweet when he wakes up, instinctively understanding what’s going on far more than most would have been. Byron, meanwhile, is the biggest flirt seen in the series since Captain Jack and with a similar sense of impropriety. Yet all of these characters feel as if they belong to this era and this house on this day. As much as the Doctor harps on about them being ‘the most enlightened minds of their generation at the absolute zenith of their creativity’ like all the best Who historicals ‘Haunting’ delights in making them more than mere names from history books we couldn’t possibly relate to, flawed with human impulses like everyone else. Indeed, were it not for the language and dress this could easily be an episode of ‘Friends’: everyone’s in a romantic partnership pretty much but not necessarily the one they’d have chosen, love rivals as well as mates with skeletons in their closets that rattle louder than the ghosts they write about. 

The witty script spends a lot of time doing a ‘Russell T’ and having the Tardis regulars converse with the Georgians and find lots in common about life in their eras. Yaz, for instance, gets to discuss her feelings for the Doctor with one of the most notoriously ‘lose’ couples of the day, finding common ground over their need to have someone enigmatic and exciting in their lives rather than someone ‘reliable’ and how few other people ever understand that. It’s the opposite of the debate that runs throughout the Steven Moffat Amy Pond years about whether  the fun but dangerous world of the Doctor is a better fit for her than someone dependable like Rory. Ryan gets to talk about the importance of family life, something there for all eras, and Graham gets to moan about the plumbing. Even the opening gag about the psychic paper getting wet and not working shows more imagination than any other use of a long-running prop in the Chibnall era (when, by and large, the Tardis, sonic and paper tend to just do what it’s been established they can do). It is, I would say, one of the closest out of the whole of the 21st century run for what Who creator Sydney Newman envisaged for the show’s historical episodes and a desire to have them make the past come alive and seem as real as the present; original script editor David Whittaker too would have recognised this as ‘his’ show in a way he wouldn’t some of the others necessarily (including his successor Donald Tosh). Overall there’s the very Shelley/Byron conclusion that human nature never changes, it just dresses up in different clothes and that the world is a more exciting place than the rationalists give it credit (also a very Dr Who message if ever there was one).

It’s not just the poets who are well written for though – Alderton understands this Tardis crew better than any other writer in the Chibnall era. She gets their mutual very 21st century brand of automatic suspicion mixed with a friendliness and desire to accept other people on their own terms. She instinctively knows that the 13th Dr is a hyperactive puppy whose desperate to be everyone’s friend but has also learned to trust the intuition that makes her bark, that Yaz is a guarded no-nonsense policewoman whose seen enough of the world to be suspicious of it but still carries the kind heart that made her want to help people in the first place, that Ryan is a young man desperate for adventure whose beginning to realise it isn’t all fun and games and that Graham is the weary dad rediscovering his zest for life after heartbreak. They feel like they belong together this week these four, rather than a quartet of strangers who have nothing to do but squabble, with some great comedy lines that sum up their characters well: Yaz joking with the Doctor about how being snogged by lord Byron might change the timelines, Ryan trying to play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano (‘a haunting air’) happily oblivious to the fact he’s easily the worst performer in the room in an age when everyone of class knew to play really well (to be fair to him playing the piano with dyspraxia is hard because it’s hard to make both your hands work simultaneously so ‘Chopsticks’ is the perfect choice for something he would have been able to play – this is from personal experience after years of lessons by the way!), the gag ‘she must be from somewhere strange’ ‘The North?’ like the old Christopher Eccleston days but just as true now the Doctor’s picked up on the Sheffield accent, Graham forever looking for a loo that doesn’t exist yet before settling for a bedpan. I particularly love the scenes of the 13th Doctor trying to fight the Cyberman not by fighting them or outsmarting them but in a very 13th Doctor way, by being really really irritating – it’s easily Jodie Whittaker’s best work in the role up to this point (and her best until ‘Village Of The Angels’ where she gets to do this sort of thing all over again, but for longer), using her constant babble to confuse and disarm as she waits for ideas to come to her. One of her defining qutes is about how ‘step two ‘ is ‘to fix the mess I made in step one!’

It’s not just the dialogue though: everything looks so good this week, especially the Villa itself all dark and shadowy and all too plausible the sort of place where ghosts might exists and writers might be inspired to write about them. The establishing shots were filmed in Llwyn-On Reservoir in Cwntaf, Merthyr Tydfil (which sounds like an alien planet from the ‘New Adventures’ novels already) with the very ‘Ghost Light’ staircase shot on a private estate in St Nicholas Cardiff (was this a later bit of filming added when the episode was under-running? It’s sort of linked to the main plot but not a pivotal point of it so could conceivably have been added later) and the brief glimpse of the cellar filmed at Plas Machen, Bassaleg in Newport built in 1660  and so just right for the period setting. The bulk of filming was at Merthyr Mawr House in Bridgend, Glamorgan, though, which is slightly anachronistic but looks the part, a full village estate of 267 houses. Just as good are the period costumes, which are always strong on Who historicals, with the romantic poets looking natural in their slightly scruffy finery and the Tardis crew looking slightly out of sorts in theirs (especially Yaz in her striking blue bonnet): this is a rare story indeed where the Tardis crew arrive properly dressed before the story starts, though predictably it’s the Doctor who still looks slightly out of time. A word too for the special effects, always hard to do on location rather than in the confines of a TV studio but which all work well, from the shuffling skeletal hand to the ‘traveller’ ghost effect, which could have been faux Addams Family but which feel as if they’re ‘real’ more than a lot of this series’ special effects. It’s a rare Who story indeed in this era that works well whether you have the sound without the pictures or the pictures without the sound.  

