The Macra Terror: Ranking - 128

            The Macra Terror

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben, Polly and Jamie, 11/3/1967-1/4/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Ian Stuart Black, director: John Davies)

Rank: 128

  'Ding dong! Welcome to the first day of the new Earth colony holiday camp since that unfortunate incident with the err, erm, well actually I can't remember what happened now but I know we've done lots of refurbishment and we're all ready to see you. Rise and shine you happy campers the sun is out, the birds are singing, the giant crabs are getting bitey and its a lovely day to get brainwashed, I mean have fun. There will be a lecture in a few minutes about how to walk sideways, you can get a manicure for your pincers over in the spa and if the chosen ones selected for a hideous death can follow me in an orderly queue I'd be most grateful. What? There are still Macra here? Don't be silly Sir they're the size of a car, I'm sure we'd notice them if they were here - and besides, there's no such thing as Macra...Aaaaagh!'

 

 

There’s no such thing as The Macra Terror. I don’t even know why I wrote that sentence. Must be too many late hours with Murray Gold’s music doing funny things to my head. Don’t mind me. Review ends.

No wait something is coming back to me. Something hazy about an insect. Or was it a crab? Not that I can really picture it – it’s as if somebody forgot to take any photographs of it. But there was one picture I remember, of a crab the size of a mini cooper, with great big claws and glowing red eyes that also looked like the lights off a mini cooper now I think about it. And I remember the sound, all those incessant jingles and people being jolly. You see they’d taken over a holiday camp where everyone was being awfully nice to each other. Wait, no – that has to be a fever dream. Even Dr Who wouldn’t do anything that weird. I’ll get back to you after I’ve had a year of therapy (but do I choose The Leisure Hive and get menaced by giant reptile mafiosa lizards or Tranquillity Spa and be menaced by something inside the vending machine? Decisions, decisions…) Looks like I’m going to be a while. Maybe I’ll have regenerated into a new body by the time I’m back? Don’t wait up!... 

Hello I’m back again! I really do remember ‘The Macra Terror’ now. Err, even though few other people do: it’s one of the stories with the least amount of footage surviving (a mere twenty-eight seconds of giant crab action, cut by Australian censors), the least publicity material taken (it didn’t have a big name cast as such and producer Innes Lloyd was a little ashamed of the crabs themselves) and the blurriest photosnaps taken from the telly (because a lot of ‘The Macra Terror’ was set at night, in the dark, which is a hard thing to capture on film when taking pictures of a black-and-white television set). Apparently my computer apparently doesn’t remember either. I had to laugh – a couple of months ago when I was tweeting the first draft of these reviews I noticed that there was a story missing from my original numbered ranking list and the word document where I keep these reviews and spent a frazzled hour trying to work out which story had gone awol. How typical that it should be this one: the ultimate Dr Who brainwashing story in a series that did these sort of things more weeks than not. For a time there, until it was re-instated, there really was no such things as Macra. 

This story is, if you try to describe it to anyone else, flat out bonkers as only Dr Who can be. It’s about a bunch of giant crabs from space who come to Earth and decides to run a holiday camp that brainwashes people. The crabs need humans you see because the Earth is full of gasses that they need which are poisonous to them and they’re not exactly built for speed (being of the slow and lumbering variety) so they can’t mass invade in a Dalek way and they’re not exactly built for hiding in the shadows like the Cybermen either. So instead they convince the population of their ‘colony’ that they’re not really there, with a gas of their own that attacks people in their sleep and makes them forget, well, everything: they wake up with a sudden desire to do the crabs’ bidding without any memory of the crabs’ existence at all, just a certain belief in things that patently aren’t true, a sort of cognitive dissonance that anyone pointing out the stupidity of what they’re doing must be wrong. It’s a really clever idea: this story isn’t so much ‘how would you cope during a mass invasion?’ as usual but more ‘how would you cope if everyone started denying a truth you knew was right?’ It’s a story I think about a lot these days. Honestly there are times when I’ve woken up in Britain in the 21^st century and wondered if the crabs have got into the wiring of society for real: they invented ‘fake news’ long before Trump, seem natural creators of the Brexit lies and propaganda and are surely behind the fact that everyone’s stopped talking about covid pretty much overnight, still the single biggest cause of death around the world in 2024 (that settles it: the virus didn’t come from pangolins, a la ‘The Leisure Hive’ or an industrial mistake a la ‘The Pyramid At The End Of The World’, but come from gasses given off by Macra. I also can’t believe we’ve gone this far into the modern series without a Trump-like figure turning out to be a giant crab – or at any rate someone with them, given his sexual habits. They did try to put a Trump clone in an alliance with radioactive spiders in ‘Arachnids In The UK’ but were far too nice all round).

