Terror Of The Zygons: Ranking - 115

     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 stories 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 DW 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 7 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 something about this story though that takes all the things that would make lesser DW stories fall apart and yet wrap them up in a whole that still puts a big goofy smile on your face. ‘Zygons’ is one of those real DW comfort stories, one that’s absolutely bonkers without the realism or depth of the best stories but is just so much fun. It takes a creative script from Robert Banks Stewart 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. Take The Zygons – they ought to be terrible B movie creatures from their names on down, the sort of thing DW 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 its because the Zygons sound quite unlike anything else in DW too, with their husky voices and their overly-dramatic prose and its almost a shame the Doctor has to blow them up when they’re such, well, fun. 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, so they have to acclimiatise into the local population and fit in by, uhh, stealing human’s identities - which is, as alien invasions go, fair enough I think. 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 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. I still half-blame the Zygons for global warming – 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. Whatever, while the main plot is just the usual how-will-the-Doctor-staop-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) 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-Invasion’ puts that right and its not often I get to say that about a new-Who episode compared to an old one). 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 (the Zygons are one of the few mammal aliens seen in DW and 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). That’s a move typical of this story, which you gives you all the usual cliches but then throws in some extra detail they didn’t have to. 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). 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, but otherwise he’s barely in the story at all (this is his last appearance for eight years which makes it doubly sad) and poor Benton doesn’t even get that much. 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’ – Angus 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). I mean, his first scene sees him ordering haggis over the radio while discussing his inner superstition and then being stingy. Oddly enough this makes the Brigadier seem more stereotypically stiff-upper-lip English than ever, despite the fact that he’s wearing a kilt. In case you’re wondering which part of Scotland this is by the way, nope – it was filmed in West Sussex (and doesn’t look much like Scotland at all). Oh and yes some of the model shots in this one are truly dire, with Tom Baker standing in front of a blow-up photo of the skarasen while he throws things at it (although its not as bad as, say, the model dinosaurs or the action man toy tanks from series past). Perhaps the biggest problem with this story though is that 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. 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. Oddly what’s lacking most from ‘Terror of the Zygons’ is the terror, at least compared to similar 4^th Dr menaces. Still, its a charming story this one (give or take the Scottish bits) and I have a real fondness for the Zygons, who were top of my monster wants list for the new series after they brought the ice warriors back. Big babies that seem more grown-up than most DW villains, they’re what makes this story more than just another DW runaround, while the clever writing and cast take what could have been a very silly story and somehow make it gripping drama. Full of the worst excesses of DW it might be, but somehow this story turns most of them (perhaps not the model shots) into a strength.

+ 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. 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 DW repeats on UK Gold? (The Cybermen’s least favourite channel).

- Most fans accept that the ‘madam’ the Brigadier is talking to over the phone is then-leader of the opposition Margaret Thatcher four years before she held the prime minister office for real. Certainly that’s what the production team were aiming for at the time – UNIT stories were all meant to be just a little into the future after all, even if no two writers ever seemed to agree just how far. This is a depressing thought. No wonder we barely saw UNIT again after this story; Thatcher probably privatised them and cut the budget. This might explain why England keeps being invaded as frequently as it does in future stories.