Earthshock: Ranking - 119

                         Earthshock

(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, 8-16/3/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Anthony Root, writer: Eric Saward, director: Peter Grimwade) 

Rank: 119

  'Well, here we are my faithful companions, up against the most evil, ruthless, dastardly villain I've ever met. Due to DNA splicing its the mutant offspring of Davros, The Emperor Dalek, The Cyber Leader, the Sontarons, The Celestial Toymaker, Sil, The Weeping Angels and The Racnoss, bred to destroy humanity without a second cause. They're hard-nosed veteran, bred for war, who sees killing as a necessity and lives for blood and gore. Why look who it is, why its...Mr Blobby?!? What stunt casting gone wrong is this?!?'  

 

Well its set on Earth and there’s certainly a big shock at the end so for once the vague DW title works well, though it’s a name that’s really covering up two big surprises: (whacking great spoilers here but you surely all know by now) the return of the Cybermen after seven long years and the actual death of a companion. Not a death in an ‘oh look they’ve just recovered/regenerated/been sent back in time/had their memory wiped/been kissed by a puddle/repaired by nanogenes/been kept alive in an underground base by sentient seaweed/revived by a raven or a puddle of alien water’ death either but a companion who stays dead. What’s great about this story isn’t so much that it does both these things but that it did so with no advance publicity. Nowadays you can’t move for showrunners bombarding us with ‘see here? You all need to pay attention because something BIG is going to happen that’s going to change the way you forever view the show, your life choices, your family and your existence for the next eternity’. ‘Earthshock’ had no publicity. The production team even turned down the big return of the Cybermen because they wanted to leave it as a surprise. This isn’t even a season finale. Through sheer chutzpah and shock value alone ‘Earthshock’ has ingrained itself on the fan psyche. Everyone remembers where they were when they first saw this story, whether it was at the time, during one of the many repeats, the video DVD or blu-ray releases or streaming services. 

 We don’t quite have that same thrill factor now both cats were let out of the bag forty odd years ago, but even now you can be so gripped by the story that you forget both twists and turns are coming. Let’s take the death of Adric first. Seen in context it comes pretty much out of nowhere and even when they put the boy genius in danger at the end of episode four the plot is endlessly giving him chances to get out of it: he could have elft with the Doctor and Tegan, could have left with the other Humans, could have still saved the day himself had a lone injured Cybermen not come along and blasted the control panel that was Adric’s one last chance of safety. Up to the end you don’t see it coming and think, well, the Doctor’s always rescuing people in the nick of time: producer JNT tried so hard to make Adric the audience-identification person for the younger audience he was trying to draw in and even though he got a mixed reception from the start there was not even an inkling from the top that it had gone so badly they had plans to kill him off. Had you asked the average fan they’d have put money on him being married off in a toe-curlingly cutesy way, or staying behind to use his mathematical skills in some ancient tribe that reminded him of his dead brother. Instead Adric snuffs it, not in some great heroic sacrifice that saves all of humanity in general and his friends in particular, but in a way that, in the end, didn’t matter at all.

 What’s an even bigger shock is how the finale to ‘Earthshock’ is set up as a sort of ‘coming of age’ tale - and in those the hero never fails, they always land on their two feet. Adric’s been clashing with the Doctor throughout, feeling unloved and unwanted and desperate to return to his home in E-space even though it’s a dangerous one-way trip. You assume he’s going to be written out that way in an ‘I managed to pilot the cyber spaceship all by myself!’ kind of a way and then later, when the Doctor and Adric clash over how to steer a ship of Cybermen out of harm’s way, you assume that he’s going to prove the Doctor wrong and save the day. He has his ‘eureka’ moment at exactly the point in the story, with five minutes to go, when Dr Who plots traditionally get solved at the last minute. Adric never gets to prove himself: all those adventures through space and time end up here. It’s a surprising dose of reality in a season that, even by Dr Who standards, had been somewhat unreal: a city that doesn’t exist, green space frogs, pink snakes in the mind, giant terrapin-like aliens in 1666, the roaring twenties: none of these feel like stories in which anyone’s in any real danger, never mind die. But ‘Earthshock’ is a reminder of our mortality, that the Doctor won’t always be around to save us and is a deliberate policy by script editor Eric Saward to make the 5th Doctor fallible and more vulnerable than his predecessor, to leave you tuning in because you don’t know if he’s going to save the day or not (whereas by the end Tom Baker wasn’t even sweating). Even before then ‘Earthshock’ sees the Doctor ‘lose’ to some extent: he gives his usual speeches – including a famous one – about why feelings are good for you and bring life to your life but the Cybermen exploit this by pointing a gun at Tegan and causing his surrender. They even break into the Tardis (only the second race to do so after The Sontarons in ‘Invasion Of Time’), the Doctor’s home and sanctity, the one place in the universe that should be safest and it’s not just a case of evicting them with some warning sign or trickery either: it’s a long time before the Doctor uncharacteristically, all methods of peace finally exhausted, pulls a gun on the Cyber Leader more out of last minute desperation as anything else. 

