Terror Of The Zygons
(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, Harry and UNIT, 30/8/1975-20/9/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Robert Banks Stewart, director: Douglas Camfield)
Rank: 115
'Hoots mon, I'm McZygon and I got left behind in human form when the Doctor came along and blew up the spaceship. I strated a new career in advertising: I came up with the slogan 'Drinka pinta skarasen today' before it got changed by the milk marketing board. I live by loch ness now with my pet skarasen living alongside the locals and doing the few Scottish cliches that didn't make the episode: yes that's me doing the Highland fling while eating shortbread. Would you like to hear me play mah bagpipes?'
Time to let bygones be bygones – even with Zygons. As much as I moan from time to time (especially the lower-ranked stories I reviewed back in January) I really do love everything about this series, even the ‘bad’ bits. Most times I’d still rather watch a poor Dr Who that is at least trying than some anonymous soulless bit of modern scifi. There are a lot of bits in ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ that resemble the parts I’ve spent the past seven months moaning about: monsters that take over Human form mostly to save on a recognisably flimsy budget, yet more companion possessions, peculiar motivations for taking over the world that are never properly explained, sets that don’t look anything like real life, models that don’t even look like models never mind real life, not to mention wee stereotypical locals that border on insensitivity, hoots mon! There’s the oil rig setting from ‘Fury From The Deep’ , the organic technology of ‘Claws Of Axos’, the ancient legend that turns out to be an alien (all sorts) ‘The Daemons’ and the ‘possession’ theme of many stories, most notably ‘The Faceless Ones’. There’s something about this story though that makes it stand out, that takes all the things that would make lesser Dr Who stories fall apart and wrap them up in a whole that still puts a big goofy smile on your face. There’s a creative script from Robert Banks Stewart (with script editor Holmes returning the favour, after getting a job as guest writer on the 1950s series ‘Undermind’ where Stewart was script editor) that takes every cliché under the sun but somehow creates something that feels new and imaginative and a cast doing everything to make the most of every twist and turn on the way and a sense that everyone is giving their all to make this story the best it can possibly be. ‘Zygons’ is one of those real Dr Who comfort stories, one that’s absolutely bonkers without the realism or depth or messages or imagination of this show at its very best, but is just so much fun to watch and get lost in that none of that matters.
Take The Zygons – they ought to be terrible B movie creatures from their names on down (they’re the only Who monster who’s names begin with the ‘space’ letter ‘Z’), the sort of thing Dr Who doesn’t usually resort too, but they have a look and sound all of their own. Orange blobby walking foetuses that look as if they’ve fallen in a vat of spaghetti hoops and baked beans, they look quite unlike any other alien race in any scifi series never mind DW and seem the most believably from another world outside the Daleks. Why do they work when the orange blobbed axons and gel guards are hilariously bad? Couldn’t tell you, they just do. Maybe it’s because Banks Stewart has actually thought about this race, deciding that any rogue species that wants to take over the Earth would probably be a fellow mammal, recognisable in shape to us and designer John Acheson has taken that idea and totally run with it, developing a monster that looks like a baby ‘us’ that grew up in a totally different way and yet simultaneously looks like nothing else ever seen on television. Their technology too is very different tours yet ‘feels’ real, with an organic spaceship with controls that physically grow out of it rather than a bunch of wires and dials. Even the décor is interesting and nicely different: it looks as if someone left a jar of marmalade in a bouncy castle that got tossed in a storm. The Zygons even have a ‘nursemaid’ pet that they bring along with them to keep them supplied with milk, the way future Earth explorers might take a herd of cows. Or maybe its because the Zygons sound quite unlike anything else in Dr Who, with their husky voices and their overly-dramatic prose making them highly memorable and always good for a quote. The Zygons aren’t evil, just opportunistic. It’s almost a shame the Doctor has to blow them up when they’re such, well, fun, without the seriousness of a lot of other monsters.
