Planet Of Evil: Ranking - 121

                               Planet Of Evil

(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, 27/9/1975-18/10/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Louis Marks, director: David Maloney) 

Rank: 121

  'This is Nala reviewing the antimatter version of Doctor What from a rockpool that exists on the borders between our two universes. I really like the way the most recent series harangues and lectures you and tells you what to feel, while their attention to detail over past historical characters is second to none. I wish Murray Silver’s music told me how I should feel a bit more though, it’s so quiet! The best costume in the series is surely the Myrka, with a great realism in the way that it walks just like a pantomime horse. 'The Timeless Child' was such a clever twist on sixty years of history that kept us on our toes by, umm, changing everything we knew about the series in one go. My favourite companion is Kylie Minogue (such acting skills!), my favourite race The Dominators (what a bunch of nice sweet gentle people). Though of course Star Wars is the better series, honest. Such deep plots full of such pathos and expression and those gun-toting Ewok ninjas get me every time. Anyway I’ve reviewed all 134553723834547 of them by now (because in this mirror universe Dr Who was never taken off the air and The Doctor was played by Rowan Atkinson, Anthony Hopkins, Idris Elba, Steve Martin, Russell Tovey, Roger Daltrey, Joanna Lumley, Christina Ricci, Scarlett Johansson and an actual android – what a fun series that was!) in really short concise reviews with absolutely no pontificating at all. We now return you to your normal universe and…oh dear the matter and anti-matter versions of ‘Alonsy Alien Archives’ have just touched and caused a mass explosion leading to a second big bang where it’s created an alternate universe of Whovians. Carry on…'

 

‘What’s da anti-matter with you?’ asks the 4th Doctor at the edge of the known universe in a story that’s both very much at one with the rest of his era (the Hammer horror source material – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde this time with a dash of werewolf for good measure; a lot of running around alien planets trying to avoid alien plants; a mad scientists who puts everyone in danger and needs to be stopped and shown the error of his ways) and quite unlike any other story Dr Who ever did (as it’s basically a story about devolution into madness, with a ‘monster’ that’s invisible except for some wavy red lines). By and large the 4^th Doctor stories have complex interesting characters and some great epic plot with a moral dilemma but thanks to a lack of budget and time can be a tad short on the overall atmosphere. Fittingly for a story that’s all about our ‘opposites’ for once ‘Planet of Evil’ suffers from the completely opposite problems: rather than writing the script and cobbling together a set to suit it producer Phillip Hinchcliffe sat down with designer Roger Leach-Murray and asked him what he most wanted to do (a jungle planet!) and let the technicians design a squiggle monster with their favourite digital chromakey toys (It’s something called a ‘spark’ machine with an outline that can be coloured red by computer, with the image on the screen as filmed ‘masked’ so that the image can go over or go behind the actors and look as if it’s really moving) then tried to write a plot around the two ideas, one big on atmosphere but not so hot on internal logic or characters. It’s one of the most horror-drenched Who stories this one, but not in an more obvious ‘Image Of The Fendahl’ ‘Brain Of Morbius’ or ‘Silence In The Library’ way with a monster you an point to beyond a red squiggle. It’s more a possession story but one utterly unlike, say, previous story ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ where our regulars get to act evil and the original bodies are still kept alive. It’s not the body that’s possess and corrupted al any Cybermen story but their minds, as the planet attaches itself to its victims in a way that takes it over. As a result this is a story working to very different guidelines to usual and means you need to watch it differently too, without the usual runaround or monsters. People tend to feel one of three things when they see ‘Planet Of Evil’ – either sheer boredom at the fact that it doesn’t have any ‘proper’ monsters (as in men in suits) and that nothing seems to be happening, awe at the elegance of it all or fall somewhere right in the middle (because the story is a brave stab at doing something different that breaks up the flavour of the early 4^th Doctor era without being as strong or memorable as the stories either side).