 For some fans its good riddance I know and if they had to kill off a companion then Adric’s the one, but you feel for him in this story more than any other anyway even before the end. Everyone says Adric is being sulky in episode one for no reason and his mood swing does come rather out of nowhere given he was all smiles and sandwiches at the end of ‘Black Orchid’ but see this story from Adric’s point of view. The father he looked up to has turned into a new man who doesn’t look much older and acts far younger than that: he could learn from the 4th Doctor but the 5th is so unconfident and out of place that Adric feels like the mentor in many ways, just without the experience. He can’t understand the Doctor’s problems: if he had all that information he’d be invincible. The heckling from Tegan and Nyssa is getting him down too: it used to be just him and the Doctor rattling around in the Tardis when Romana and K9 left. They stand there judging him, Tegan with her feelings laughing at his need for logic and Nyssa who out-performs him for mathematical excellence and calmness under pressure. It’s taken a few stories to get here but Adric doesn’t feel as if he’s needed anymore. His attempt to prove to the Doctor that he can get back to E-space is partly just to score one over on the Doctor and have him taken seriously, but it’s also a desperate crying out for home, because the Tardis doesn’t feel like home anymore. Only Adric has nowhere to go. My reading of that final decision to stay behind, so often seen as arrogance and Adric’s need to be ‘right’ even at the cost of his own life, always struck me as being pure sacrifice: Adric doesn’t intend to die but he has nothing much to hang around for: this way he can prove to his friends that he does has worth after all, hopefully as a live hero. But if he dies, well, what did he have going for him anyway? It’s a conscience decision to stay behind and he does it knowing the Doctor can’t save him and a brave thing to do: I mean, this isn’t even his planet he’s saving but Tegan’s (‘that’ll make her appreciate me’, he thinks). The fact that he ‘fails’, after all that courage, is a really brave move – far more powerful indeed for the fact that ultimately it doesn’t save anyone (although I guess the vacuum caused by killing off the dinosaurs does leave to humanity taking over so there is that I guess. I wonder if his last thoughts were ‘good God, I’m responsible for creating Tegan?!’) 