Ian Stuart-Black’s story actually makes a lot of sense in the context of 1967, when it was becoming increasingly clear that the next world war wasn’t going to be fought on a battlefield with heroes and weapons so much as it was going to be a cold war between two super-powers trying to infiltrate the other from the inside. This is the era when spy films and books were big, when James Bond was the new kid in town and newspapers were full of reports about spies successfully (and unsuccessfully) infiltrating big important political decisions and interfering from the inside to subvert the truth, even when it was obvious (indeed, if you see Putin as the natural Russian heir of Stalin then ‘The Macra Terror’ makes a lot more sense in 2023 than it has since the end of the cold war). This story, for instance, comes right in the middle of one about not believing your eyes when the Cybermen start walking around and hiding and another when a load of aliens, who lost their identities in a giant explosion (How does that work? Don’t ask), start taking over ours. For even though the crabs turn up for the cliffhangers as normal, the ‘real’ threat in this story come from the people with the authority covering it up, who clearly don’t know what they’re talking about insisting you’re wrong and that the evidence of what you’ve seen with your own eyes just isn’t real. They’re afraid of the Doctor not because he’s seen through their evil plans and has vowed to stop them, so much that they’ve invested too much: if they admit that’ he’s right and that crabs have got into the colony and infected everyone then it means they’re the villains and it’s easier for them to keep going on with the lie and pretend that they’re doing the right thing (again, I’m convinced this is how a lot of Trump and Brexit supporters and covid deniers operate, because it’s easier to keep going down a wrong path than admit your mistake and make a u-turn sometimes). The threat for once isn’t a mass invasion, or even the invasion of one deadly monster with all the power, but mob rule with the Doctor on his own telling everyone that they’re wrong. Even one of his own companions!

It’s the perfect place to unleash the Doctor and, hot on the heels of ‘The Moonbase’, is the second story where the Second Doctor really comes into his own. He’s no longer the authoritarian figure of the First Doctor who can walk into any situation and take control but a shadier character who works in a similar but more benevolent way than the Macra. He’s always on the fringes of the action, encouraging events to act in a certain way and only stepping in when things get out of hand,  someone born for snooping and working out answers in places people don’t want him to go. The Doctor has been reborn from a moral crusader of justice upholding intergalactic karma to an investigative troublemaker seeing where authority is corrupt and challenging it, refusing to follow any rules of any planet just because he’s told to. You can see it (well, you can only hear it nowadays or see it in animated form, but you know what I mean) in episode one when the Doctor is placed in a ‘tidying’ machine that makes him smart: pressed shirt, hair combed back and trousers less baggy, before an irate Doctor un-tidies himself again: this is someone who doesn’t act presentable for other people the way they want him to, the Doctor proud of his scruffiness in a world that’s far too tidy by half (there’s a reason the Cybermen turn up every five minutes in this era: their need to eradicate individuality is the complete opposite of this Doctor). There’s a big passionate speech, when the Doctor is trying to wake a half-dosed Polly from her slumber, where he urges her to always think for herself and not take anything anyone says to her on trust – to believe her own eyes instead of someone else telling her what they see. I’m open to the idea of a telesnap coming to light one day where the Doctor actually breaks the fourth wall and winks at the camera right at the moment he says this to Polly, it’s that sort of a speech.