I’m the last: It’s a story I know I always like when I watch it and yet don’t remember that well between screenings because the threat is more of a psychological, thoughtful, abstract one than a memorable nightmare-inducing one. I mean there’s a great deal to love about this story. It’s as properly hide-behind-your-sofa-and-hope-it-isn’t-made-of-antimatter scary as any of the other Hinchcliffe era ‘horror’ stories without anything more to show us than a red squiggly line and a bit of roaring (because where do you hide from a monster that isn’t really there and can pass through walls?) I love the fact that even The Doctor has never quite met a monster like this one before and doesn’t know what to do with it.  mirror universe?) Given that it’s 1975 the monster is also pretty well executed, easily the best of the (near) invisible monsters in Dr Who (It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come since the Refusians of ‘The Chase’ a decade earlier, which were shown on television through footprints in the sand and objects thrown of-screen, or even the Spirodons from ‘Planet Of The Daleks’ a mere two years before, where they all had to wear purple furry cloaks that looked like the hide of Aggedor if you wanted to know where they were, while the effects are even better than when the modern series does it with ‘The Boneless’ or whatever-the-hell-that-was in ‘Midnight’ and ‘Listen’). It would have been easy to make a bunch of squiggles turn into the silliest monster the series has ever seen but writer Louis Marks adds just enough background combined with mystery, just enough gravitas, just enough mention in the  script of how scared the Morestran astronauts are that we fully buy what a big and dangerous threat this is.

The concept too is sublime. There are a few Who stories out there that go to the edge of time (‘Frontios’  ‘Wild Blue Yonder’) but this is the only one so far to go to the edge of space, so out of the way of explored space that it exists on the boundaries of a world of anti-matter that’s existed side by side ‘since the beginning of time’ that still has an influence on ours. So that’s where all my missing socks and pen lids have gone! One of the biggest concepts of science I struggle to get my head around is the fact that the universe is forever expanding, that first big rush of atoms from the big bang still stretching outwards into infinity. I mean, what does the edge of space even look like? Is there a black line where nothing lives? What would happen if you tried to fly into it – would you bang your head, be vapourised into atoms or set off a chain reaction for another big bang coming the other way? Does the universe behave the way European explorers thought it did, with an edge we could fall off and the warning  ‘here be dragons’? Or is it a round globe that takes us back where we started? (And if so is there anything beyond that globe?) For Louis Marks the edge of the world joins directly onto another world exactly like this one but opposite… Here be ‘anti-matter dragons!’ It’s a world made of anti-matter, where all their protons are neutrons and neutrons are protons, a concept that was still pretty new in 1976 (though Dr Who had already explored it once in ‘The Three Doctors’), which if ever caught in contact with this world results in a giant explosion. The two world are joined by a rock pool that looks like infinite darkness and the red squiggle monsters are the ‘guardians’ in some way, natural defences that keep people from one side from venturing into the other. They’re kind of the ‘mirror world’ versions of UNIT soldiers teaming up to defend ‘their’ land against invasion by ‘us’ (or at any rate characters who look like ’us’). Of all the really big ideas and concepts in Who this is one of my favourites and even if the story never quite explains what lies on the other side and just teases us with monsters it makes you think. Here’s a few suggestions o what’s out there: 1) It’s deserted. No life at all because nothing can live in an anti-matter world. The red monsters are natural side effects created to keep people out. 2) There’s a whole universe on the other side made up of people who only exist as outlines – except maybe, to their vision, we’re the ones who only exist as outlines and to them everyone they see is ‘normal’ (maybe we look super-weird ‘filled in’). 3) The antimatter creatures can exist in our world and are what we’ve come to think of as ghosts, able to move through atoms and other objects because they’re not solid in any way. Zeta Minor and presumably other planets like it are their home but they can wander freely through our world causing trouble (there’s definitely something of the mischievous poltergeist about the squiggle monsters) 4)  It’s the afterlife. It’s said to be impossible to destroy energy, only transform it, so when our bodies die and our souls are free is this where we all end up? It would make perfect aesthetic sense, especially in the karmic Whoniverse, if our afterlife is an exact mirror of this life so we can ‘learn lessons’ from an opposite perspective (but is that it? Do we end up there forever? Is there something beyond anti-matter on the ‘other’ other side of the universe? Or do we die in that universe and end up regenerating back in this one in a neverending cycle?)  5) It’s e-space and looks just like this one. Only with Alzarians and vampires and great white voids (see ‘Full Circle’ and the two stories beyond it). Marks is a clever and ambiguous enough writer not to give us the answers to any of these questions, simply make you think about what your own conclusion is  (my real theory? This is a universe where everything is our exact opposite, which means they have all the best politicians in charge but The Spice Girls have a long and successful career).