This event makes Adric the single biggest destroyer of life in Dr Who seen in the series outside ‘Logopolis’, crashing to an eerie silence and a close-up of his smashed mathematical excellence badge (which, usefully, turns out to be gold which Cybermen hate – a rare early example of a series arc in Dr Who and which makes it look like E-space is more like n-space than we realised). It’s perhaps the neatest instance in 20th century Who, too, of that age-old subject matter of how the past the present and the future are intertwined: here Adric is in a sort of present, trying to prevent a future where the Cybermen take over Earth, but accidentally causes the past instead, wiping out the dinosaurs millions of years ago. Episode one very cleverly shows us the dinosaur fossils in cave, looks for a moment as if the plot’s going to head in that direction then completely ignores them for so long that it’s a surprise when they turn out to be linked to the plot in the dying moments too. It’s a timely thing for Who to do too: new discoveries meant that debates about evolution were hotting up for the first time since the Victorian era (see ‘Ghostlight’ for a story all about that). The theory that had existed for over a century was that the dinosaurs had died off because they couldn’t adapt to Earth’s ice age and ran out of food to eat. Fossilised remains just like the ones in part one of this story, though, suggested a more instantaneous fate than that, as if something had been impacted into the earth at high speed and created just a cloud that it had blotted out the sky and killed off most of the plant and animal life. Scientists assumed this was an asteroid – but of course nobody was there. So in the Whoniverse death by spaceship, a freighter from the future being sent back in time, ‘Superman’ style (by going round the Earth in a certain direction – who said the Cybermen’s plans were as logical as they were?!) is every bit as plausible. It’s a clever solution too as to that perennial problem whenever the Doctor or someone he loves get into trouble: why not go back to the past to get them out of it? Other stories get themselves in knots over this, inventing the ‘Blinovitch Limitation Effect’ so that time travellers can’t cross paths (even though when the plot needs him to the Doctor does this all the time), timey wimey reasons why going back to see Amy and Rory in New York would blow the city apart and adding The Reapers who can break through the time-fabric holes caused by re-tracing your steps in ‘Father’s Day’. But, while the story sensibly doesn’t dwell on it till the beginning of next story ‘Time-Flight’, the Doctor can’t do that because undoing Adric’s actions would leave the dinosaurs alive and mean humanity got to run the Earth. 

 Right to the end you think the Doctor will find a way to undo it all – especially if you come to this story from the modern series where you think companions like Rory and Clara are dead for multiple stories before they come back to life. Family shows with kids in mind just don’t do things like this unless they really really have to – and they didn’t have to. I mean, poor Matthew Waterhouse wasn’t itching to leave or anything; he was a huge Dr Who fan himself so would probably have stayed for years if left to his own devices. Indeed he was so angry he wouldn’t talk to producer John Nathan-Turner for a fortnight, not because he lost his job but because he thought the manner in which Adric died meant he would never be able to come back to his favourite show ever again in any anniversary story or special (to his credit once he learnt that the producer sought the actor out and explained how, in a time travel show, they could go back to a point before he died). Adric’s death might have been for nothing in character or plot terms but it means a great deal for the series: it meant that fans at home could no longer take the jeopardy in stories lightly because we never knew when they might kill someone else we loved off next (although when they tried it with Peri in ‘Mindwarp’ there was such an outcry it was scaled back). I’ve often wondered too if this wasn’t a case of producer and script editor conspiring to rid themselves of the ‘old’ era. Though he’s never said anything I’m convinced the ‘original’ Adric (before he got watered down and played by Waterhouse) was previous script editor Christopher H Bidmead’s attempts to give himself a voice in a series that didn’t feel fitted him. A mathematical genius who was great with computers and preferred them to people in so many ways, who was a little bit socially shy and awkward: certainly compared to the likes of Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks and Douglas Adams it rings true for him. Bidmead left under something of a cloud, having clashed with JNT (though nothing like as bad as the clashes to come) and it wouldn’t be the only time the producer used a story to get ‘revenge’, while Saward – as the new kid in town – would surely have been happy to go along with ridding all races of the old (I’m going to throw this out there no: did Eric write himself in as Turlough? A mysterious enigmatic figure no one can quite pin down). The fact Adric dies while trying to prove that he was ‘right’ in an argument he loses might also be deliberate! I’ve often wondered, too, if Saward somehow learnt of what was going on in the sister office over at ‘Blake’s 7’ where, three months before broadcast of ’Earthshock’, the entire crew of heroes were killed off in a similarly offhand way against not arch villain Servalan, as everyone expected, but her troops (and though Terry Nation no longer had much to do with that series one time Who writer Chris Boucher did). You would have thought this episode would have got even more complaints than the flood that followed that final episode ‘Blake’ and the production team were braced for it: actually they got six (JNT gave the sensible advice to comfort young fans that they should tune into Peter Davison’s ‘This Is Your Life’, broadcast nine days later, when they’d see Mathew Waterhouse alive and well). However ‘Earthshock’ is still one of the most complained about Dr Who stories of all because of the scene of Cybermen emerging from what looked like plastic bags (which children could potentially copy and suffocate from, which is indeed a bit of a clumsy error they should have picked up on and altered). 