Where this story falls apart badly is the ending, which forgets the romanticism for some good old fashioned Dr Who arguing and rather pushes the supporting cast to one side. First the Cyberman looms over Mary’s baby, intending to kill it, before being persuaded not to by the Doctor in a way that’s very like the end of ‘Closing Time’ (and Craig’s baby) but even more saccharine and unlikely. It’s the old ‘tram/lever’ ethics question, so loved by sociology papers, about whether it is right to interfere with fate or not – about whether you could pull a lever to make a tram run one innocent person over if it meant avoiding multiple sometimes guilty people. It’s a question Dr Who has asked many times before and generally better than this (the ‘do I have the right?’ speech from ‘Genesis Of the Daleks’ is the, well, genesis of it in the series but a lot of modern stories ask it too): both results end in death and both feel like a loss in different ways, with the Doctor agonising over her choice here. For some reason the Doctor ignores the hint given to the others by Captain Jack in ‘Fugitive Of The Judoon’, choosing to give the Cyberman ‘what it wants’ rather let it take the life of Percy Shelley. I really don’t buy  the Doctor’s argument that killing this one particular man will make more difference than usual because he’s ‘famous’ and ‘writes words that others listen to’ so he creates ‘ripples’; it’s far more in keeping with the series to spare his life because every person has ripples of their own and everyone deserves to live. Usually in Who it’s easier for the Doctor to make a moral choice of everyone dying rather than single one person out, even if they’ve already been chosen by that week’s alien nasty: Percy would have been the first to argue against her choice had he been aware enough (and Mary doesn’t put up too much of a fight: then again they were more casual acquaintances in this era than husband and wife in real life). The Doctor also never gives a reason why she ignores the advice of an old friend who fought so hard and risked his life to pass on that wisdom. The Doctor’s always had a slightly uneasy relationship with Jack from the beginning: does she not trust him? Why does Jack bother to pass on such vague information? ‘Ignore the lone Cyberman in Villa Diodati’ would have helped, or maybe‘ Go and abduct Rasputin – he’s The Master’ would surely be more use given events in the next episode. Or is it her friends’ ability to understand the message she doesn’t trust? The Doctor really turns on her friends again this week and it’s never comfortable whenever she does it: instead of worrying about the people who might lose their life this regeneration proves to be selfish once again, moaning that ‘sometimes team structure isn’t flat it’s mountainous, with me at the summit left alone, left to choose’. Jodie’s weakest suit as an actress is the moments of anger Chibnall’s scripts are always calling on her to unleash and this part sounds to me like the showrunner’s invention, the reason perhaps that he gets a co-credit this week. It’s a scene that feels badly out of place and seriously damages the good work done before it. Suddenly some of the greatest minds of their generation are just hanging round watching the Doctor and even though she’s more active this week (the mirroring of Byron’s threat to Ryan of facing him in a duel matched by her own duel with Asshad for the cyberium) it’s a clumsy end that doesn’t reflect the moral of the rest of the episode. It’s sad, too, that a story about monsters lurking and creeping shadows ends up being so bald about the plot by suddenly having a hulking great Cyberman there: it would have been better still if these Cybermen had been more like their phantom selves in ‘Army Of Ghosts’, never quite there. This is a ghost story after all – while turning it into a scifi one is par for the course for Who it usually maintains htat sense of atmosphere at least. If this part really was Chibnall’s handiwork then it shows again that he never truly understood this series or what he was trying to say with it, even while the writers he picked to write for the show clearly did. The lead in to the next story, the wretched nonsensical canon and logic-defying ‘Timeless Child’ arc, is what prevents this story from being truly great (not least because it makes you think that more logic in stories and less imagination would actually be a good thing and that the Cybermen were right). 

One element that gets forgotten, too, is the Doctor’s desperate need to get everyone back on track by writing their ghosts stories because her arrival has disrupted them. Typical writers – any excuse to get distracted (if this was the modern day they’d be checking their emails and their social media to avid writing! Erm, not that done that ever, honest). I mean, what happens after the Cyberman’s defeated exactly? The Doctor walks off to act on what’s just happened, warning her friends to keep out of it (even though she knows they’ll come – goodness knows why to be honest, given the way she’s just treated them). What do the poets do exactly? Given the timelines presumably they all go back in and shut the doors, maybe step over the dead body of their poor butler (the only person actually harmed by the Cybermen as it turns out) and start writing ‘Frankenstein’ and the like. Percy especially has just had his brain fused with a Cyberman’s: by rights if he ever picked up a pen again he would be writing cold hard logical poems not his most human  and expressive works (had the Doctor reversed the polarity of his brain’s neutron flow and given him an ‘emotions boost’ it would explain so much more about his career from hereon in). I know writers are a weird bunch but they need therapy right there not fiction; had the Doctor implored them to keep writing once she’s gone, because the rest of the universe depends on them then it would make more sense but she doesn’t – by and large she rather forgets they’re there. If I was in their shoes I wouldn’t both writing fiction again after finding out how much stranger the ‘real world’ is. And yet apparently everything goes back to normal. Or at least the Doctor stills knows enough about Frankenstein to still crack jokes about it from time to time (in ‘real life’ the storytelling goes on for three nights rather than the one planned here: so maybe they take the night off and regroup?) 

 I’m not sure I fully invest in the cyberium plot element too. I mean, how did it end up here? Fair enough that Percy Shelley should pick it up on one of his solitary walks as far as it goes – if anyone’s going to pick up a strange alien substance it’s going to be a curiosity-driven romantic poet – but how come it came to Earth at all? And what are the odds of it being picked up by someone famous? Who just happens to be on holiday with four other people who are more or less as famous? It’s the sort of coincidence that really needs to be nailed down, explained by something in the plot, but nothing: we all assumed at the time that we were going to get all the answers about why this all really happened the following week when the Cybermen return en masse except...we don’t. Not really. Villa Diodati and the people in it are never mentioned again in the series and this plot strand is just tidied back in the box and forgotten about. It’s such a shame because ‘Frankenstein’ itself is such a tightly plotted story: all the elements are there with no superfluous elements and lots of Who style mirroring going on from the beginning to end. Mary Shelley would, you expect, have written this plot arc in much better if she’d been around to write for Chibnall’s series – and I suspect she’s have added a lighter touch to this element too. 

I also find it incredibly odd that this particular Doctor meets two different members of one family in two otherwise un-connected stories when she has the whole of the universe to travel in (Ada Lovelace being lord Byron’s very different daughter as met in ‘Spyfall’ at the start of the year: either script could have had great fun playing on his worries that she’ll turn into a logical Cyberman only interested in science not romance and literature; instead she’s not even mentioned except by the Doctor). One other minor thing too: in real life Lord Byron, the creator of some of the most perfect prose about the heights that humanity can reach, was born with a limp. Alderton seems to have overlooked this in her research which is a shame, not least because the Cybermen could have had a great gag about ‘hey. Let me fix that for you…I’ve got a spare leg somewhere, you won’t feel a thing..’ Debating where the Human body and mind begins and ends with Byron, of all people, is a discussion I’d have loved to have seen. Also the idea that the cyberium has done something to the weather is raised then dropped, but it would have been so easy to tie this in to some great Cyber-masterplan: it was their whole driving rationale behind the weather control in their second ever appearance in ‘The Moonbase’ after all and the lightning strike at the heart of Frankenstein caused by a Frankenstein-like monster would have been the icing on the cake. You would have thought, with all that cyber-technology, the cyberium would be more than just a dull grey blob too. Perhaps the amount of times the Doctor’s defeated them down the years means there have been some cyber budget cuts? 