There’s a rock-pool of, well, nothing that links the two, which is either one of the eeriest or one of the silliest things in Dr Who, depending on how gripped by the story you are (I mean, it’s hard to be scared of a hole you can just walk around, although be glad that Harry stayed behind in Scotland last time out or I’d have laid money on him somehow putting his foot in it!) This causes the planet to have mood-swings (as anybody would, caught between two totally opposite universes) and changes its re-actions to the people who land on it. The original intention, in fact, was to write a story about a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ planet that changed moods depending on what time of day it was – in the day it was benevolent and abundant, at night creepy and scary (Marks seems to have found this hard to write so instead he moves it to influencing people and turning them into Jekyll and Hyde beings, civilised men who revert back to their most primitive form). Zeta Minor isn’t like Earth, where the planet is (mostly) stable but the humans on it (mostly) aren’t. It’s a great idea that taps into the feeling growing in the 1970s that Earth, though a giver of life, was growing out of control and might be a taker away if we didn’t change our behaviours, that it had the power to fight back and wipe us out if we didn’t look after it properly. I love the idea of Zeta Minor being an actual living planet, one that works like a living organism that can react to who lives on it the way an animal would react to a virus, with big red cells that come to kill anything that dares disturb it’s equilibrium. As much as ‘Planet Of Evil’ is fun with squiggle monsters the anti-matter elephant in the room everyone’s trying to avoid contact with in case their heads explode is what humans do to everything they come across (and the Morestrans are very Humany, to the point that they may well be from an Earth colony in the future: this is the year 37166 to them but goodness only knows what that is in Earth years). The Morestrans have left their own planet, Zeta Major, because they’ve polluted theirs and run out of fossil fuels, something that would have struck a chord with the viewing public at home in the early days of scientists coming out with warning about what we were doing to our planet and how quickly it was hotting up. They’re speeding off to Zeta Minor to colonise it and no doubt start the cycle all over again because they haven’t properly learned what happened last time. Instead of looking at a sustainable future they’re just looking for another quick fix, plundering some of the rocks on this mysterious planet that, somehow, contain ‘the power of three of our suns’. And the plant isn’t like their own, a passive entity that lets humanity do whatever they want – this time it fights back! The idea that any life-forms who land on Zeta Minor end up devolving back to primordial animals because that’s what the planet thinks they should be is a really new avenue for the series to explore and the ‘primordial’ make-up is pretty convincing too as 1970s TV goes, all fangs and hair (its actually a lot more convincing than that CGI nonsense in ‘Tooth and Claw’). The very ending to this story (Professor Sorenson giving back some rocks and the red squiggle monsters disappearing) might be one of the silliest and anti-climactic when seen on screen but morally, aesthetically, it’s entirely the right ending: The Doctor doesn’t solve this story by taking down a tyrant or a corrupt and unfair system but instead tells these plunderers to put back what they stole. We should have had more moral conundrums like this one (if we had maybe Earth wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in now. Although really, of course, 95% of global warming is the fault of the rich barons and the heads of mass manufacturers who don’t want to give up their profits if their rivals aren’t made to first and a government who look the other way because a large chunk of those profits go to them. Even when it means most of their consumers are going to die horrible deaths within a generation or three, with exactly the same short-sightedness as the Morestrans. Sometimes you wish a Dr Who plot was real so a red squiggle monster would come and gobble everyone up). Despite the title this planet isn’t really evil, it’s just acting in defence against what it sees as an attack, the same way you would if it suddenly came along cut your hair or stole a leg from you without warning. At the same time, though, the poor Morestrans aren’t evil either so much as desperate: their resources are dying out and they think they’ve found a cheap mean of fuel – they think Zeta Minor is just like their own planet Zeta Major there to be plundered. Their worst crime is simple ignorance. The real evil is capitalism.