 Adric’s death rightly overshadows the rest of the story, which is more DW business as usual and like many an Eric Saward script is high on action and explosions and battle sequences and always keeps your interest, but low on believable characters, dialogue or subtlety. It desperately need s script editor, ironically enough given the writer’s day job, and it’s one of the very few Who stories that doesn’t have one (while Anthony Root is credited that was more of a ruse to explain why a script editor appeared to have commissioned himself and prevented another writer getting a job; initially Saward was only ever meant to be filling in while Root helped out Juliet Bravo, a fellow BBC drama in crisis with staff leaving, but he’d decided to stay on and Eric seemed to be working out, making this the final of his brief Who credits even though, in all likelihood he never seven saw a script). There are long gaps where nothing happens, or when the plot changes under our feet so violently it defies all logic (which is a bad thing to do in a story about Cybermen). It’s the opposite of ‘Dragonfire’ in many ways, our last review if you’re reading these in alphabetical order in that it all looks amazing and has budget well spent, with (almost) every member of the cast giving their all, but as a script it falls flat. Even when it is moving and al the sub-plots are at last pointing in the right direction there’s no greater angle going on, no metaphor to get your teeth into. Admittedly not every Dr Who story has to: Terry Nation made a career out of making Dr Who adventure stories that were all about a struggle for survival and Saward’s approach is closer to Nation’s than many fans realise, with plots that are more ;’what can I do to these characters next to keep the plot moving?’ than ‘this is the next logical thing that should happen’. In common with his other three (ish) stories ‘Earthshock’ is also incredibly bloodthirsty: if Steven Moffat is the showrunner for whom ‘everybody lives!’ then Saward is the one who proclaims ‘Everybody dies!’; it’s inevitable he was going to kill one of the regular cast off somewhere. Read or watch any interview and Saward is a very likeable, quiet, diffident kind of guy, slightly adverse to conflict and keen to stress that in real life he finds war and violence abhorrent, one of the things that made his job appeal to him in the first place. But that’s not how his scripts feel: we don’t just see one battle off-screen because the plot needs it – we linger on them. The Doctor only kills people himself very few times and always because he feels he has no choice – it happens twice in the Troughton years, three times in the McCoy years, a handful of times in the modern series and maybe a third of the 5th and 6th Doctor stories where Saward was script editor. This story especially lingers on the Doctor pulling a gun on the Cyber Leader at a time when his troops are already defeated in space – and yes he’s saving Nyssa and Tegan, but there are other ways he doesn’t even try first. 

 As well as the Cybermen this story also invents Androids, who are even more clinical emotion-less soldiers who don’t think twice about killing anyone 9and very much like the Raston Warrior Robots of ‘The Five Doctors’). They’re even more apt for the 1980s gung-ho way of doing things than the new-look Cybermen are and show them in great contrast: you can tell that the Cybermen used to be Human, still with a little of the old ways left about them, even if they try to pretend it isn’t. They’ve adapted to kill though it didn’t come naturally, whereas with the androids it does. The Cybermen have, in a sense, evolved to become who they are because of survival. Humans, by contrast, got lucky and wouldn’t be alive at all if not for Adric’s actions at the end of this story. The androids, though, are created specifically for the purpose of fighting and know nothing else, happy to risk their lives because they’re not actually ‘alive’. They’re the sort of ruthless trained killing machine you need to survive in this new world (although they’re actually pretty rubbish at the job for which they were designed, guarding the Cyber-bomb. They’re not exactly lying low in this story after all). Note, too, that the androids kill by vaporising humans and turning them into pools of water, as if returning us to the primordial gloop from which we came. 