Oh well. We got 90% of the way to having a great story this week and that’s still a lot closer than I’d dared to hope after such a run of duff stories in a row across series twelve, the weakest in sixty years in so many ways. I’m still haunted by ‘Haunting Of Villa Diodati’ and how close it nearly came to being a modern classic, not just because it feels like traditional DW again but done in a new and refreshing way, or even for getting the basics of storytelling right for once, but because it made it feel as if this series was finally going to make the most of all the many things going for it, correct the occasional mistakes that kept dragging the other episodes down and get everything right from hereon in. It won’t happen – the following ‘Timeless Child’ two-parter is the show’s nadir in so so many ways – but that feeling of promise, that for a week made me feel this show could do anything again and do it well, is still more than enough to let me think of this story fondly. It’s a story that walks in beauty, as Byron would have put it, even if it ends up in ugly place. It’s ‘music when soft voices die’ until those voices return from the dead and start shouting, as Percy Shelley would say (‘electric!’ Mary Shelley would have called it… even though the lightning storm, so close to what gives her monster life in ‘Frankenstein’, is oddly enough not directly related to the plot the way it is in the Big Finish versions of the Doctor’s adventures with Mary). If you ignore the last quarter hour, though, there is still so much to love about this story which succeeds as a historical, as a ghost story and as drama-comedy indeed; it’s just as part of the series arc it falls over.  

POSITIVES + For a while there it looks as if this is going to be a proper ghost story in a proper haunted house and everything. Believe it or not we’ve never had one of those in Dr Who before – the closest till now have been ‘Hide’ (which turned out to be two loved-up aliens from another dimension) ‘Day Of The Daleks’ (which turned out to be time travellers from an alternate version of Earth’s future) and ‘Ghost Light’ (which turned out to be a cataloguing alien). This one is arguably the closest to being a ghost story all the way through without turning into something else more science based; even when the Cybermen arrives he’s as close to a ‘ghost' as anyone in the Dr Who universe, a one-time Human who died.  Graham even meets a ‘real’ ghost not connected to the main plot (though we naturally assume that it is), a red herring that puts off the scent and has the Doctor, known supernatural sceptic, declare that there might be such things as ghosts after all. If you’ve come to this story from any of the other three (or ‘The Daemons’) then that’s quite a change of heart. 

NEGATIVES - While most of the regulars raise their game this week to match Lili Miller, whose excellent as Mary Shelley, some of the other performances are more...gothic horror than gothic romance. Percy Shelley should be full of mystery and romance, a complex tortured soul driven by things his imagination stirred up that he doesn’t understand but feel compelled by and yet he mostly comes across as a hopeless drunk. John Polidari is, in so many ways, the most interesting character here and to me the best writer of the quintet (he wrote the world’s first vampire story called ‘Vampyre’, and it’s a lot better than ‘Dracula’ that came out shortly after and stole its thunder) but he’s nothing like as interesting on screen as he was in real life and mostly stuck to the crowd scenes. Byron, meanwhile, is played as a pure caricature, not even close to as complex and fascinating as he was in reality – the sign of a great DW historical of old was that they sent you running to the library to look people up, but only Mary Shelley makes you want to do that this week. Normally I’d just blame the script but actually there’s a lot of gothic layers there for actors to, erm, get their teeth into if you read the scripts, it just comes over all flat from the delivery. Unusually the regulars act everyone off the screen.

BEST QUOTE: ‘Words matter! One death, one ripple, and history will change in a blink. The future will not be the world you know. The world you came from, the world you were created in won't exist, so neither will you. It's not just his life at stake. It's yours’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In one of the rare but funner contradictions between the main series and the spin-off ranges Mary Shelley spends ‘Villa Diadati’ without once saying ‘wait, didn’t we do this before? I used to know a Doctor, but he was a short but cute guy with a scouse accent. I travelled around the universe with him in a blue box…just like the one outside!’ Because, believe it or not (and I still don’t quite believe it even though I’ve heard them) Mary Shelley was a companion of the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann, for a string of stories. Her first appearance is the closest to ‘Villa Diodati’ and is practically the same tale bar the Cybermen, part of the ‘The Company Of Friends’ audio anthology (2009) about the 8th Doctor having one-off companions mentioned in the spin-off books and comics rather than his regular Big Finish companions. It had long been teased that this Doctor knew Mary, the godmother of scifi, well and ‘Mary’s Story’, written by Jonathan Morris, is again set at the Villa Diodati in 1816 as Shelley and friends tell ghost stories. They’re interrupted by a knock at the door –a man called Dr Frankenstein who talks incoherently about a ‘volcano’ and ‘the year without a summer’, then  collapses and dies. Percy Shelley tries to revive him with electricity, which causes him to revive but go beserk, the assembled throng chasing him to his blue box in the woods where he reveals himself to be the 8th Doctor. Or at any rate he’s partly the 8th Doctor…he’s also been infected by an alien monster and is about to kill them all! The ending to this story is absolutely bonkers and makes you wonder why it doesn’t happen all the time (spoilers: a younger version of the 8th Doctor gets a distress call and turns up to put things right with his sonic). Most of the assembled guests are scared but Mary is fascinated and the Doctor invites her on board the Tardis as his companion. Julie Cox is an excellent Mary in all these adventures, not that different from how she is on TV, with the same sense of curiosity and heart. 

It took two years to find out what happened next in a run of three stories that saw Mary Shelley travel with the 8th Doctor full time. Marc Platt’s ‘The Silver Turk’ is #153 in the Big Finish main range and seems to be the inspiration for the ‘other’ half of ‘Villa Diodati’, with the appearance of a lone Cybermen, an exhibit at the World’s Fair in Vienna in 1873 (so some 22 years after Mary died in real life). He’s where the legend about a chess-playing automaton that was famous in 19th century Europe came from (and which was the starting point for ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’), only this one plays the piano too (and the sound of a Cybermen playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ is one of the dafter Who moments out there). The Doctor tries to evacuate the hall and with the help of a knife Mary has with her, does something clever to its circuits. Mary proves herself as a companion by realising its not scary but ‘in pain’, a concept it doesn’t even understand, ready for an oddly sweet conclusion that once again features the lightning strike at the heart of ‘Frankenstein’. No wonder Mary Shelley got so many ideas for her story…she stole all of it from the Doctor! Arguably the best of the quartet – certainly it’s the more memorable.