This is all perfect for what’s happening in the wider world in 1967, an era of anti-Government protests and youthful rebellion. We’ve talked a lot already about the inter-generational divide of the 1960s (the most extreme of all the generation gaps?) and how ‘Dr Who’ was one of the few things parents watched with their children. This story is one of the most extreme cases of being on the side of the children, the baby boomers, over their war generation parents: until circa The Beatles in 1964 (or indeed Dr Who circa November 1963) and the rise of the cold war it had been the norm to just accept what your governments told you, that if they wanted you to fight a war it must be just and right and proper and that the people in charge knew something you didn’t. That was how fascism was defeated and that was clearly a good thing. Only war didn’t end with the atomic bomb in 1945. Now Westerns governments are fighting ‘just in case’ wars in an endless chess game with Russians that resulted in seemingly pointless deaths in faraway places like Korea and Vietnam that seemed to make no sense. The youth of the day had seen a lot of their parents and their grandparents die in two world wars and it felt inevitable that there was going to be a third: well, not them, they’d seen firsthand the devastation war could have. They were the peace and love crowd, who believed in the greater good of humans and couldn’t be manipulated with propaganda about how their neighbours across the sea were ‘bad’ just because they had a different worldview and/or skin colour. They didn’t have the same built-in belief of authority: they believed in individuality, the importance of having your own principles and moral code to live by that you made yourself after reflection (often of the hallucinogenic kind). Authority was how we’d ended up in wars in the first place and the people in charge of running the world all seemed shifty and untrustworthy, without the planet’s best interests at heart. ‘The Macra Terror’ doesn’t exactly feature a full-on student demonstration or sit-in but it is as close as any fictional programme on British television in 1967 dared to show, in the days when new bulletins were firmly on the side of the parents ad scratching their heads as to what the big fuss was about. Of all the Dr Who stories watched as a family this must have been one of the most uncomfortable as Ben, the only non-UNIT companion to be from one of the armed forces, talks about duty and doing the right thing and following orders, even though to everyone who isn’t brainwashed by crabs he’s clearly wrong and confused as to why he’s saying what he says half the time. Most programmes would have done the obvious and made the youngsters hip and their adults square but the genius of Dr Who is that the youthful rebel is the middle-aged Doctor (Troughton turned 47 during the making of this story) and the authority figure is the teenager from the navy. Even so, ‘The Macra Terror’ is pretty darn heavy in places and can’t possibly have the same impact on re-watchings, now that both generations have grown older and been followed by at least three more who weren’t born at the time of transmission, one of Dr Who’s biggest political statements (qwere they to do this sort of thing now Generation X would be too depressed to care and let the Macra wander free, the Millennials would try to defeat them then get discouraged and have a breakdown and Gen Z would make a tiktok campaign about the dangers of crabs, then get eaten while posing for a selfie). 