There are times when you get the feeling that Saward might even prefer Cybermen to people (Terrance Dicks certainly thought so, teasing Eric during the making of ‘The Five Doctors’ for asking him in every single bit of correspondence if he could make the scenes with the Cybermen bigger and longer because they were his favourite Who monster). People with emotions are less messy and easier to read, and far less efficient, with scenes in this story of how they moan and grumble instead of getting on with their work. Captain Briggs is the opposite of the Cybermen in many ways too: she’s a bully who doesn’t understand that people are flouting her authority partly because she’s done nothing to earn it and make them respect her. Whereas the Cyber Leader always puts his jug-handles where the action is. Notably, too, the Doctor could have saved this whole issue a lot sooner and without being an inadvertent dino-murderer had he not been concerned with the Cybermen killing his companions, while Adric’s death does rather prove the Cyber Leader’s point by being, well, pointless in a way. This is a story that touches on the idea that people need to regulate their emotions without turning into unfeeling Cybermen (something I wished they’d pushed more): Adric loses out of pride and arrogance, the Cyber leader loses because his logic doesn’t allow him to use imagination the way the Doctor can and Tegan nearly gets them all killed by lunging at the Tardis control panel; instead this story asks us to be like Nyssa, controlled, quiet, calm (although even Nyssa is as emotional as we ever see her when Adric dies). The Cybermen still get the last word in this story in so many ways and come as close to winning as they are ever allowed to get away with. The script even lets them talk about their plans more than normal as if Saward is thinking well, would it be so bad, to lose all feeling? On the plus side Saward writes for the Cybermen better than most, playing up that they’re survivors prepared to do anything necessary to live (which is a lot better than just treating them as cyborg robots) and, ironically in a story where most Humans are soldiers, makes the Cybermen more than the mindless army drones they so often are. On the downside though they don’t act in character with what we saw before: for all their boasting these Cybermen have clearly had an emotion chip implanted at some point. At different times they’re smug, condescending, boastful and mocking and this plot isn’t so much about ensuring their species survive so much as revenge (the one motivation the original Cybermen could never have had). This is only the second time we’ve seen the Cybermen in colour and just as with all the others they rather lose something when they’re not in black-and-white: this is a race made for skulking in the shadows. 

 The update sort-of works though: while I don’t buy for a second that hanging round a peace conference hoping to subvert it is a natural Cybermen plan (it’s a Dalek one but nit a Cybermen one) upgrading the Cybermen to fit the new shape of the cold war is a good way to go. If the 1960s Daleks were Nazis then the Cybermen were proto-Russians: sneaky, lurking in the shadows rather than fighting face to face and taking over food supplies and cargo rather than fighting outright, before picking humanity off base by base. Their aim, to make everyone ‘like them’, is also what most capitalists fear communists want to do to them (once again, this story really is the opposite of ‘Dragonfire’ where capitalism is the enemy). Only this is the 1980s, the era of space wars’; for now Jimmy Carter is still at the end of his time in the West Wing and trying to solve the world’s problems through peace and negotiation, but everyone knew his poll ratings were falling and whichever candidate we got next would be more brutal and thuggish about the cold war. The Russians changed their rhetoric to match Americas (although these Cybermen are notably much more 1980s American, right down to the weird dress sense) and even at home we’re building up to the Falklands War, this story going out just six weeks before the sinking of the Belgrano ship, a conflict which didn’t come out of nowhere but a sort of jingoistic fervour that we wouldn’t be left behind - suddenly we’re in a world where all things military are (mercifully briefly) back in fashion and bragging about how many people you can kill is seen as a good thing, not a character flaw. Having the Cybermen back at all after so long off our screen (with just the one story since 1968 and a single scene in ‘The Five Doctors’) feels like part and parcel of having the cold war suddenly become centre stage again. At the time it felt ‘right’ and at one with the public mood: of course, in the era of the Iron Lady who seemed to bate everyone who wasn’t making pots of money like a conservative should, we were going to get the Metal Giants who hated people who weren’t ‘like us’. The wonder actually is that we didn’t get the Cybermen every other week like we did in the 1960s. It’s watching this now that wars have moved on and changes tactic and peace seems more important than ever that the more violent parts seem more questionable as a way to be entertained during a family Saturday teatime. The upgraded costume might not be up to the 1960s in my eyes and the rubber suits make them look more like generic monsters than the ‘diving suits’ they uses to wear, but it is better than the ‘Revenge model too, with JNT’s inspired change to the masks so that we could see the actors’ jaw-lines (and save on the need to pre-record all the lines) and some great casting (this story helped make cyber controller David Banks a star in the Dr Who world and rightly so – it makes a big difference having a Cybermen take the lead and giving dialogue rather than having just mass unthinking drones stumbling around and he manages to be authoritative without just being a Davros clone). Even so, I’m with Gerry Davis, though, who was disappointed with what had been done needlessly to his and Kit Pedler’s creations. They’ve become generic soldiers rather than Cybermen per se, out to kill humans rather than convert them which is a far scarier threat. I can’t help but wish that the production team had run with his submitted story ‘Genesis Of The Cybermen’ instead, which had been handed into Saward in 1981 then quietly put into a drawer (and would have turned out a little like ‘The World Enough and Time’ with the ‘Tenth Planet’ cloth Cybermen); I sympathise with Davis too that, just a year after the death of his co-writer Kit Pedler, it was the wrong time to start meddling around unnecessarily. 