‘The Witch From The Well’ (#154) follows on directly, a more sciencey story from writer Rick Briggs that has a creature from the ‘Hecatrix Dimension’ bury itself down a well, Erato-style. The locals assume it’s a witch and Mary, rather than the Doctor, saves local children from its clutches. The story has a strong start but soon gets out of hand, with lots of mad running around and a ‘flux imp’ (!) along for the ride. 

‘Army Of Death’ (#155) by Jason Arnopp then wraps up Mary’s brief stay in The Tardis with her first trip to an alien world: Zelonia. It’s a very Star Trek story this one, about twin cities at war pitched from peace into war by the death of one ruler and the need to find a path somewhere down the middle. The story is more remembered by the fact that the Doctor finally stops flirting and openly admits to having the hots for Mary – not really a surprise, given that this is the most tactile of all Doctors, but it does feel a bit odd! Mary never gets a proper farewell scene, instead jotting down some ideas in her diary for when she gets home.

Mary’s first Who appearance of all ,though, was in the comics, specifically ‘The Creative Spark’ published in the ‘Battles In Time’ series in 2008. A rowdy, colourful affair – like the rest of the series – it has the 10th Doctor visiting Villa Diaodati during a lightning strike this time, this one caused by an alien artefact,  an elemental intensifier, buried in the woods. An alien named ZZarik was trying to use it to cross dimensions and travel across the vast reaches of space but it developed a technical fault. Instead he’s rescued by the Doctor and, on a break with tradition, rather than tries to eat him he apologises for being such bother. Mary is lurking in the woods, taking it all in for her future book. Silly but fun. 

Previous ‘Can You Hear Me?’ next ‘Ascension Of The Cyberman/The Timeless Children’

The Creature From The Pit: Ranking - 113

  The Creature From The Pit

(Season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, 27/10/1979-17/11/1979, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: David Fisher, director: Christopher Barry) 

Rank: 113

In an emoji: 🕳

  'What Erato was really saying:

Ee lads, there's some right trouble down t'pit on Chloris so there is. I've been stuck down this pit, boy and monster, for so long now and all I did was come to talk t'the lady of the 'ouse about some financial negotiations. Ah don't like the way they keep calling me 'creature' instead of 'Sir', I mean I didn't spend five years in diplomat school to be treated like your common or garden monster. The local life forms are really fragile, I think I just squashed one by accident. Not very diplomatic I know - oops - but then if they will keep me down here with nowt so much as a loaf of Hovis a monster's gotta do what a monster's gotta do. Eh up, a bloke with a long scarf has just chucked himself down, wonder what he wants? See thee later!'  

I’ve often wondered why this fine 4th Doctor story, a re-telling of ‘Beauty And The Beast’ where the beauty is an ice-cold villainess and the beast is a shapeless amorphous blob that looks like a weather balloon, doesn’t get the love that other ones do. Is it the constant jokes? The rather rude looking alien? The fact that most of it features another alien mute creature hiding down a catacombs, like the Peladon stories all over again? Is it because it followed an acknowledged classic in ‘The City Of Death’, a story that (thanks to an ITV strike) won Dr Who a whole new audience? Or because the ITV strike meant that the channel threw everything at their comeback the night ‘Creature’ went out? Or is it simply that ‘Pit’ is one of the most misunderstood of all Dr Who stories? You see there came a time, when the first Who guidebooks were being written and Dr Who Magazine first started, where this story became a shorthand for everything that was wrong about the series and the direction that it was taking – that it was sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, that it didn’t take itself seriously enough, that Dr Who had become silly, a parody of itself and all science-fiction, too busy being smart to be scary or political. 

But being silly is oh so very different to being funny. I love Dr Who when its genuinely funny and this story is so often incredibly funny with a gag practically every scene. Writer David Fisher has a natural bent for comedy anyway, but combine that with Douglas Adams as script editor embellishing the dialogue and Tom Baker at the height of his powers improvising wildly on top of that and you have some of my favourite lines from the series: ‘Our researchers divide into two categories. The ones who have got close enough to find something out about it – and the ones who are still alive’ ‘Did you examine the body of the creature?’ ‘ ‘No – I was too busy trying to avoid it examining mine!’ and the moment the 4th Doctor is down the pit and gets a copy of ‘climbing Mount Everest’ out of his pocket to climb upwards, then curses as its in Tibetan – and then gets a book on how to read Tibetan out the other pocket. That is far from being silly though: all these jokes are absolutely in character and all part of both the Doctor and Romana’s attempts to wrong-foot the very serious villain, who clearly hadn’t anticipated two wise-cracking timelords and their robotic dog coming along to subvert her all too serious plans. In their hands comedy is another weapon wielded carefully to knock a villain who gets her own way all the time off her feet. There are still moments of terror too though: the moment the Doctor leaps down the pit to what we (and even Romana) thinks is his death, when he’s just a plot-beat ahead of us and knows he’s safe, is one of the great DW cliffhangers of the 1970s. 

Myra Frances is excellent as Lady Adastra in a part that could easily have become a joke had she sent it up the way the leads are, but she’s the still haughty rock around which they dance, the Margaret Dumont to their Marx Brothers, the still centre that demands to be taken seriously – which only makes their jokes hit all the harder. It’s a deliberate ruse to upset her, because the only thing you can do to tyrants to take them down is either to match them (which really isn’t the Doctor’s style) or laugh at them. She has no imagination, no poetry in her soul (by contrast the Doctor and Romana both spend their first scene of this story reading ‘The Tale Of Peter Rabbit’ and even K9 seems to be getting something out of it. Oh and incidentally, for all my comments on finding a political allegory, note how close the plot of this story actually is to ‘Peter Rabbit’: Chloris is basically an alien version of Mr McGregor’s Garden and all Erato wants is a carrot: they’ve got plenty, it’s not like they’re about to starve and the land doesn’t technically belong to any one individual anyway). Take the moment when Romana asks what the whacking great hole in the middle of the ground is and is told ‘we call it the pit’. Lots of fans say this line is evidence of the stupidity of the plot and the way it’s laughing at scifi, but for me its just evidence of how narrow-minded Adastra is, that she doesn’t have the imagination to see anything beyond her own nose (she has the entire run of Chloris and owns most of it but still can’t see clearly – whereas Erato has been chucked down a pit and still has a bigger vision than she does). Nevertheless Adastra is a true threat precisely because of this narrow vision, as sadistic as any villain we see in this series and the Doctor and Romana both know it – indeed she’s the first baddy since Davros that feels like a true threat against the Doctor from the first. And no wonder really – ‘Adrasta’ means ‘Queen’ in Latin (Adams changing the name round in editing slightly just in case it gave the plot away too much), a dictator through and through. Fisher based her on one of his Great Aunts he remembered from childhood that he used to dread visiting, being haughty and insufferable, and had great fun conspiring to kill her off! 