There’s a school of thought that the Macra represents communist Russia. That’s clearly what the ‘adults’ watching this first time round were meant to think. They’re the mute parasites in charge living off the workload of the humans under them, for whom they don’t care. Until the last minute the Macra were meant to be spiders or at least some form of insect: this story only started because producer, writer and script editor gathered together in an office to look at a list of old stories and work out something obvious that hadn’t been done before. Only some bright spark had forgotten about ‘The Web Planet’ and it’s infamous giant insects and after script editor Gerry Davis found out how badly that story had gone down he had it changed to crabs at the last minute – so last minute half the dialogue still refers to them as insects; Polly even refers to the Macra as ‘insects’ half a sentence after calling them ‘crabs’ and as one of the few people to have a perfect un-brainwashed view of what they look like (though clearly a mistake it actually really fits this story of people believing what they’ve been told rather than the evidence of their own eyes). The name ‘Macra’ comes from the Latin for the largest crustacean known on Earth: the Japanese ‘spider crab’, Macrocheria Kaempferi, which is twelve feet wide (give or take a big lunch). They kind of work as crabs too, if you take them as a metaphor for an alien menace that scuttles, sideways, without ever being direct. Assume for now that they were meant to be insects, though, and it all makes sense: they run the holiday camp like a gang of ants, each one brainwashed into working for the Queen ant who never leaves the hive. The humans even refer to it as a ‘colony’ rather than a camp. It’s also a place where everyone is meant to be equal and happy and will tell you that they are – as long as you don’t dig under the surface and look too deeply or ask too many questions. It’s how visiting Russia seemed at the time, or North Korea does now, with everyone happy and pleased to meet you as long as you follow the rules and only look at what they tell you. However to the baby boomers it must have reminded them of capitalism, also run by shady forces who got their claws into everything and who you never met but who still took a percentage of your heard-earned wages in tax for goodness knows what (this is the era of secret but not so secret word didn’t get out military budgets that everyone knew about but whose figures were never discussed openly in parliament). Those jingles alone are a very 1960s consumerist society idea, spoofed by The Who at the end of the year (but being recorded right when this story went out) with the fake companies they advertised on ‘The Who Sell Out’ (the one with Roger Daltrey in a bath of baked beans on the cover – and, more than anyone bar The Beatles, Dr Who relates quite closely to what their namesakes were up to and even retire the same year, 1989, with plenty of ‘comebacks’ starting in 1996. Talking ‘Bout My Regenerations indeed, while regeneration itself is a sort of ‘Substitute’. This story is ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ down to the letter: meet the new crab, same as the old crab. All it needs is for Zoe to turn out to be a deaf dub and blind Pinball Wizard and you’d have the set. Alright I’ll stop now, I promise). This is also the first stirrings of knowledge about hazardous working conditions, of things like asbestos that had been quietly killing employees for years (though, fearing compensation, the government was still in so much denial it was still being found in my school in the 1980s – and indeed BBC TV centre, affecting the filming of ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ there  in 1988). Which is very like the crabs forcing humans to work with gasses that poison them in order to feed themselves. The working world, something unquestioned as a fact of life by their parents, had come up short. And was it really worth going to an inevitable war to defend as seemed inevitable with communist Russia, when both ways of life seemed as bad as each other?    

The holiday camp setting is a clue. It was your sanitised affordable ‘reward’ for 50 weeks work that saw you swap one set of rules at work for a whole load of other ones. They’re a joke now these places, anachronistic beyond measure and the only ones that still survive are more living museums to a way of life that doesn’t exist anymore (even as early as 1987 and the sort of sequel ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ a holiday camp is a strange anachronisms where aliens are naturals to turn up, rather than an everyday part of life), but to the children of 1967 they were where their parents (back in the days when foreign travel was about as likely and affordable as going to the moon) took them for the sort of ‘regimented fun’ they despised. To the war generation they were a cheap escape: everyone else made rules to follow so they didn’t have to, where everyone had harmless fun and forgot about their respectability for a fortnight and where there was a community spirit that reminded them of the war, everyone making do and joining in, with muzak you could dance to in big stately dresses and a moral code that was there to keep you safe that just wasn’t there in day to day life. For the baby boomers it was everything they loathed and detested: ‘regimented fun’ was an oxymoron: real fun came from exploration, from discovery. Why should you have to follow an arbitrary rule about who could meet who after dark, or what time you got up, or what music you danced to? That didn’t sound like fun. Fun was sticking it to the man, of being your true free self, of not following rules at all. The setting also exaggerates the divide in nature between the two ‘sides’: the war generation are all make do and mend, putting on a brave face, of acting happy in an attempt to be happy. But the baby boomers are far too in touch with their feelings for that: why should you put on a smile for the benefit of someone else if you were unhappy? Better to be your true self! Even though writer Ian Stuart Black is not exactly fresh-faced at 42 when this story went out he’s clearly on the latter’s side: this holiday camp is as creepy as it gets, with people so darned happy all the time that they’ve lost touch with their true self and with jingles interrupting the action every few minutes to tell everyone how happy they are, honest. It all sounds, well, alien: somewhere humans have lost touch with what it means to be human.