Their motivation for
taking over Earth are more interesting than most too, starting off being a
recovery mission after their spaceship crashes and strands them in Scotland, so
they have to acclimatise into the local population and fit in by, uhh, stealing
human’s identities - which is, as alien invasions go, fair enough I think. The
originals aren’t murdered but rather kept alive in the Zygon spaceship allowing
them to go about their day in disguise. There’s actually quite a few humans out
there that being possessed by a giant blobby orange fiendish thingy would make
nicer. Only later do we find out that they plan to start making changes to the
Earth to make things more suitable for them even when it kills off the local
wildlife (i.e. us), which is going just a bit too far really. The result is a
story that’s only half about the usual alien invasion – the rest is about
identity. It’s a very 1950s/1960s plot,
back in the peak cold war days when everyone suddenly realised that the ‘enemy’
came not from invasion but infiltration and that the nice little lady down the
shop asking lots of confusing questions might be a Russian spy, with the news
ful of cases of people who’d gone so deep undercover they’d had entire families
without anyone guessing who they really were. It’s a natural Dr Who-ish leap to
go from ‘enemies on the other side of the globe’ to ‘enemies from another
planet’ and having your aliens take on Human form is a nice way of saving
budget and allowing the actors time out the make-up chair. If you’ve ever seen
‘The Invaders’, the 1960s version of ‘The X-Files’ set in a closed deserted
diner, where an American uncovers an alien plot and races across the country
warning every state in turn – only to find out that everyone in power he tries
to tell is secretly an alien too (every week for two years!) then ‘Zygons’ is
that story in miniature and it’s as 1960s a plot as you could have. The enemy
isn’t a foreigner the enemy is ‘the man’ in power. In fact Dr Who had already
done exactly that as a story in the 1960s with ‘The
Faceless Ones’ but that story was all about the fear that those close to
you might be replaced and you’d never know. ‘Zygons’ has a more specific target
in mind: politicians. The idea of ‘replacements’ dates back much further too of
course, back to Celtic stories about children being replaced by ‘fairy babies’,
either ones who changed personality or who acted differently to everyone else
(chances are these children were undiagnosed neuro-divergent, back when nobody
knew what that was), which makes the Scottish backdrop all the more suitable.
The other backdrop to
this story is an energy conference, with The Zygons taking over the head of it
in the shape of crotchety human The Duke of Forgill (not one of life’s natural
diplomats). The Zygon plan is to use politics to change the Earth’s atmosphere
to something better suited to their kind rather than a full-on invasion.
Amazingly it’s the first time aliens changing politics on Earth has come up in
the series – ‘Day Of The Daleks’ too had a peace conference at its heart but
that was more of a ‘time dilemma’ story with future us trying to prevent it while
The Daleks took advantage; this is the first Who story that actively comes out
and says our politicians are all orange blobby aliens. It makes so much sense
it’s a wonder the series hadn’t done it before. I mean let’s face it, if the
current government revealed that they were really orange blobby Zygons trying
to kill us off, the only thing about that sentence that would surprise me is
that they weren’t actually Slitheen after all. This story is the reason I still
half-blame aliens for global warming because there’s no other reasons Humans
haven’t got their act together to sort it by now. I’m amazed, too, that it was
Steven Moffat who brought the Zygons back to modern Who given that this sort of
story is so in Russell T Davies’ wheelhouse. After all, while they’re meant to
represent ‘us’ so many never seem to and how many of us have even met our
representatives in parliament? How do we know our politicians have our best
interests at heart? So any of them are secretly working second jobs with big
corporations that pay them money to either look the other way or vote for a
conglomerate’s best interests. And if the people in power had really sold out
and were working for someone else what could we do about it until the next
election? It’s easy to imagine a different lot of aliens coming into power then
too and the human race going through the cycles all over again. What ‘Zygons’
does so well is tap into that feeling of mistrust that nothing is quite what it
seems. The oil backdrop might be particularly telling: this is the era of the
North Sea Oil gas drilling, when ‘foreigners’ came to drill off the Scottish
coast: as this story shows there was some pushback against foreign interlopers
coming to their fields and taking their resources and as a proud Scot Banks
Stewart might well have shared it – certainly he writes in the idea that these
interlopers are really blobby aliens with glee. Often in the news across the
1970s, the first oil drill opened a few weeks after ‘Zygons’ was broadcast’
(for more on how resentful locals felt you might want to check out the film
‘Local Hero’, which is where a young Scottish actor named Peter Capaldi came to
fame. There’s a rather lovely Mark Knopfler score too). The story wraps
everything up with the Skarasen in the Thames outside Downing Street though,
the place that sanctioned the drilling, as if ‘they’re’ the real monster behind
it all (while the Brigadier talks to the ‘new’ pm on the phone, just to rub the
point home).