I wonder, too, if this story is really talking about nuclear power. It was, is and probably always will be a thorny issue: nuclear power is safer in many ways than mining for fossil fuels and offers more power in one go, but the risks versus rewards are huge and it only takes one mistake to mean that the last thing on any victim’s mind in the surrounding few hundred miles is being able to pay their electricity bill. The Doctor talks a lot about how scientists ‘buy our privilege to experiment at the cost of total responsibility’ and might as well be lecturing ‘us’ when he does it. We haven’t hit Chernobyl in the real world but there was a fear that something like that might happen one day, that human carelessness or a technical error might lead to some huge mistake with devastating consequences for the public at large. It had, after all, only been nineteen years since ‘Windscale’, when a fire at Britain’s biggest nuclear facility now re-named Sellafield in the Lake District (why are all our ugliest buildings in the most beautiful parts of our countryside?) had woken many Brits up to the dangers where something could go wrong; the fire burned for three days, caused a reactor to get too hot and radioactive chemicals were spewed out into the atmosphere, getting as far as the edge of Europe (after all, radioactive waste is kind of antimatter: its invisible and deadly to the touch). Even so by the 1970s, with fossil fuels being used up en masse, many politicians thought nuclear power was the way to go. It wasn’t like the threat was contained to one part of the kingdom either: nuclear waste was forever being driven across the country in ginormous tankers and dumped up and down the UK. There are quite a few 1970s Dr Who stories that raise the issue that humans might have bitten off more than they can chew and might be meddling with something that comes back to bite them (‘The Hand Of Fear’ the following year going one further and asking what would happen if it came under attack from ‘illegal aliens’ – literal aliens in the case of Eldrad). There’s the fear, too, that radioactive waste wouldn’t kill you outright but mutate you, with studies into the effects it had on the brain (had he not suddenly gone all hairy Sorenson would no doubt have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, of having a ‘split personality’) and it fits the ideaof a ‘mirror universe’ that in this story the people are effectively fighting themselves. It’s less obvious than when the Mara tales ‘Kinda and ‘Snakedance’ do it, but I like to think of this story as being about the Morestran’s ‘shadow sides, the bits of their characters they don’t want to face ad bury deep inside, the greed and recklessness of mankind hat means our greatest achievements can suddenly turn into our biggest losses. Because at the end, when mankind is done exploring and has gone as far he possibly can, he still has to make peace with the parts inside ourselves that make us uncomfortable and lead us to make the same mistakes over and over. As far as I know neither radioactive waste nor our darkest hidden selves cause red squiggle monsters and the threat comes from a hole in the round not one of those tall cooling towers; nevertheless the theme of desperation because our planet is beginning to run out of fuel and the worries about what that fuel and waste might be doing to our only home and the sheer helplessness of not having any easy answers to put things right because we’re still in a mindset of greed and control we can’t escape are all very much the driving forces behind this story. That part alone makes ‘Planet Of Evil’ a great story: few others are prepared to skirt this close to the wind machine about how destructive a species mankind can be 9and it makes a nice change from other people invading and plundering us!) 