 She is also, surely, Margaret Thatcher in space: yes some guidebooks doubt this, given that it’s 1979 and she’s only been in power five months at the time this story was transmitted (never mind written), but people forget that Maggie had been head of the opposition for several years and had talked about what she was going to do if she got in so this story is at least what people were afraid she would be like. Far from being silly, David Fisher is one of the few writers in Who that has created an alien world by sitting down and really thinking about it. Chloris is, despite the name, not the sort of planet that looks like a swimming baths but one that’s covered in mass vegetation, in planets taking in energy by photosynthesis, through chlorophyll. It’s a planet where the plants are pumping oxygen constantly into the atmosphere and the people on it are just along for the ride, not giving anything back. At the same, though, this is a planet without metals of any kind except those that have fallen from the sky: no one has ever invented weaponry and no one has thought to cut the trees down. Adastra, then, is an ‘Iron Lady’ with no iron, a false leader. Lady Adastra rules the planet by controlling the mine which is the only source of income on the planet Chloris – and if whacking a great alien monster down at the bottom to eat people who disobey on her orders isn’t a form of nationalisation I don’t know what is. There is a giant pit in town but it’s not used for mining anymore and all the miners on this planet have turned into bandits in order to scrape together a living – instead the pit is where Adastra has been flinging undesirables and anyone who disagrees with her. Given that Thatcher has been talking openly about shutting down the mines when she gets into power, ending jobs that have existed for centuries and multiple generations, is this story a forewarning of what might happen when she takes command for good? For the pit, the mine, has been turned into a battleground where enemies get eaten. After all for Adastra and Thatcher, both, the enemies of this world are communities and trade unions, the idea that people might stop being scared long enough to club together to stand up to her. Why won’t alien planets ever stick our politicians down a big pit, eh?! 

It’s not like that on nearby planet Tythos, they’re a democracy of amorphous blobs who live on a planet over-flowing with metal but who don’t have any trees left. In one of the greatest twists of any Dr Who story (mega huge spoilers) the creature turns out to be Erato, a planet ambassador, sent to make a deal with the people of Chloris – only because they don’t have any vocal chords and they look so big and ugly everyone assumed it was a monster. Adastra knows the truth but trade isn’t a word in her vocabulary so she sent it down the pit to scare people. Now everyone is looking the wrong way scared of the ‘monster’ down below ground rather than the one above it. Which is just how Adastra wants it. (bit early for it to be an Arthur Scargill union boss metaphor but that kind of works too, even more so if you see the unions as a leaderless blob). Everyone is scared of Erato but the only people he kills is by accident, from accidentally rolling on top of them (because that’s what Tythonians do as a greeting?) Its hard to be a diplomat when you squash people every time you move. Something they should remember in embassies around the world (OK, maybe it isn’t Arthur Scargill and I really don’t want that image in my head. Forget I said anything). The solution should be easy: both planets want what the other has, but greed gets in the way. In that sense ‘Pit’ is a story not just about the present but about the past repeating itself again, medieval Europe when countries went to war with each other over greed and hoarding resources. Instead Chloris has gone backwards, resembling our Medieval world, even though they’ve clearly had great technology on the planet at some stage. Like many a Dr Who story this one asks ‘just think where we might be now, how far out into the stars we might have travelled, had we not stopped to fight each other along the way?!’ For any success in dictatorships is fleeting and who remembers a dictator kindly one they’re gone? 

Far from being a fellow dictator, Erato is a humble employee and a nice one at that, a giant green featureless blob with appendages only a mother could love (if Erato has one: Fisher wrote dozens of notes for his two planets that never made it on screen: one of which was that Tythonians live to be 40,000 years old and because of this only births are limited and only thirty are allowed to be alive at any one time. No wonder he can’t comprehend Adastra’s short-term greed given that he lives so long). He has no nose or indeed eyes or mouth. How does he smell? Like a cerebral membrane. Dear Erato. For some fans he’s another poor costume choice. For others he’s a joke too far, with a very err phallic looking trunk that the 4th Doctor is called upon to blow down – to the point where some have wondered if it was a deliberate comment on gay rights (had this been in new Who then very much it would have been, but chances are it’s just another of those weird DW costume decisions you get from time to time – both Fisher and Adams would have been a lot more subtle than that in getting their points across). And for other people he turned out to be every bit the ‘monster’ he was painted out to be by Adastra’s propaganda. The only thing Fisher was asked was to write a ‘different sort of monster’ so he thought along the lines of something big and possibly gassy. As it happens the special effects team were thinking more along the lines of ‘Rover’, the weather balloon from ‘The Prisoner’, but were asked to make it big and ran out of time and money, the usual problem. The entire cast and crew saw it for the first time at camera rehearsals and were on the floor laughing. The special effects team then got into a huge spat with the director over unreasonable demands that became one of the most heated rows in Who history; thankfully it calmed down, eventually. But there are still grown men who cry thinking about how they so nearly lost their jobs over this monster. Erato makes sense to me though: chances are an alien race out there somewhere would grow to be that large and featureless and keeping it trapped down a pit means that it doesn’t have to move and spoil the effect, the way the pantomime Myrka did (it helps that there isn’t an actor inside it as such – it’s a bag of hot air controlled by five technicians). He’s sweet too: as much as you’re told to be terrified of him for two and a half episodes, in a very Dr Who twist he turns out to be a big softie once the Doctor finds a way of communicating with him through his own vocal chords. It’s a running joke in Dr Who that all aliens seem to speak perfect BBC English and even people from other countries in the past seem to as well (explained away, eventually, by the invention of the Tardis telepathic circuits’) but surely not every life out there develops vocal chords naturally: Fisher’s been thinking harder than most writers coming up with this world and this alien, which for me makes up for any defect in how the Tythonian looks on screen. In another great twist too, no one knows what the mysterious object is that arrived at the same time as Erato. Given that we’re a scifi literally audience and the people of Chloris aren’t we feel all smug that it must be a spaceship – but the kicker is that it turns out to be a giant egg that just looks like a spaceship. Now that’s funny! So is the fact that ‘Erato’ is another Latin word by the way. It means ‘lovely’… As for the complaints that we have yet another pit, well, where else would you keep a monster trapped so he doesn’t eat people except the ones you want him to eat? At least there isn’t yet another labyrinth this time. 