 Ultimately what we have is a story that sets out to shock and achieves that, a story that’s highly watchable while you’re sat down in front of it but which doesn’t leave you with the sense of having seen a brilliantly plotted story or made you see the world in a different light like the best Who stories do. It’s eye candy with guns, an action flick that were it not for Adric you wouldn’t think twice about until you saw it again. There are no extra characters who capture the imagination and, indeed, a more forgettable bunch you never saw with some truly bonkers casting: not just the obvious one (see below) but all the incidental parts this week. Nobody is drawn well enough for us to care about them or get caught up in their plight and the plot is more a series of things that happen in order than something to get caught up in every week. Saward is really good at the big grand gestures, but he doesn’t have the finesse or lightness of touch of his mentors, writers like Robert Holmes or Malcolm Hulke who can make even the pauses in scripts sing. There are too many empty pockets in this script where nothing happens – not even anything exciting as you need a pause in between the explosions, but nothing at all. There are some really basic errors too: not just the casting or plot holes but even something as simple as keeping the production crew out the way (there are endless booms recording the sound appearing in shot and that’s Eleanor Carruthers, trainee production floor manager, you can see reading the script in the scene of Tegan on the freighter stairwell, at least on video and DVD; I hear they’re airbrushed it from the blu-ray and I haven’t checked i-player yet). 

 So if the Cybermen are acting like humans and humans are acting like nothing ever seen before on TV (or at any rate their captain I n) and the plot’s a bit basic and odd then what does this story have going for it? Atmosphere. For all it’s problems ‘Earthshock’ is a well made bit of television with a lot of class to it, especially from the effects tea without any of those ‘oh dear, well it’s only Dr Who’ low budget scenes that scupper pretty much all other 1980s Who stories somewhere. The scene where a Cybermen gets melded and welded into the freighter door, for instance, is far better staged than most cyber-battles from the past, a really strong image(the Doctor’s setting up a stabilised molecular structure of an anti-matter containment vessel that ‘regenerates’ the geographic position of the door just as he’s walking through if you were wondering what was going on, as indeed I was till I looked it up). The archive dip, back in the days before videos and before the series did it every other episode, is a real thrill, with clips from ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’, plus, confusingly for fans nowadays, the Cybermen recalling the events of ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ over footage of ‘The Wheel In Space’ (because that story hadn’t been rediscovered yet. I like to think the Cybermen have a really faulty filing system though and left the real clip behind in a Mormon church or something; incidentally Saward is enough of a fan to note in the actual script that there never was a 3rd Dr Cybermen story and it wasn’t a mistake as such). I love the way that this story is so emotional when it’s up against the Cybermen (this is the story where the 5th Doctor starts saying ‘Brave heart Tegan’ and while that catchphrase gets overused quickly its perfect here as a little bit of character detail. Though then again this is the same story that has Tegan call herself a ‘mouth on legs’ after a fan made the comment at a convention; Janet thought it was funny at the time but is rightly quite horrified by it now). Malcolm Clarke writes a music score that’s certainly imaginative and had more hard work put into it than most, sampling metallic sound effects for the Cybermen to play through his synthesiser (including, aptly, a couple of BBC film cans, though alas we don’t know which ones or if they were Dr Who episodes): Saward loved it, the director hated it, but even if it gets in the way at times (and the quote from Saint-Seans’ ‘Carnival Of Animals’ piece ‘Fossils’ when we stare at bones is just wrong on so many levels) it at least suits this story’s mood, which is a lot more than some 1980s music does. Unlike, say, ‘warriors Of The Deep’ this one gets the atmosphere spot on, with dim lighting and – in the cave shots at least – the only glow we have comes from lamps that we actually see on screen (it all makes a much bigger difference than you might think). There’s also location filming in a cave (something we hadn’t seen for a while and done better than usual too), battle androids that are quite unlike any of the previous more sentient robots seen in Dr Who, superb model shots throughout, a freighter set that incorporates part of the studio into it’s walls and thus enabling it to seem bigger than most (even if the design’s a bit drab) and if I had to sit through a lengthy non-UNIT battle sequence in Dr Who the ones in this story are the ones I’d choose, shot to be interesting rather than fill in time because the script came in short this week. Once we reach yet another bland looking spaceship, though, the story stalls and the interesting plot, lightly touching on themes of evolution and survival, ends up being a lot of people bickering with another lot of people. The 5th Doctor, never the most assertive of regenerations, is particularly wet here being pushed around by all and sundry while Tegan and Nyssa get put safely out of harm’s way early on with not a lot to do. At least Adric gets a decent amount of characterisation in his last story, Matthew Waterhouse lifting his game with it, but when you’re relying on a teenage junior filing clerk with no previous acting experience to carry your story’s main weight then you have a problem. 