All of this makes the Doctor’s attempts to solve this latest conundrum seem much more dangerous than usual as its so far out of line with what he normally does – we know he can stop a monster or even a race of aliens but a whole planet? That he’s standing on? That’s new and The Doctor spends most of the story less flippant than usual, more desperate (Sarah even points out at one stage that she knows he’s worried because he’s lost his laidback charm and gone back to being rude to people, the way he always does when he’s trying to save them). I mean, he’s not often facing foes the size of a whole planet, even if it’s a planet that inevitably we barely scratch the surface of on screen. There’s a scale and scope to this story that makes it one of the biggest threats The Doctor ever faces too, as Sarah actually asks for one to go back in the Tardis and run away but The Doctor says they can’t because if the anti-matter creatures keep attacking then the whole universe as we know it could be in danger. It’s scientifically accurate too – well, more scientifically accurate than the more fairytale version of anti-matter in ‘The Three Doctors’ anyway, where objects could come and go between worlds and humans and timelords both could exist between the two for short periods; here any contact, anything at all, could mean death for you and everything that has ever been, at least on ‘our’ side of the universe. This isn’t a  place of exile for renegade Omega as before but a war between their side and ours, one we haven’t got a clue how to fight back. As threats in the series go death by anti-matter feels like one of the worst, especially the look of horror on people’s faces as they are attacked in this story or lose control of their own bodies. In plot terms you really can’t look away from this one for a single second!

Or at least it feels like you shouldn’t, but in reality ‘Planet Of Evil’ can be a bit of a chore to sit through. It’s hard to say why too – I mean Marks is a writer whose far better at plot than character than dialogue (just about the only thing in common with all four of his stories and truly was there ever a more disparate Who quartet than the ecological themed ‘Planet Of Giants’, the fun with timelines and paradoxes that is ‘Day Of The Daleks’ and the Renaissance with aliens ‘The Masque Of Mandragora’).  The characters we meet are a pretty weak-kneed bunch all things considered, with the Morestrans one of the races in Who we know the least – it would have helped this story a lot if we’d heard a bit more about how desperate they were for power back home, or seen them do more than simply squabble with each other (this people suffers from the age-old Dr Who problem of an elder who wants peace and a junior who wants war; although at least in this era the younger brothers and sisters of the hippies were turning into punks, more aggressive and cynical beings who felt that the world was failing them so for once in Dr Who they’re the ‘right way round’ in age rather than being a comment on what might happen if the baby boomers come of age and start running the world). At least they tried, Marks writing in that this is a Star Trek-style future where colour differences have been set aside, with a black astronaut (Louis Mahoney back again from ‘Frontier In Space’ and a number of Irish characters in amongst the usual posh English voices); alas that’s all the character they really get (and even then they mess it up with Ranjit, a supposedly Indian person at the end of a communications line, being an obvious European caricature). They miss a trick, too, given that Sarah is the only female character we meet all story (although admittedly it’s rather hard to work out the gender of as squiggly red outline, so for all I know the antimatter creatures are all female);  something that spin-off sequel novel ‘Zeta Major’ turns into a big plot point. Given how small the cast is this week and how much of the plot depends on us caring about the Morestrans as they get bumped off, we never really get to know them that well – the only character that’s at all memorable is Professor Sorenson and he’s a snarling werewolf for half of it. The real trouble is that they all speak in B-movie quotes: there are no quiet moments of people talking, just a lot of characters who declaim to each other in questions and sentences with exclamation marks (Louis Marks loves exclamation marks) at the end. The fact that no less than two of these actors (Frederick Jaeger and Ewen Solon) had both been in ‘The Savages;’ only draws your attention to how similar this story is to that one and a few others in Dr Who’s growing history: a civilised people fighting a savage monster with the twist that really it’s the other way around. Mind you, I’ve sat through worse than that on both scores. 