 Another thing that Fisher’s been thinking about is how these people might treat the idea of aliens, given that they don’t have the metals to build rockets. The fact is they don’t: their view of the stars is closer to astrology than astronomy and Fisher builds up a whole world here too, with a group of star signs peculiar to this planet that nevertheless sound just enough like ours for viewers to get the joke: ‘Caprius’ ‘Ariel’ ‘Aquatron’ and ‘Prato’ (the Doctor remarks, possibly truthfully possibly jokingly, that on Gallifrey he was born under the sign of the ‘crossed computers’). The astrology angle really helps sell this story’s metaphors too: ‘as above, so below’ is what the Medieval scholars used to say and as it happens every prediction we get on this planet comes true, not least Adastra’s come-uppance, although the joke when we first meet him is that this great seer didn’t see himself being thrown down the pit. The put-upon astrologer we meet, Organon, is a wonderful character too, played by Geoffrey Balydon in his only actual appearance in a series he had several links with (he did this story back to back to appearing as the all-seeing impossibly old timelordy Crowman in ‘Worzel Gummidge’ opposite Jon Pertwee, while his most famous part as Medieval wizard ‘Catweazel’ was as closer as ITV came to creating their own ‘Dr Who’ pre-‘Tomorrow People’ or ‘Blake’s 7’, while he was on Verity Lambert’s shortlist to play the first Doctor if they couldn’t get William Hartnell and, finally, he played a ‘parallel world’ Doctor in Big Finish’s ‘Unbound’ series). He’s excellent, as eccentric as the Doctor and able to see through Adastra’s narrow vision of the world, a Nostradamus who can see all the awful things in the planet’s future but politically is unable to say anything in the present or it will see him thrown down the pit (as indeed he is), the messenger shot for his message not being what Adastra wants to hear. He’s another example of how blinkered Adastra is: is she had the imagination to see more than her immediate present and make use of his predictions she might have flourished further still but o, she won’t listen to criticism or contemplate not winning. Organon is one of those passing characters I really really wanted him to join the Tardis at the end of this story (and to those reading these reviews in transmission order thinking a feeble old man whining would be a hindrance, wait till Adric turns up next season). 

The Doctor-Romana interplay was never better than here too – they’re not a master and pupil anymore or Romana doing Doctory stuff while the Doctor gets all the jokes, they’re a double act, two best friends having fun confusing conmen and tricking tricksters both because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s fun. Some fans think that it’s the era when Tom Baker is too big for his boots and spending more time tossing jokes into the script than saying the words that are there but they never go too far (for now). Lalla Ward hits the ground running: this was the first story she filmed as Romana (though her third Dr Who story transmitted – its complicated) but she breezes through it as if she was born to it, with a carefree joy the first Romana never had while being still recognisably the same character. She was, famously, deeply unhappy with both the characterisation and the costume, both of which are still clearly modelled on Mary Tamm and she hasn’t quite found the middle ground between smugness and playfulness but she’s working on it fast – and it makes sense that Romana’s fashion sense hasn’t quite regenerated along with her body (after all the Doctor can spend a whole adventure in the ‘wrong’ clothes before changing sometimes). K9 too is better catered for than usual, getting lots to do that doesn’t just involve him shooting things or resolving the plot and he gets some of his best lines too – the Doctor has, apparently, programmed him with sarcasm to go alongside his new voice (in reality because John Leeson had left to have a bash at doing other things; David Brierley can’t compete but at least he still very much feels like K9 who just happens to have a new voice because that’s what computers do from time to time – it was probably another of those irritating windows updates - rather than an imposter). 

 Look out, too, for a couple of the minor parts: Eileen Way makes her third and final appearance in the series after playing two of the most important roles in the series – the ‘old woman’ of the Tribe of Gum’ in first ever story ‘An Unearthly Child’ and the matriarch of the Sisterhood of Karn on ‘The Brain Of Morbius’. She was, reportedly, one of the few actresses Tom baker was genuinely in awe of and deserved a fat bigger part than just Adastra’s handmaiden (she could have played Adastra for starters). Check out, too, Adastra’s engineer Tollund whose played by the director Christopher Barry’s distant cousin Morris Barry who was himself a director – of Dr Who stories ‘The Moonbase’ ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ and ‘The Dominators’. It’ a sad farewell, too, to terry Walsh whose had a hand in practically every one of the 1970s stories and worked as both Pertwee’s and Tom Baker’s stunt doubles in fight scenes: he gets one last fight here but also some lines for the first time, in the part of Doran who dies in part one. 

 Of course this isn’t perfect by any means. Everything seems super pushed for time (which it was: this week’s industrial strike: the whole BBC closed down the first day of shooting after an employee had their contract terminated without notice illegally: the irony, a story partly about the strength of unions all but shut down by one). The ‘miner’ characters are minor characters indeed and manages to be clichéd offensive stereotypes that hve been much criticised and rightly – not bad going for a group of people who only get a few minutes screen-time anyway. Chloris seems to consist of a pit, a palace and a shack, none of which look all that convincing on screen: there’s no sense of how this world works beyond that, how many people live on this planet or how they lived before Adastra came along (never mind how she led a creature that large down a pit that small without it rolling on top of her; to be fair there’s lots in the novel and the author had clearly thought a lot about it, it’s just a shame more of that didn’t end up on screen). For such a well thought out planet it’s a real shame we don’t see much of it beyond a pit, a shack and a mansion, none of which are all that convincing it has to be said. There are at least three too many supporting characters running about there to make up the numbers rather than do anything that really impacts the plot. The killer ‘wolfweeds’ (i.e. tumbleweeds) make sense given the nature of this planet and all the plant-life but just look silly when crowding round K9 and squashing him to death. The model shots are all pretty hopeless, despite being re-shoots (because the strings were visible the first time round). As good as Fisher’s central idea is that’s pretty much all he has too: there are no real sub-plots beyond the main mystery and like many a 1970s story ‘Pit’ runs out of steam halfway through without enough of substance to keep the drama going once the Doctor works out what’s going on, the middle episodes desperately vamping and the fourth all but ending halfway through when Adastra (spoilers) snuffs it at the hands (err, protuberances?) of Erato. Then there’s the much-mocked ending where the Tythonians try to blow up Chloris and the Doctor stops it by wrapping a neutron star in aluminium. Which sounds like a joke but came from more research than most writers; Fisher wanted jeopardy so rang up a class of science undergraduates at Cambridge (Douglas was himself a pupil as you’ll be seeing in ‘Shada’ at the end of the season) for their advice about something plausibly big and threatening as well as how to solve it. They came up with the neutron star ‘the size of London’ and said that the best way to stop it would be to ‘wrap it in foil’ to absorb the energy; apparently it’s accurate science and not being a scientists I wouldn’t know, but I surely can’t be the only fan who read that and thought ‘surely the students were just pulling the writer’s leg?’ As much as I always come away loving this story, which is one of my go-to comfort Who stories when I need cheering up for its sheer joy and laughs (yes I have a pile of them for different moods, doesn’t everyone?!) I also come away feeling that there should have been a little something more going on. In that respect then yes, the final point that people always make about this story is valid: compared to ‘City Of Death’ ‘Creature’ does seem like a step backwards, without the variety or the complex ideas while yet another boring marsh is no substitute for Paris. 