While the main plot is
just the usual how-will-the-Doctor-stop-them-this-week? plot we’ve had maybe
200 times elsewhere, the story behind it leads to all sorts of interesting
discussions about trust (how do you tell who’s really a Zygon in disguise?),
the environment (the Doctor ticks us off for living off oil and you half expect
him to start throwing orange confetti around the Scottish oil rigs– this was
back in 1975. I’m still waiting for the liquid hydrogen revolution he mentions)
and whether different cultures can live together in peace (it turns out they
can’t in this story, but thankfully the even better ‘Zygon Invasion-Inversion’ puts
that right and it’s not often I get to say that about a new-Who episode
compared to an old one). There’s even a sub-plot about hunting: the inn is
named after the foxes hunted in this area and there are multiple ‘trophy’ heads
on the wall, as if hunting is part and parcel of what it means to be alive. We
see two takes on that in this story: one is when we’re literally seeing things
through the eyes of the Zygons, with a clever ‘point of view’ distorted shot
that makes us feel pity for them as they cower, terrified, while hunted down,
while also reminding us that the Humans trying to drive us out from our own world
are only doing to us what we do to animals further down the food chain. The
Zygons aren’t being unreasonable, they’re just doing to ‘us’ what we do to
others. Even something as simple as the tune ‘Flowers Of The Forest’ Angus
plays on the bagpipes resonates: it’s a tale of sorrow for the thousands of
Scottish soldiers dead in England who’ll never get to come home (just as the
Zygons’ planet has been destroyed and they’re refugees themselves).
We even get an
explanation for the loch ness monster that, well, it’s as plausible as any – and
for once it isn’t this week’s big monster but the only case of a monster taking
its own animal, a sort of cross between the Zygons’ nurse-maid and pet (a lot
is made about their need to drink milk to live – so much so I was expecting the
end of the story to involve a milkman and an intergalactic cow). The first
draft of the script was all about the monster and only a little about its
masters (Stewart’s starting point being that the monster was the one mystery he
hadn’t seen them do on Who yet) but script editor Holmes was far more
interested in The Zygons. That’s a move typical of this story, which you gives
you all the usual clichés but then throws in some extra detail they didn’t have
to. Mostly though it’s about trust, about our reliance in human society that
people are who they say they are. Humans are complex creatures, their
characters always changing so that we see different parts to them in different
situations, even people we’re close to. Everyone says it was coincidence and
the design and name came together independently but ‘Zygon’ is very close to
‘Zygote’, the very first cell in mammal development which divides off to create
life and holds all the DNA that decides who a person becomes. It’s as if Zygons
started off from that same original cell from the moment of fertilisation and
went in another completely different way, whilst also finding a way to
replicate Human cells to become the person we are.
The regular cast all do
alien brainwashing very well, especially Harry in his penultimate appearance
whose gloriously blank and frightening the only time he’s possessed/doubled by
a baddy (a shame as he’s really really good – and Harry, being one of the
nicest and gentlest of companions, only makes the conversion into a
psychopathic assassin seem worse somehow), while John Woodnutt is utterly
brilliant in his double part as chief Zygon Broton and the Duke of Forgill
(what with his regular appearances as Merlin in Knightmare he was one of my
favourite actors from my childhood). In fact Woodnutt is so good that you do
rather think his ‘Human’ and ‘Zygon’ selves are played by two different actors,
not least the different accents (The Duke of Forgill talks like no one else has
ever talked, a compromise between director Dougie Camfield wanting pure Scots
and the actor arguing that as a posh Scot chances are the Duke would have been
educated in an English public school and therefore had his Scots burr drummed
out of him). What’s less impressive is the way that our old friends from UNIT
are mucked about with – there’s some hilarity as the Brigadier turns up in his
family kilt (surely a joke from the writer, who also has links to the ‘Stewart’
clan tartan), but otherwise he’s barely in the story at all and as this is his last appearance for eight years
it’s a sorry way to go. The 4th Doctor, particularly, no longer
seems to think of him as a friend, snapping at him for being recalled for
something as minor as oil and barely looking at him. Even Sarah is distant by
her standards, script editor Homes perhaps pushing the idea that their recent
run of adventures have changed the cast (it is rather odd the way everyone just
gets back to their old UNIT roles as if they’ve never been away, rather than
nattering to the Brig about Daleks and Cybermen and giant wasps. Poor Harry’s
probably in shock, especially given his rather dazed reaction to being invited
back to the Tardis but you’d think Sarah would be telling everyone and making
notes for that night’s late edition). Poor Benton doesn’t even get as much as
the Brigadier.