Maybe it’s because for years all we had is the soundtrack but it’s notable how important music is to this story, with new-ish composer Dudley Simpson stretched to his limits summing up both halves. On the one hand he’s asked to come up with those jingles and the music that plays in the background and encourages the colony to work their little socks off. It’s grating as only muzak can be, false and jolly and relentlessly happy and devoid of feeling, as if Scott Joplin had just taken anti-depressants. It sounds impressively false and creepy, clearly the work of a force that doesn’t have the populations’ welfare at heart. If you were to ask me what the most sinister sound in all of Dr Who is, well, the insistent cheery ding-dong of the camp bell calling people to be brainwashed is right up there along with the ‘Yeti’ hum, the Dalek disintegrator sound effect and the cybermat theme tune for unsettling vibes. It’s not just there either: episode four has Jamie escape from the mines (where he’s making gas for the crabs) and trying to disguise himself in a bank of youthful cheerleaders  who are rehearsing for their big dance. In a woeful comedy scene they assume from his kilt showing off his knees that he’s one of them and try to get him to dance, to a very false and stilted big band dance. Jamie has none of it and whistles a Scottish air and does a highland fling out the door, a moment of pure individualism the others don’t know what to do with. Uniquely, too, when the crabs have been sent packing (do Macra have any baggage? Including emotional? Or are they unthinking parasites? The script can’t agree two scenes in a row) the story ends with a big celebration, not with smashing up with of the holiday camp or a big war like usual but with a dance, to proper music this time, as close to rock and roll as a middle-aged composer who works for the BBC and has to wear a suit every day can come up with. Even then, however, this score doesn’t do the usual thing you expect: if this was almost any other Dr Who story you’d expect the Macra to be represented by an old-fashioned score, something polite and traditional, but instead Dudley gives the Macra a creepy leitmotif every time they turn up (more or less the first time Dr Who had ever done this – it happens every single week in the modern series), played on a Hammond Organ which was the sound of 1965 (mostly thanks to The Beatles using it on so much of ‘Beatles For Sale’, out for the Christmas market 1964). It’s deliciously alien and unsettling, especially on the murky old bootlegs of this story’s soundtrack that used to be the only affordable way any of us knew this story (the Target novel sold badly and still costs more than the animated DVD does secondhand) where it frequently comes out of nowhere in a story that has relatively little dialogue (nobody says a word for quite a long time at the start of episode one, very unlike any Who story before it, especially when original script editor David Whittaker was de facto in charge and dialogue was everything).

 Mind you, new as this is for Dr Who and as much as this is the sort of story that could only be made in the 1960s there are two ginormous precedents that Stuart-Black leans on heavily here. One is our old friend Quatermass, the 1950s scifi series which more Dr Who stories seemed to copy than didn’t in its first two decades, specifically ‘Quatermass II’ – the one set in Carlisle, where a bunch of aliens take over the local population and nobody notices (figures), live off poisonous gasses (again, figures), plays alien music that hypnotised everyone into working long hours (very like the local radio I seem to remember) and everyone is in complete denial of the truth under their noses (ditto). Like many Quatermass stories it’s solved by the scientist who comes to his own conclusions and proves them scientifically rather than going along with everyone else, a clear antecedent for the 2^nd Doctor’s natural troublemaker (and even more so the semi-establishment 3^rd to come). The other is George Orwell’s ‘1984’, a seminal book that invented idea of ‘doublespeak’ and people lying to you in real time, first published in 1948 (the reason 1984 was chosen, and a fact lost in every year since publication, was because it was the numbers ‘48’ changed round the other way) and adapted many times across the 1950s, including one in 1954 that’s clearly the inspiration for this one. Most notably the way so much of the action took place against a backdrop of TV screens  (a new concept back then), with the face of the BBC’s propman Roy Oxley stared out as the face of Big Brother’s surveillance team. ‘The Macra Terror’ recreates this with shots of the base controller, youthful and smiling in the propaganda, then (in the story’s greatest scene) old and frail and manipulated by a giant claw like a puppet when the Doctor demands we see him ‘live’ in real time (the 1970 Who story ‘Inferno’ rips ‘1984’ off even more for its parallel world). 