 However not many stories could compete with ‘City Of Death’ and ‘Creature’ comes closer than most. Far from being frivolous it’s one of Dr Who’s toughest, most cynical and political scripts, just done with a joy and verve that makes it different to the ‘other’ political stories out there such as the black humour of ‘The Sun Makers’ and ‘The Happiness Patrol’Yes things go wrong, some of them spectacularly, but I do feel that fans have spent so much time watching the disasters that they haven’t appreciated the things this story gets right and thankfully there are a lot of them. Not least what this story is doing that Dr Who had never done before: given that its 1979 and nobody was doing this sort of thing yet (‘The Sunmakers’ is more barbed but in a less specific way politically) the allegory at the heart of this story is impressively brave, a bit of fortune-telling itself for the things that will happen in the 1980s that Organon would have been proud of. Throw in some of the series’ funniest jokes, most sympathetic monster and one of the best baddies and I’m sold, even with the comedy supporting cast, muddled ideas and the struggle to make how things look on screen anywhere near as good as they read on the page (or in the rather good novelisation). One of the most under-rated 4th Dr stories of them all. Oh and incidentally I appreciate the irony: time and time again I’ve been telling you all that a Who story has nicked a certain element from the 1950s ‘Quatermass’ serials. Well, this is one of the few that doesn’t – even though everyone whose half-read the synopsis and title think it’s a re-tread of third story ‘Quatermass…And The Pit’ (which is actually the plot from ‘Web Of Fear’ instead). 

 POSITIVES + I can’t keep putting ‘Tom Baker’ in my positives list but nevertheless he deserves the accolade here in particular. Had this been a story with most any other Doctor they’d have been acted off the screen by the baddy, but Tom is magnificent in every scene – sparring against Adastra and pairing up with Romana or Organon. He’s the best mix of his particular regeneration’s range of parts, being effortlessly alien, dark and deep and brooding, with an anger and disdain for tyrants who don’t see the universe as a chance to make life better the way he does, but with a flippancy that shows he still thinks he’s smarter than they are. This is the period when people began to get worried that the star was dominating the show (this is, indeed, the first story recorded since the big showdown between star and producer with the head of the BBC technically over pay but really about control; Baker was given a pay rise then patted on the head and told to let Graham Williams get on with his job, with the compromise that Lalla Ward was hired following her time playing Princess Astra in ‘The Armageddon Factor’ as she and Tom had already got on well) and in time the joking will get in the way of the plot but not here, not yet – this and ‘City’ are Tom Baker’s zenith as the Doctor and, far from sending the show up, the Doctor’s brooding bursts of anger between the joking seem all the more real somehow. A good half of this story is so watchable purely because of what the 4th Doctor is up to in any one scene and the story grounds to something of a halt in the scenes when he’s not there. 

 NEGATIVES - Yeaaaah, the one really big mis-step that’s every bit as bad as people say it is is giving us a plot that demands we care about the locals of this world and then have them turn out to be petty comedy bandits that act like they’re extras from the cast of ‘Oliver!’ It was John Bryans, playing lead bandit Torvin, who realised in rehearsals how close the part was to Charles Dickens’ Fagin, a part he’d played himself on stage once (and which is played now, in surprisingly gritty CBBC drama series ‘Dodger’, by Christopher Eccleston) and hams it up. The script makes Torvin out to be desperate not greedy but the actor plays him as a stereotypical Jewish man on hoarding money ()on an alien world where he has no reasoj at all to talk like that): he really really really didn’t understand the script and it was borderline offensive at the time – it feels shockingly wrong now; director Christopher Barry on the last of his many Who stories, is usually good at this sort of thing and really really really should have stopped him. After all, these are meant to be ‘us’ or our equivalents – the miners and working classes who’ve worked hard all their lives but are now living under a tyrant and her bandit-eating pet who doesn’t value their lives at all. Seeing them squabbling amongst themselves, nicking things and being obsessed with money just plays right into Adastra’s hands. Horrible. This lot need a better union... 

BEST QUOTES: Organon: ‘Astrologer extraordinary. Seer to princes and emperors. The future foretold, the present explained, the past apologised for’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: One of the weirdest ‘extras’ is a five-minute piece Tom Baker did, in character as the Doctor, for the children’s TV programme ‘Animal Magic’ recorded on the last day of filming (with his hands still in the stocks for the scene they’d just been recording…with no mention made of this at all!) ‘Animal Magic’ is an odd mixture: it features the imaginary thoughts of real animals, as provided by presenter Johnny Morris, so to have a fictional character talking about fictional Dr Who creatures as if they’re real is truly surreal! The Doctor doesn’t pick the obvious ones either: he talks about the Shrivenzale (the lizard thing from ‘The Ribos Operation’), the sentient plant The Krynoid (‘The Seeds Of Doom’), The Wirrn (‘The Ark In Space’) and The Fendahl (‘Image Of The Fendahl’) with such anecdotes as the Shrivenzale squeezing coconuts with its tiny claws despite being a carnivore that ate up to two wheelbarrow loads of coconuts and the Wirrn’s ability to kill an elephant within five seconds. A mad reminder from the days when Dr Who was so big it was everywhere and a last hurrah to its beginnings as a series that resembled a different programme every week. Oddly they never mention Erato. Included in the ‘Creature From The Pit’ DVD and season 17 blu-ray. 

 Previous ‘City Of Death’ next ‘Nightmare Of Eden’

Planet Of The Ood: Ranking - 114

 Planet Of The Ood

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna, 19/4/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Keith Temple, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 114

  'The Song of the Ood translated...