Well bust ma kilts and
blow ma bagpipes! For some reason fans always lap up the Scottish stereotypes
in this story too, even though if anything they’re crasser than the ones about
Wales in ‘The Green Death’ (and
England in ‘The Daemons’, something a
lot of fans overlook; you can see why everyone thought setting a story about
‘alien outsiders’ in Ireland probably wasn’t a good idea in the 1970s). Angus
Lennie (‘Storr’ in ‘The Ice Warriors’)
is so full of Scottish stereotypes that
he doesn’t surely resemble any real Scottish person that ever lived (some of
them are like that some of the time, but never all the time – and no I don’t
know every Scottish person that ever lived but I do know quite a few). The
story’s first scene has an oil rigger ordering haggis over the radio and then
the story goes on to include bagpipes, mean-ness, superstition, seventh sons of
seventh sons, second sight and kilts (as worn by the Brigadier – check out
those knees!) – and that’s just the first episode! Oddly enough this makes the
Brigadier seem more stereotypically stiff-upper-lip English than ever, despite
the fact that he’s the one wearing a kilt. People tend to give Banks Stewart a
free reign over the stereotypes, given that he’s Scottish himself, but in a way
that makes it worse: despite Dr Who being based in Cardiff now neither Barry
Letts not his co-writer Robert Sloman had ever been to Wales before writing
‘The Green Death’ and were writing a fictional place based on stereotypes.
Stewart though knows his homeland and could easily have added some local colour
without going this far and making it silly. Given how few times Dr Who ever
goes outside England (in the pre-Chibnall years at least) it’s a waste.
In case you’re wondering
which part of Scotland this is while you’re off reading this on holiday there by
the way, sorry – it was filmed in West Sussex firmly in England (and doesn’t
look much like Scotland at all) purely as a money saving device of being able
to drive everyone back home at the end of the location shoot rather than pay
for hotels (Who won’t film in Scotland for real until as late as ‘Tooth and Claw’). The Tardis lands in
Ambersham Common, the Zygon spaceship landed at Climping Beach Littlehampton,
while The Fox Inn was in the village of Charlton and that was it’s real name:
that’s not a BBC mockup (although the inside of the inn is back at BBC TV
Centre). Filming in these places in a windswept March was not without its
problems: the lighting, particularly, changed every five minutes and one of
Who’s most famous ‘cut’ scenes of the Tardis’ arrival had to be dropped before
transmission as the light between the ‘blank’ forest and the ‘Tardis’
materialising effect was just too different, despite the scenes being filmed
close together (they can do all sorts with technology now, of course, and its
been restored to the DVD looking much the way it was intended. Though not a
very revelatory scene it is worth watching so I recommend setting your DVD up
to the ‘director’s cut’ on special features if you haven’t already. I’ve heard
it’s there automatically on i-player). That’s not the only scene that looks a
bit ropey. The model Zygon spaceship is pretty good, even when close to the
camera with the regulars running past it far away (a shot a few other Who
stories tried too but never as good) and the model oil rig is excellent (they
built two in case the scene where the spaceship crash-lands into it went wrong:
the ‘spare’ is used as a model in the oil base, a side effect of this story
having so many scenes made out of order, to save Woodnutt having to keep
dressing and undressing from his Zygon suit). However the model shots of the
Skarasen are truly dire, with Tom Baker standing in front of a blow-up photo
and then a crude puppet while he throws things at it (although it’s not as bad
as, say, the model dinosaurs or the action man toy tanks from series past, it
seems to have been made with a millionth of the care of the Zygons themselves.