Maybe it’s the fact that very little happens in this story, besides the cliffhangers. It’s as if Marks did so well to come up with the overall concept of an anti-matter planet that he let it float about the story rather than tie it down to the ground and show the realities of it anywhere. After all, a monster that’s everywhere means you can’t exactly avoid it so we don’t get the usual money shot of people running a marathon down a corridor or breathless rushing around; instead this is a very quiet story where the most physical thing anyone does is back away slowly. It’s easy enough for instance to avoid a whacking great hole in the ground where the red squiggly things come after all. ‘Planet’ is a very abstract story and while that’s perfect for an audio adventure or in a novel TV is such a visual format that you need the audience to be thrown some form of a bone to break it up. It feels as if once the horrors of the ‘other world’ have been established there’s not many places this story can go: the stakes are raised by having The Doctor himself fall into the crevasse at the end of episode two but even this is a let-down after all that build-up: We’ve been waiting 45 minutes (and two weeks on first broadcast) to see what an anti-matter world might look at, given the scariness of the creatures that have come out of it. And it turns out to be Tom Baker on an empty set in the pitch black, looking for all the world as if the BBC have forgotten to pay their lighting bill. Nightmares are not made of this. Even the red squiggle threat, when it catches up with Professor Sorenson, doesn’t do the obvious thing and turn him into a squiggle monster sucking all the colour out of him – no, it does the most obvious thing going and transforms him into a slathering werewolf. Which might have been fun had they not already done this sort of thing better on ‘Inferno’. Or in the future in ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’. Or ‘Tooth and Claw’. Or…well, you get the idea. And while the first two are triumphs that use werewolves as simply one string in an arsenal of ideas ‘Planet Of Evil’ is more like the last one, a story that’s only about werewolves and has nothing to do except lead up to the transformation and then lead away from it again (because they can’t afford to do this too many times). Given the size of the threat we’re up against going a bit hairy also doesn’t seem that bad really. I mean, last week had orange blobby aliens and The Loch Ness Monster; next week will have an Ancient Egyptian God who can kill at a second’s notice (some writers, especially Stephen Wyatt, uses the werewolf as a metaphor for puberty and turns the plot into a coming of age tale about being independent and learning who to trust, but I don’t think that’s what Marks is after here, given that the Morestrans are a pretty hairy bunch to begin with). Even the squiggle monster, good as it is by 1975 TV budgets, isn’t a patch on the very similar ‘Id’ monster, stolen wholesale from the film ‘Forbidden Planet’, made on not that much of a bigger budget back in 1956 (like a lot of the Hinchcliffe years it feels a tad secondhand, as if you’ve seen this story before somewhere). If you watch this from beginning to end, its a story that soon hooks you in. Of course, if you happen to stumble across any scene individually it looks properly ridiculous – people running from a squiggly red line and over-acting when it gets them, which makes what’s quite a complex metaphorical intellectual plot look like an episode of ‘Playschool’. To be fair, in its day this story must have looked quite something, with its squiggly lines a really complex effect to create and one of the first digital effects around, as alien as anything seen on TV in 1976. It’s only now, nearly half a century on, that it looks like a toddler has drawn over the picture in random with a red crayon.

This is also one of those stories where, instead of The Doctor being allowed to take charge and save people from obvious certain death everyone suspects him of being the cause and locks him and Sarah up, repeatedly, so that instead of staring into the abyss of the great unknown we’re staring at the prison bars of an over-familiar set. Even the spaceships are as basic and flimsy as spaceships get on Dr Who, all white and grey colours and square sets with piping. To properly work, to be gripped by a threat that only exists in red outlines, you need to be totally sold on this world, this place and these people and instead you don’t really feel as if you get to know or care about any of them. This is a good story for Sarah though, who gets to do all the things people assume she did all the time, though in reality her character changes from story to story with the wind – here though she’s at her best, brave and resourceful and curious, scared out of her wits but determined to do the right thing where she can. The 4th Doctor isn’t quite right all story though – of all 43 Tom Baker stories (including the unfinished ‘Shada’) this is the least 4th Dr-ish of them all, with little of his usual trademark humour or moral speeches or eccentricities. Tom Baker acts sullen for most of it, breaking cover only when confiding in Sarah (there’s some nice banter between her and The Doctor, who have reached the point in their relationship where they trust each other implicitly but also know each other’s weak spots so can engage in gentle teasing and banter). There are some lovely moments in ‘Planet Of Evil’. Some brilliant ones where the sheer scale of the plot dawns on you. But some pretty boring scenes between those bits along the way. 