 
Still, even if it’s  not wholly original, ‘The Macra Terror’ is still nicely different with lots of great individual scenes. It’s impressively atmospheric and creepy, an eerie mood piece that really stacks things against the Doctor and most of the ‘other’ best scenes are of him getting increasingly desperate as a lone voice trying to (literally) wake thousands of people up to the truth who don’t believe him. There’s a relatively small cast, with so many people just voices down the end of a Tannoy for much of the story, which means a good lot of screentime for the regulars. This is the first story, after four stories of finding his feet, where Patrick Troughton absolutely knows what he’s doing with the Doctor and he’s absolutely brilliant from first to last, simultaneously the shiftiest person in the story and the person you instantly trust to tell you the truth. His comedy yet serious moment with the tidying machine is the moment, had I been old enough to watch these stories in order back in 1967, when I’d have finally accepted him after Hartnell. Jamie’s naivety is touching: he thinks he heard some sort of voices talking to him in his sleep but he ignored them and has learnt long ago not to trust anyone – except perhaps the Doctor (this blind faith goes without comment at the time but comes back to bite him in two stories’ time in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ when he learns that even the Doctor can’t be trusted). Polly is torn: she trusts authority and the voices in her head and what she thinks she sees with her own eyes but eventually she trust her friends more, which is very Polly. It’s Ben and Michael Craze who does best out of this story though, as he finds whole new dimensions to play the companion enjoying his last real hurrah. Ben’s always been a force for good till now, his strengths of bravery and relentlessness and cheerful optimism such a boon during the Doctor’s travels, but now his greatest strengths have been turned against him. Of course it’s Ben whose most badly influenced by the Macra: he’s used to taking orders, has been blindly following the Doctor without question as a substitute authority figure without always understanding what’s been going on, who helps people out because it seems the right moral thing to do. Of course he falls when a voice whispers in his ear that they’re right and his friends are wrong: he’s not a natural at independent thinking and has always taken things on trust. Only when Polly is in danger – and even then it takes a while – does he finally spring into action and save her (before denying it ever happened). I’ve always considered Michael Craze one of the most under-acted actors to appear in the series: so few of his episodes exist and the ones that do either show him when he hasn’t quite going yet (‘The War Machines’) when he’s a spare part with Jamie given most of his best lines (‘The Moonbase’) or when the production team have got fed up of him and all but written him out (‘The Faceless Ones’) but, on audio at least, he’s often fabulous and the best thing going. Especially here where he plays Ben as being impossibly stern and argumentative, using all his character’s passion against the Doctor rather than for. Ben is a tricky person to portray: he’s as straightforward as any Dr Who companion ever came, with no real interest in the worlds and times he experiences, someone who just wants to get back to the navy in one piece. As Michael died so young, when conventions and DVD documentaries were in their infancy, fans struggle to judge how much of Ben is acting what’s on the page and how much is just the actor being himself. In truth Ben doesn’t get much to do during his handful of stories, all the best lines going to Polly or Jamie. However Michael Craze positively shines in this story playing a possessed Ben, ones whose recognisably like the Ben we know and love but with his morals confused, so that his strong senses of duty is now to the crabs, his bravery makes him stand up to his friends rather than the monsters and his cheerful persona is now rigid and unbreakable. His possession is right up there with the Tegan-driven Mara as the most convincing of the many, many examples in the series (I mean let’s face it, Sarah Jane alone is in double figures). It’s a brave move by the production team that this sort of thing can happen to any of us without realising it, back at a point when companions didn’t often get possessed or brainwashed (Barbara gets possessed by the Zarbi in ‘The Web Planet’ but that just means she walks around with her arms outstretched: she’s not emotionally changed the way Ben is; Dodo and to an extent Polly are in ‘The War Machines’ too but most of what happens to them is offscreen and, besides, we never knew Dodo well enough to know how any of her adventures affected her).  