Especially the rubber teeth). It’s not even that it’s a puppet: it’s that
sometimes it’s also a model and sometimes it’s an animatronic effect and none
of these three things look like the others or act like the others. Plus surely
if the loch ness monster looked like that people would have spent the past few
centuries bursting into laughter rather than running away? Poor Camfield,
returning to his favourite show after five years away following the heart
attack he suffered making ‘Inferno’
must have come close to having another one after seeing it (the production team
had tried to lure him back many times but I’m surprised he went for this story,
which doesn’t look much on paper – and the fact it’s so good on screen is
partly down to him).
Oddly despite the name what’s
lacking most from ‘Terror of the Zygons’ is the terror, at least compared to
similar 4th Dr menaces. The Zygons are all talk and no trousers, even when
they’re, erm ,being humans in kilts – we hear a lot about what they can do but
other than attacking Sarah Jane with a pitch-fork (dressed as Harry) none of
them does anything close to being threatening. They talk the talk but can’t
walk the walk, even on blobby legs and lack the weaponry of the Daleks or
Cybermen or the brute force of The Ice Warriors or Sontarons. They’re even a
rare monster that dies from bullet wounds (the Brigadier is thrilled!) Just
seeing something of what they could do on screen would have made this tale a
whole lot scarier and made the stakes an awful lot higher. After all, they’re
in a unique position as baddies that’s never really used: we hear that they’re
a long lived species who are still the first descendents and if reports of a
monster in loch ness going back to the Middle Ages are to be believed they’ve
been here a very long time (then again, ‘Timelash’
claims that’ story’s big bad The Borad was mistaken for the loch ness monster
too. Which is, how shall I put this politely?…unlikely). Long enough to know
Humans incredibly well and be able to do terrible harm from within. Quite why
the Zygons have decided to wake up now is never explained: are they so afraid
of public transport that they’ve never ventured out of Scotland? Have they
waited all this time for something important to happen near them? While it
makes sense they need to go back to their spaceship to re-programme from the
bodies they keep fresh, have they never thought of simply moving their
spaceship? There are lots of little plothole errors, almost as if the writer
was making it all up as he went along: it seems ridiculous in retrospect for
instance, that the possessed Duke around whom the plot centres not only happens
to bump into the UNIT people but actually gives them a lift and risks blowing
his cover! Later a possessed Zygon actually helps Sarah Jane up the very ladder
that leads to an alien spaceship (there’s a, mercifully cut, cringeworthy line
about Sarah being too distracted trying to look u his kilt and getting her own
back for all the times men look up her skirt, before he tells her to do it
herself). The Doctor also suddenly, out of nowhere, shows off the ability to
put people in a Tibetan trance to save them from pain, something you’d think he’d
surely have sued before this (even if he picked the skill up recently there’s
no break between programmes since he was unstable in ‘Robot’ and just think how
different ‘The Sontaron Experiment’
a few stories ago would have been with that knowledge to name one of dozens). Stewart
also seems to forget all about the Zygon fleet still out in space waiting for a
signal – Im amazed that hasn’t been mentioned in Dr Who again, even if several
light years and centuries away (this is a time travel show after all).
You’d think, too, that
the Zygons would have reached out a tentacle to one or other of the many alien
invaders seen in the series, offering to help with their specialist knowledge in
return for melting the ice caps (it’s in their best interests to wipe Humans
out). As mentioned ‘Zygon
Invasion’ does a much better job of playing with all the many interesting
ideas that having body doubles and an alien so similar to us in so many
Mammalian ways throws up, showing how much like ‘us’ the Zygons are and how we
could all run shoulders and get along, but ‘Terror’ is too busy trying to tell
a traditional monster tale to do anything quite that brave. Yet it never quite
makes the monsters traditionally frightening to be as scary as other
Hinchcliffe era threats like the Wirrn, Morbius or Krynoids either. It’s not
just the invaders either but the invadees: Stewart didn’t know Dr Who very well
and left most of the characterisation to Holmes but he didn’t have time to
write everything so they all seem a little ‘off’ this week, especially Sarah (who’s
more of a drip than usual) and The Doctor (who’s even ruder and far less fun
than usual). The only scene where both seem like their usual selves in when
they’re trapped in a decompression chamber and that’s because Tom Baker and
Elisabeth Sladen effectively improvise it, to make up for an effect that failed
on recording day. The regulars cover the gaps elsewhere too, but only Harry
comes out of this serial with any real credit and that’s because he spends half
of it acting against type. If you’re watching this story purely for a fond
farewell to some much loved regulars we won’t see all together again (not with
the Brig anyway) then you’re going to be sorely disappointed. What a shame, by
the way, that the Brig at least doesn’t take The Doctor up on his offer (the
only time he’s directly invited in the Tardis rather than kidnapped/there by
accident): it would have been such fun to think of him saying ‘Egyptian God
there, five rounds rapid’ or ‘Oh my God, this antimatter planet looks just like Bognor. Again!’