Those are all things that prevent ‘Planet Of Evil’ being a top tier story, but it’s still a blooming good one: if you watch Dr Who purely to be scared then this might well be the high point of the entire show, with more jump-scares per minute than most stories and lots of memorable moments (the cliffhangers are notably excellent this story). This being the first story Hinchcliffe commissioned himself (as opposed to inheriting it from Barry Letts, who wanted to give the incoming producer a fair chance with scripts all ready to go) the producer has been doing a lot of thinking about what sort of ‘monster’ he could and came up with the vague plot to have three: the planet itself, the anti-matter monsters and a converted Sorenson,  sending a different threat against The Doctor for the last three episodes to keep things moving, only with the twist that none of them are monsters really. There are a lot of deeper thinkers involved in this story while there’s a really strong plot behind it, especially that moral ending when the planet simply lets everyone go after they return what they’ve just taken (although they should have gone with the original idea of taking Professor Sorenson with them at the end to keep their world ‘safe’ – it was a last minute decision to have them spit him out, his cells returned to their old ways leaving him dazed but unharmed, so the story didn’t upset children by ending on a ‘downer’. As a result it’s one of only an small handful of 20^th century stories where ‘everybody lives’, even the baddie (the only exceptions I can think of are ‘Fury From The Deep’ and the Mara pair, plus weird ones where there was a titchy cast to begin with anyway or The Tardis landed in a world that wasn’t ‘real’ to begin with). It’s a very clever idea that, instead of landing on a planet just like ours and meeting an alien monster, we land on a planet that is alien and where the monster is ‘us’. Like I say, too, you will rarely find a better Who story in terms of pure atmosphere: the set, the lighting, the CSO effects, the radipophonic ‘wind’ sound effect that alone is enough to chill your bones, even one of Dudley Simpson’s better scores (mostly wind based, perhaps to match the copious use of the wind machine) all combine to make a Dr Who adventure that just ‘feel’s right somehow, as if they really did shoot this entire story on location on an alien planet. It’s perfect for the original time slot, when the nights were beginning to draw in at the start of Autumn and the clocks went back during the broadcast, a story about how sinister darkness and the unknown can be. Certainly compared to ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, a similar story that took us to the edge of all known things and tried to show us a planet that didn’t play by the usual rules, but with such poor execution and badly thought out ideas they muffed it up badly, so it became another planet where nothing much happened (It feels as if Russell’ T Davies’ comeback is being spent remaking these stories loosely in order, following this one with ‘Pyramids Of Mars/The Legend Of Ruby Sunday-Empire Of Death’.  Which means that the next one to be re-made is ‘The Android Invasion’. Oh lordy…)  It’s the lack of action that lets this one down, a planet not so much evil but of boredom. Well, that’s what happens with Jekyll and Hyde planets I guess: some bits bad, some parts not just good but glorious. On balance the idea behind ‘Planet Of Evil’ are brilliant enough to make up for its lesser moments.