 
Where this story falls down slightly is that there’s nothing else to go on, no real subplot to keep us going, so the story sags as soon as Jamie’s down in the mines running away from a monster even I could outlumber and the Doctor’s already worked out what’s going on – you know he’s going to solve things in the end, the way he always does, and episode three in particular is just a delay until he gets to meet the baddy and turns into, erm, a story about trying to avoid getting crabs in a holiday camp (I’m amazed Captain Jack doesn’t have a cameo in it to be honest). The camp, too, might be more period-detail accurate but isn’t as well drawn as the one in ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ - there’s no sense of multiple families (and bright-green aliens) enjoying themselves and having their own stories away from the plot, with just a couple of people the Doctor gets talking to that we never really get to know (although this story is much scarier and taken far more seriously than ‘Bannermen’ and ‘wins’ on that score). The Doctor works out what’s going on practically from the first, when whistleblower Medok (a sort of less pretentious Julian Assange) collapses outside the Tardis (and threatens Jamie) and takes his side almost instantly so there’s not really much jeopardy there either, less a labyrinth of intrigue to unravel and more a single piece of string – later Who stories on a s similar theme are rather better at keeping the intrigue going, of having the audience themselves make their minds up what’s really going and what the ‘right’ side really is (‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’ springs to mind although there are many, many more). It’s also not the subtlest story DW ever made – which seems an odd thing to say about a story set in a holiday camp involving giant crabs from space, but it does seem for the first episode and part of the second as if this is going to be a much brainier, darker, complex story about misdirection and free will until the (actually rather good) cliffhangers claw their way in.

We also learn frustratingly little about the Macra and exactly why they’re taking over humans, which is always the downside in Dr Who when you get monsters who can’t talk. What with being mute and only existing on a soundtrack and ‘hidden’ from the press by the producer for a while there we didn’t even know what they looked like, past their claws, until a cliffhanger snippet and a series of photos finally came to light in the 1990s. To be honest I still struggle to picture them in the story the way I can other monsters because they’re so hard to get an angle on, half the people who saw them in real time petrified by them and half finding them completely daft (even the cast are split: Anneke Wills admits to getting the shudders but Frazer Hines thought them hilarious). As ever with monsters that only appear in missing episodes they’re hard to judge (the Rills seemed stupid until we finally got to see them in ‘Galaxy Four’ in 2012 when they kinda worked) but, until a returned episode turns up to prove me wrong, they do seem to be in the lumbering, un-scary half of monsters. They were big and unwieldy and clumsy, even less manoeuvrable than the War machines or Mechonoids before them,  either 9 or 10 feet tall depending which gudeibook you use (including antennae), one of the last big monsters made by 1960 Who’s favourite company Shawcroft models at an exorbitant cost of £500, a full fifth of the budget for a single episode back in those days. Innes Lloyd grumbled that for that price he could have nought a ‘cheap car’ – he’s not kidding, given that £500 was the going rate for a mini cooper. Which funnily enough is where the blinking red eyes come from (they’re indicator lights): I wish I could see them in the dark, the way so much of the story was shot, because I’m willing to bet those at least would have been a lot more effective than they ever looked on screen. That said,  though, they were incredibly unwieldy: poor Robert Jewell was inside not finding life any easier than being inside a Dalek, working the eyes and claws himself in the dry ice, while for the shots on film the Macra was on the back of a giant truck that raised it up and down. They also left a (deliberate) trail of slime, a combination of wallpaper paste, wood chippings and that old Troughton-era standby, foam (two things that sound, at least on paper, like a recipe for disaster, although the brief shot of one looming over Ben and Polly suggests that director John Davies at least knew how to get the most out of them). From the little we have the Macra seem laughable, but moving? Shrouded in darkness? With those sound effects? There is, after all, a story that the director of this story was torn off a strip for making it ‘too scary’ and never used on the series again and given what does survive in some of the other stories (immediate predecessor ‘The Moonbase’ for one) it must have been pretty high up the scare factor for that to happen.