Still, those are the reasons ‘Zygons’ isn’t
perfect. It’s still a charming story for the most part, one that does things a
little differently to most period Who stories and is all the better for it. The
script is never dull, the cats give their all (especially Woodnutt and Marter)
and Acheson’s designs (based around a John Freidlander mask) are exceptional.
So much so that Hinchcliffe wrote to his department with a special memo
praising him for his extra work and that he was the star of the story. Big
babies that seem more grown-up than most Dr Who villains, they’re what makes
this story more than just another Dr Who runaround and they were top of my list
of ‘classic’ monsters to bring back, after The Ice Warriors. The story
certainly wouldn’t work anywhere near as well without them (is this, whisper
it, the first time a Dr Who monster costume was so good it actually enhanced a
story rather than detracted from it? Not quite as it happens – I would suggest
‘The Ice Warriors’ and ‘The Time Warrior’ and anything Dalek,
but certainly it’s rare).Full of the worst excesses of Dr Who it might be, but
somehow ‘Zygons’ finds a way of turning most of those clichés around and making
them work anew. There might not be any one thing done in ‘terror’ that’s better
than it’s done in another story, but somehow it mostly works (perhaps not the
model shots) and sometimes that’s all you really need. Incidentally, ‘Zygons’
was meant to be a series finale rather than a series opener but the BBC was so
afraid of the new guns-blazing big budget Gerry Anderson live action scifi
series ‘Space: 1999’ being broadcast in September that, rather than give Who
audiences a chance to get hooked on that they brought Dr Who forward from its
regular post-Christmas week slot to compete with it, a schedule Who will keep
right up until Michael Grade starts mucking about with twice weekday slots in
the 1980s. Despite the blaze of publicity and the sheer amount of money spent
on ‘1999’ it died a death and barely dented the Dr Who ratings: even on a fraction
of the budget it was obvious this was the show with the imagination and ideas
and even after twelve years Who still had a lot more life in it yet. Imagine,
though, what a different future Who might have had if they’d put a lesser story
like, say, ‘The Android Invasion’
in that slot instead…
POSITIVES + The
‘tunnelled’ camera effect when we see things from the Zygon’s point of view,
overlaid with heavy Zygon breathing, is an excellent effect that stays long in
the memory. It really does make it look as if we’re seeing this part of the
story through ‘alien’ eyes and reminds us just how different the Zygons are to
us, even when they’re doing a really good job of ‘being’ us. The Zygons then
watch back whatever one of their ‘bugs’ or Zygons-pretending-to-be-human see on
their own crystalline TV in their organic spaceship, something more aliens
ought to do. A nice little touch. I wonder if they get the Dr Who repeats on UK
Gold? (The Cybermen’s least favourite channel).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Two
days before episode one of ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ and a full forty-eight years before
Dr Who joined the Disney family, Tom Baker became the latest celebrity to
present animated clip compilation ‘Disneytime’. It’s a sign of how much
everyone still thought of Dr Who as a predominantly children’s series, with Tom
hosting the show in character in between stints by Ed Stewart and Bing Crosby
just to give you an idea of what a varied bunch presented the programme and how
seemingly anybody was asked to do the show. It’s hard to explain to todays
streaming, blu-ray owning fanbase that this programme was basically a
puff-piece to keep Disney’s name on telly and in the news, one which repeated
chunks of films animated and live action that you couldn’t simply go to the
shops and own or download. If you missed an episode of Disney time (and there
were usually four a year across the 1960s to the 1990s on bank holidays – Tom’s
was the Summer one in August) that was it: you might not see your favourite
clips again for another decade. Walt Disney himself started the trend on
American telly, initially as a way of selling his Disneyland theme parks to the
public, but they soon became a way of teaching children about the behind the
scenes making of animation, or the traditions of storytelling, or how to draw
particular animals. Inevitably, with so many episodes to fill all year round,
they ended up publicity pieces. Given that Dr Who is now officially rubbing shoulders with these films it’s a
shame we don’t get more of a crossover: Sarah Jane teaming up with Minnie Mouse
and Daisy Duck to talk women’s lib, or Donald Duck losing his temper at Davros
(who is after all modelled on Hitler, a character he’d already defeated once in
the jaw-dropping carton ‘Der Fuhrer’s Face’; sadly we’re a little early for K9
to meet Pluto).
