The Creature From The Pit: Ranking - 113

  The Creature From The Pit

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

Rank: 113

In an emoji: 🕳

  'What Erato was really saying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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