Of all the missing stories, this is one of the ones I want to see most, not least because it’s one of the most ‘missing’ but also because so much of the soundtrack is mostly bloops and whistles, so it’s hard to tell if what’s happening is as genuinely scary as it sounds, or as silly as the appearance of a giant crab ought to be. The script is very visual, full of chase sequences and dances that don’t translate well to audio (perhaps especially the official soundtrack versions with first Colin Baker then Anneke Wills trying to sum up the plot with lengthy exposition that doesn’t seem to make any sense), full of a lurking presence rather than a visual presence that translates well to photographs. It appears a very simple story – arguably a little too simple, too similar to Stuart Black’s other Who stories ‘The Savages’ and ‘The War Machines’ I the sense that there’s a great big brainwashing beastie trying to possess us all, but with far less going on than either. It is however a lot more fun to listen to/watch than either, with more direct barbs and attacks on modern society and with the 2^nd Doctor far more at home in this sort of a shifting, artificial environment than the 1^st.  Knowing how the rest of season four turned out, it honestly could have gone either way or even both simultaneously (and yes there is an animation and it’s arguably the best animation so far in terms of getting the flavour and character likenesses, but it’s not so reliable as it’s based on the camera script not the story as shown and the animations are all pretty awful I think –the 2nd Dr always looks like Bernard Cribbins, Polly always looks like a boy – even in stories where she doesn’t have a super short cut like she does in this one  - and Jamie always looks like a girl; the telesnap reconstructions are a much better way of revisiting the missing stories for me and desperately deserve an official release all together. Pretty please). It seems apt somehow that, unless an episode is ever returned, we may never know – this is a story all about forgetting after all. Maybe the Macra has just brainwashed us into forgetting it? What we do have though often sounds chilling (even if it sometimes looks cheap and silly) and there are times when you really begin to wonder if everyone is going to come out of this story alive and sane. A little like holiday camps all round really. A most under-rated adventure.

To finish, another of my fun production stories. The catering at rehearsals (traditionally a local church) were known for this stingy food and bad service. Things got so bad that the original Dr Who team used to bring in their own packed lunches in giant hampers (provided by William Hartnell from Fortnum and Masons) with one or other asked to provide the starters, puddings or booze. Things grumbled on until one or other of the episodes of this story where the canteen staff barely turned up at all and a mutinous crew and cast finally said enough was enough and kicked up a fuss, while the dinner ladies denied there was a problem in plain sight. The mutiny saw things put right, at speed, showing that it’s right to kick up a fuss. Sometimes. Just like the events in this episode, sort of. There’s no such thing as crab paste?!  

POSITIVES + I love the fact that everyone in this story is so terribly, terribly nice. Usually in Dr Who politeness means you’re on the side of the angels, but here everyone is wearing those false American fast food chain ‘have a nice day’ smiles and the Doctor doesn’t quite know how to defeat it at first. For the earlier episodes he ends up looking like the loony madmen being rude and upsetting the status quo and you can understand why the locals want him to keep quiet and shut up. But then the Doctor plays everyone at their own game, with a brilliant scene where the baddies disagree over what to do with him – and he sternly ticks them off, telling them ‘there’s no room for bad tempers and disagreements in this happy colony’ and makes them say sorry to each other. Such a very Dr Who moment – you don’t get that in James Bond spy films do you?! Talking of the Doctor’s ‘directness’ in this story, by a happy coincidence this was the first story to go out with the leading actor’s face in the opening titles, something Verity lambert rejected in 1963 for being ‘too scary’ with the distortion caused by the howlaround effects, but now possible with a cutout photo inserted into the mix in post-production rather than as part of the original image itself. It’s a distinctive look that all the opening titles for the rest of the decade and most of the next two will go on to copy.

NEGATIVES – From what we can see the sets look a little…threadbare. Designer Kenneth Sharp tries his best picking up on the holiday camp vibe with chalets with a distinctive inverted v shape that look both exactly like the sort of holiday camps your mum took you to in Skegness in 1967 and also believably alien (we never do find out this planet’s name and where we are, though the hint is that it’s a colony of Humans in the future rather than Earth per se). Only all the money’s gone on the crabs so it’s an oddly bare holiday camp, with no real props and chalets so empty even the most grin-and-bear-it of 1950s parents would be asking for their money back. We don’t have much info about what the mine set looked like, but it sounds from the people who saw it as if there had been better ones in Who before or since too.

BEST QUOTE: ‘It’s just possible you’ve been given a series of order while you’ve been asleep. You know, do this, do that, do the other thing. My advice to you is don’t so anything of the sort! Don’t just be obedient Always make up your own mind’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Macra made a most unexpected return a massive forty years later in ‘Gridlock’, which holds the record for the longest gap between appearances of any Who monster.

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