 The result is a story that’s certainly never boring and which has many great ideas underlying the action sequences, but which would be a pretty bog standard Dr Who spaceship story without the two shocks at the end of part and part four with a lot of the middle two episodes stalling for time and trying to find something interesting to do. And they really were a shock too, both of them, the Cybermen return even more than Adric’s death in many ways: for the only time in his stewardship JNT had the gallery shut so no fans would learn about the comeback and had the Cyber Leader and Lt’ credited only as ‘Leader and ‘Lt’ in the Radio Times. With those two surprises though ‘Earthshock’ suddenly feels very different indeed – the stakes are higher, the tension is greater and the unexpected ending is handled beautifully, melancholy without being schmaltzy. The difference between this and Saward’s sort-of sequel ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ (a story I can’t stand) is that there’s emotion in between the action, the sense that it really matters and isn’t just a string of battle sequences (odd that emotion should be the saving grace of a Cybermen story rather than a Dalek one, but there you go). More than just being a decent standalone story, though, ‘Earthshock’ is important for re-writing the rules of what DW could do in its 19th series and made you wonder what they might do next in every single story to come. If nothing else it’s a very influential story – its fast pacing (with more scenes per episodes than any 25 minute story in ‘old’ Who), in-yer-face menace and, yes, ridiculous plotting are much more like stories in the modern series than anything else in the old. You suspect a lot of the people making the modern series saw this and went ‘that’s what we need to do’; Moffat especially loved this story to the extent of recording a special ‘introduction’ to it on the ‘deluxe’ DVD version, even though he’s exactly the sort of fan I thought would have hated this story, in which ‘everybody dies!’ and in which Adric dies precisely because of his intelligence and being too clever by 99/100ths. The best thing you can say about ‘Earthshock’ isn’t that its a great story or even a great version of a great story (there are too many problems for that) but that it raised the stakes and made the universe a dark and scary place again just as everyone was becoming complacent. For if the production team are willing to go all out in a story full of this many shocks, what the hell are they capable of doing next?! After this story you never quite believed ‘oh everyone will get out of this just fine’, instead you asked ‘is today the day someone else will die?’ That alone makes this story iconic. Does it stand up to scrutiny? No. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a classic too. Of sorts.

 POSITIVES + He gets a lot of stick from Who fans and most of it deserved, what with spending more of his producer-ship attending conventions and flogging merchandise than he did caring about scripts or actors, but sometimes John-Nathan Turner had some really great ideas no other producer would have come up with. It was he who suggested that there were too many in the Tardis crew and the impact killing one of them off would have; Tegan was too popular and Peter Davison adamant that the quieter, gentler Nyssa was the character who worked best alongside his Doctor, so Adric got picked almost by default. It was JNT’s idea, too, to roll the credits in silence rather than with the usual Dr Who theme tune, something the show had never done before (or since) – he got the idea from a character death in Coronation Street he remembered being really moving (Martha Longhurst, as played by Lynne Carroll, who was written out as long ago as 1964) and its really effective. The silence I mean, not Coronation Street. That would be silly. 