IWe..We love the colourful orb she holds

And the way the sunlight plays upon her folds

Through telepathy we hear the sound of a gentle word

On the wind of the aid conditioning we had installed

We're picking up Ood vibrations

The voice in our head giving us excitations'

 

 I love the Ood, they’ve got to be my favourite ‘monsters’ of the modern series – precisely because they’re not monsters, well only when in the hands of the real monsters: humans. ‘Planet Of The Ood’ is the closest modern Who has come to repeating the ‘morality’ stories of the Pertwee era – the Malcolm Hulke ‘and this is how humanity forgets to be humane’ type stories which were always my favourite. Technically this is the sequel, but its all handled one heck of a lot better than in ‘The Impossible Planet’ where they were a nice idea that was never really used properly (they were, after all, sharing screen time with the devil). This time though their story is central to the plot and this story looks not at where the Ood ended up but where they began, as slave labour for a species too lazy to do stuff themselves. It’s all too sadly plausible that, having explored space and found a friendly and feeble lot of aliens, mankind’s first thought is to sell them into slavery. Mankind is told so many times across so many years that Oods are less than human don’t feel any pain that everyone has come to believe it – but they’re all wrong. The Ood just bear the pain stoically, doing what they need to in order to get by but enjoying their own culture at night when the humans can’t see. A series like DW, that promised to update us on the changes in culture that had taken place since the show went off air in 1989, just had to do a series like this sometime and they handle it well for the most part – they could have made the Ood out to be weak and pathetic but instead you’re rooting for them from the moment we follow them; equally they could have made all the humans out to be monsters but instead they’re just not thinking for the most part – it takes Donna, as our eyes and ears, being uncomfortable to make them feel that anything is wrong about a part of society they grew up with and never thought to question. The great DW twist is that even while we’re told the Ood feel nothing and even while their mannerisms resemble slightly stiff Victorian butlers with impeccable manners their appearance screams untamed wild beast, with the look of a deranged toddler that’s spilt spaghetti all over themselves and lots of evidence that not only do they feel they feel a lot. Far from being monsters, left to their own devices the Ood are sweet, polite, desperate to please, a universe away from the Daleks and Cybermen, with the fan-pleasing references to their close cousins The Sensorites – creatures from 1964 who couldn’t handle bright lights or loud voices. Not every alien race are conquerors – some are conquerees – and for once in the modern series the humans are aggressors. For DW old hands that’s maybe not so much of a surprise (for the first ten years of its life the series was doing this sort of thing every other story) but if you were little in 2008 and were used to the more generic sort of scifi then this sort of concept was mindblowing and exactly what this series was for. The Ood are also interesting because they’re not strictly individuals but parts connected to a giant hive brain via telepathic powers– something that’s relatively easy to take over as it happens – but for all the representation of them as a replica species they still feel like they have real personalities beyond being just another ‘clone race’. The scenes of the Ood singing in captivity, with their minds the only place they’re free to roam and their spirits the only thing that can’t be extinguished, are incredibly moving. And then they get revenge, developing glowing red eyes and a taste for human flesh, making this one of the properly scary stories of modern DW, even though this is one of those rare DW episodes that has you cheering them on every time. From the moment the Doctor and Donna arrive you know where all the plot beats are going to go – that things are going to be put right by the end – but even so its very satisfying to see all the right people get their comeuppance and peace restored, just like the good ol’ days of DW. Mostly this is a charming episode, one very much in the grand old tradition but with the budget of the new series delivering things the olden days could never have dreamed of: there aren’t just one or two Ood for instance but dozens, while the winter base actually looks as if it has real snow. I do have a few small questions about this story that prevent it being truly top tier though. This is an ice planet but nobody ever seems to be cold, even outside in the snow and the sun is visibly blaring in every scene (does snow in the future have a higher melting point or something?) The heating bills must be astronomical – why not transport the Ood to a warmer human climate and take the big brain of goo with them rather than keeping them here? (Surely somebody must have tried that –I mean, its not as if these humans are at all worried about inconveniencing the Ood if it can possibly help them in some way). I’m not the first person to point out that a race like that wouldn’t have evolved on an ice planet either – of all the aliens in DW the Ood are the ones with the most flesh on show, as it were; unless their DNA is ridiculously different to every known species they’d freeze quicker than we would unclothed and as a species we’re pretty feeble in the cold. Telepathic species are also, surely, the last people who ought to be repressed: they can organise a resistance without the fear of being overheard. The Friends Of The Ood seem to be doing more harm than good too- as anyone with any knowledge of colonial history will tell you, there’s no good freeing one or two slaves if they’re got nowhere to go or their owners will just take them back and/or make things worse for the ones left behind. At the end everyone seems to know when the Ood have gone back to being peaceful again and the Humans stop their mass slaughter because the script needs them to – even though, in reality, the Oods would surely all have been murdered ‘just in case’ they went rogue again, Doctor intervention or not. It’s a shame, too, that the Human characters aren’t delivered with the same love, care or attention as the Ood as many of them are just one-dimensional bad guys, doing questionable moral things because they have questionable morals, rather than good people who just go along with the status quo because fighting it is too much work and they’re desperate to make money or fear of being treated the same way as an enemy of the state (which is how most evil regimes are propped up, after all). It is all, dare I say it, a bit simple compared to the more complex plots we’ve been getting used to by 2008. There is, though, far more to love about this story than not: the Doctor is brilliantly Doctorish, Donna is already a much calmer, gentler presence than in her first three stories with more signs of the big heart she hides behind her big mouth when she comforts a dying Ood (a scene that could have been silly but is genuinely touching), the Ood themselves are extraordinarily good in design and performance, their mass speaking and takeover greatly chilling and a daft action sequence towards the end breaks up what’s quite a talky episode nicely and gives Tennant something to do rather than stand around raging or pouting. In other words its very very ood episode indeed

+They could have left this as one of those metaphorical ‘you figure out what we really mean’ stories but no – they’re actually brave enough to come out and say it, without actually quite saying it. Donna is appalled at the thought of people sweating away working for people they’ll never meet because they’re forced to and quietly smug they don’t have slavery in her own time, unlike the past and future. Then the Doctor points out that the clothes she’s wearing were stitched half the world away in a sweatshop for pennies. The parallels with the way that Earth is picking up free Ood slaves and don’t ask questions about how they got them (because ‘they don’t want to know the answers’) is one of those moments new Who covers no other series could get away with but which really needs to be said.

- Murray Gold’s musical score is a bit loud this week even compared to normal and often gets in the way. I SAID MURRAY GOLD’S MUSICAL SCORE IS A BIT...Oh What’s the use? I’ll stick the subtitles on.