POSITIVES + We had a lot of impressive alien jungles on Dr Who in the 1960s and most of them looked great too. They were in black-and-white though – this one is fully is technicolour (blood-red, a lot of it) and its doubly impressive that it manages to look so real and believable in the harsh lighting of a studio (Ealing) that didn’t always suit Dr Who sets in the colour years. The trees look so real and substantial and as if they really are growing out of the swampy soggy floor, even though they’re made of Jabolite and had to be firmly weighted down when the wind machine was switched on. No wonder designer Roger Murray-Leach told the producer he was pretty confident he could make a good jungle set: it really is amazing what he managed to do in the corner of a BBC studio, with a perspective that makes it look as if stretches on to the horizon (no painted backdrops here!) Hinchliffe was so impressed he recommended the designer get an award; he didn’t (possibly because the set was so hard to take down without breaking it that it led to overtime for the set dressers to take it down every night and there was no place for the boom microphones to go overhead without getting in the way so all the dialogue had to be over-dubbed at some cost afterwards!), but did receive the accolade of having a still from this story printed on the front of an official BBC drama handbook about how to make brilliant sets on low budgets and deservedly so. A shout out too to Visual Effects Designer Dave Harvard who never gets the credit he deserves for providing all the actual plants. 

NEGATIVES - The acting in this story is...variable. Michael Wisher’s as great as ever (he’s one of the unsung heroes of 70s Dr Who and does far more with the minor part of Morelli than it deserves, even if his fake Indian voice as crewman Ranjit is…uncomfortable listening today)  but everyone else is...lacking. Even Frederick Jaeger as Professor Sorenson, no stranger to Who after performances in ‘The Savages’ and ‘The Invisible Enemy’, gives the weakest by far of his three performances. Prentis Hancock, the saving grace of many a Dr Who supporting cast, seems bored out of his mind. Generally the mid 1970s was the time when Who was getting its highest ratings (give or take the golden years of 19624 and 1972, the occasional Dalek-related publicity blitz or ITV strikes meaning nothing else was on) and big respected actors were queuing up to be on it, to boost their careers or show off to their children. This lot feel as if they’ve been forced here by gunpoint and are hating every minute of it. Normally wooden performances can be excused with production issues or rushed deadlines but nope, not this time: the running of this story was as smooth as any 4th Dr story ever went (it didn’t run overtime, go over budget or have last minute re-writes the day before filming) and as the first story made after a production break they had as much time to prepare and shoot this one as they ever did. Maybe it’s those odd chunky blue-with-sticky-out-white-tubing spacesuits everyone’s made to wear (not the costume department’s finest hour), or the fact that they spend most of this story being scared of a monster that isn’t actually there.

BEST QUOTE: ‘You’re tampering with the balance of nature on this planet which you do not understand – and it may already be too late!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Zeta Major’ (1998) was an unexpected trip to the ‘Planet Of Evil’s older brother, part of the ‘Past Doctor Who Adventures’ series of novels. A 5^th Doctor Tegan and Nyssa story, it’s a welcome story about consequences that feels more in keeping with the Russell T Davies era. We don’t usually get to see what happened after the Tardis leaves a planet. We’re meant to think that all is sweetness and light, but 2000 years since Professor Sorenson got home and told the Morestreans about his near-brush with disaster in his search for technology and their fuel sources finally gave out it’s turned a whole society away from technology and towards religion and superstition. Sorenson alone has kept faith in technology and has built a massive mast on Zeta Major, intending to harness the antimatter power from afar, but now he’s dead and his descendants have forgotten how to work it. There’s also a desperate breakaway group so fed up of living in the dark and watching their civilisation go backwards that they’ve set out to try the rock pools of Zeta Minor all over again. Author Simon Messingham really captures the flavour of the original story and adds a lot of back story to the Morestrans and handles the regulars well too (Nyssa and Tegan are still shaken after losing Adric in ‘Earthshock’ and this story feels as if it would work better earlier than the setting on the back of the book between ‘Arc Of Infinity’ and ‘Snakedance’, while Messingham throws in a bit of detail as to why there were no female scientists in the TV version – this is a deeply misogynistic society more like that of the Draconians so you’ll be cheering on the companions’ attempts to fight back). Though the novel gets a bit bogged down in the goings on at the Middle Ages-style Morestran court and the ending is a tad rushed, all in all this is a really good and under-rated book, much recommended if you liked the parent TV story.

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