 NEGATIVES - Then again, this story sees the worst of JNT too as it was his idea to have yet more needless guest stunt casting with more of an eye on newspaper reaction than making the best story he possibly could and he cast that nice elderly ‘grandma;’ style comedian Beryl Reid as...a bloodthirsty battle-hardened spaceship captain her crew all fear (described in Saward’s original script as a ‘mean hard woman in her early thirties’. Erm, no…) She gives what must be one of the worst performances in DW history, under-selling every twist and turn in the script and looking for all the universe as if the real starship captain brought his batty granny along for care in the community day and somehow left her in charge. It’s really not her fault though – it should have been obvious how wrong she was for the part before they sent the scripts out, never mind through rehearsals and filming. Maybe everyone assumed she’s say no: I still don’t know why she did this story as by her own admission she couldn’t understand a word (although her quip ‘Where’s warp drive? Is it off Earl’s Court?!’ is meant to be a funny remark made during rehearsals, not evidence of her cluelessness the way some guidebooks assume). Maybe she needed the money – but if you need money then why work for the BBC? I understand getting her at all was quite a coup, but why not give her the Nerys Hughes part in ‘Kinda’ the same year? Or as a lady in the manor in ‘Black Orchid’ the story before? She’d have been good at those. She’s hopelessly mind-numbingly bas at this one. 

 BEST QUOTE: Lieutenant: ‘A Time Lord? But they're forbidden to interfere’. Leader: ‘This one calls himself the Doctor, and does nothing else but interfere!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Earthshock’ was the choice of 5th Doctor story picked for the BBC i-player series ‘Tales From The Tardis’ for the 60th anniversary in 2023, reuniting the (biregenerational?) 5th Doctor and Tegan. It’s the saddest of all six tales as they admit their shared grief for Adric and how it hurts to remember him but they should (eliciting another ‘Brave Heart, Tegan’ for old time’s sake). The impact’s not quite what it would have been so hot on the heels of their reunion in ‘The Power Of The Doctor’ the year before but it’s still great to see Peter Davison and Janet Fielding on screen together and their warm hug something they never did in the past (‘but we do now!’ Tegan adds) is sweet indeed. While other companions are shocked to find themselves back in the Tardis (actually a ‘Memory Tardis’) after all this time Tegan’s response is the funniest and most characteristic (‘Don’t tell me – you had an accident!’) Is ‘Earthshock’ the ‘strongest story of all’ as the Doctor says? Probably not, but it’s a powerful piece on grief and how you still carry around memories of the people you lost even decades on (though it’s not the kindest of tributes: the Doctor calls Adric ‘silly and sulky’ and Tegan ‘a nightmare!’ while when Tegan comments how Adric ‘loved’ the Doctor instead of replying ‘and I loved him or something similar he just adds ‘I realise that now’. Charming!). Still lovely and probably the most moving of the six ‘Tales’, mind. I do miss the ‘silent credits’ in this version though! 

 ‘The Boy That Time Forgot’ (2008), #110 in Big Finish’s main range, isn’t a prequel or sequel as much as a parallel world version of ‘Earthshock’ that sort of half-undoes the story but then half does it back up again! Thomas Brewster is kind of the Big Finish equivalent of Adric, a boy genius loner whose a whizz at block computation and likes meddling with history. Obviously the big one to undo is the freighter that crashes into Earth and kills off all the dinosaurs, something that seems to have happened when the 5th Doctor and Nyssa turn up in what should be a modern Earth that’s filled with dinosaurs. At the time (spoilers if you’re listening to the releases in order and haven’t got to this one yet!) Matthew Waterhouse was one of the last surviving companion actors who hadn’t appeared in a Big Finish story and his cameo at the end was a huge surprise (Big Finish even go to the trouble of crediting Andrew Sachs in his role so as not to give the game away). 

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