The Zygons, meanwhile, next appeared in Who when
they faced off against the McGann Doctor in the BBC 8th Doctor
Adventures novel ‘The Bodysnatchers’ (1997). A Zygon spaceship has crash-landed
into the London fog of 1894 and none other than Henry Litefoot (from ‘Talons Of Weng-Chiang’)
is asked to view the body. He suspects grave robbers but really, of course,
it’s a Zygon needing to keep their body double ‘alive’ and imprisoned in their
quest to turn Earth into the new ‘Zygor’ colony. The 8th Doctor and
book companion Sam are still new to time travel and each other (this is only
the third book in the series) so there’s a lot of room for the Doctor
questioning his own identity, for Sam to question the character of the person
she’s effectively run away with and lots of questions about what our identity
really is when a Zygon can impersonate us so easily down to the mannerisms and
yet something is still a little ‘off’. Mark Morris’ novel (this is his first –
he did the novelisation of ‘Wild
Blue Yonder’ in 2023 after a nearly twenty-five year
gap) is one of those that’s great in parts but doesn’t quite hang together all
the way through: you can probably guess where it’s going to go from page one
too. . It’s a clumsy book for the most part, slow to begin and with a rushed
end while the Doctor lectures for most of the book about the dangers of
genocide and then does just that. But then the Zygons were never about
originality: by their very nature they’re into recycling and inhabiting old
bodies! The portrayal of Litefoot is the book’s highlight, Morris nailing the
character as if it was Holmes back writing for him and the pathologist easily
gets all the best lines. Be warned too it’s one of the more gruesome Dr Who
novels around with lots of descriptions of gouged body parts and blood, while in
one chapter a Skarasen goes on a bloody rampage through an English village and
the book ends (spoilers) with a clumsy mistake by The Doctor that wipes the
Zygons out totally. Butterfingers!
‘The Zygon Who Fell To Earth’ (2008) saw the McGann
Dr meet the orange blobby ones on audio, as part of Big Finish’s ‘8th
Doctor Adventures’. The early McGann adventures are some of the strongest
things the company did in its first decade and this story is one of the best, a
moving tale of love in its many forms. It turns out that companion Lucie’s
Aunty Pat (who we meet in previous story ‘The Horror Of Glam Rock’, itself a
sequel) has been married all these years to…A Zygon! Lucie knows something is
up when she discovers him carting off Skarasen milk and spends the story
working out how to break this to her beloved relative. Only to find out that
she knows, she’s always known, but loves him anyway, orange blobs and all. The
rest of the story is more business as usual, as the Zygon is a splinter from a
group secretly hatching to take over The Earth, with a heartbreaking ending.
Powerful stuff with Sheridan Smith at her best.
It took thirty-nine years for Tom Baker to have a
re-match with the blobby ones, when ‘Zygon Hunt’ was released, part of Big
Finish’s ‘Fourth Doctor Adventures’ range (2014), a few months after they’d
shared a story in 50th anniversary special ‘The Day Of The Doctor’.
Nicholas Briggs’ story feels like several 4th Doctor stories put
through a blender: there’s the jungle planet (‘Planet Of Evil’)
with a colony of Humans cut off from their base (‘Ark
In Space’) and Humans being hunted for sport by a killer
alien. Mostly, though, it’s ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ part two as the Zygons
takeover people’s bodies but keep the originals alive. Sadly the big expected
Leela v Zygon fight never quite happens and the theme of the hunters
impersonating their prey and getting caught in their trap feels rushed. Never
mind though: I mean, they’re back together at last, after so many years of
waiting: we’d had far too many years of Zygons being bygones and all the familiar
sound effects are present and correct, that’s good enough for me!
Previous ‘Revenge
Of The Cybermen’ next ‘Planet
Of Evil’
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