The Rescue: Ranking - 80

          The Rescue

(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, 2-9/1/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Dennis Spooner (uncredited), writer: David Whittaker, director: Christopher Barry)

Rank: 80

   'There once was a monster named Koquillion
He had spines all down his chinnigan

Until the Tardis came he thought he was winningham

But the Dr blew his plans in again

So he left the planet Dido to travel to Michigan
Got on a chat show with Richard and Judy Finnigan
That was the last anyone anyone saw of him again
Poor old Koquillion
Begin again!...

 

 

There’s been a lot of fuss down the years, understandably, about what a sea-change the first Dr Who regeneration in ‘The Tenth Planet’ was. After all, no other series had ever thought to try anything like it and, traditionally in the 1960s, if a series was lucky enough to run for enough years for a cast member to leave they were simply replaced by a vague lookalike with no reference to the change at all (think Darrin in near-contemporary‘ Bewitched’; I like to think the casting of Richard Hurndall in ‘The Five Doctors’ was a jokey nod of the head to this as well). However the first ever change of companion in the series was, in many ways, every bit as big and scary for the production team. The original Tardis crew had been created after a lot of thought, to cover all bases for all members of the audience, with Susan simultaneously the audience identification figure for the elder children watching at home and an exotic alien who was open and friendly in ways that the Doctor wasn’t (yet). In the original pre-series paperwork Susan’s arguably a better thought out character than her grandfather: she’s all things to all demographics - young enough to be taken by the younger children at home as ‘their’ character, hip enough to have a 1963 Vidal Sassoon haircut for the teenagers, cute enough for elders to feel as protectively grandfatherly as the Doctor and intriguingly other-worldly enough to fascinate the adults. No one in the production office seems to have given any proper thought to what might happen if one of the cast decided to leave – after all, it was assumed by almost everyone working on it that Dr Who would be lucky to make it’s assumed thirteen weeks.

So it was a bit of a shock when, despite being in one of the biggest TV hits of the decade, Carole Ann Ford handed in her notice at the end of her first year. Though not necessarily a surprise: there she was, a twenty-three-year-old adult mum with a string of strong acting credits to her name, playing a 15-year-old who often acted younger (but is arguably older given what we now know about timelords and the ageing process; she could be anything up to a few hundred years old if this is her first regeneration). Carole also signed up on the back of Susan’s more interesting alien features as listed in the series notes sent to writers before filming that were never properly used on screen and frustrated that they had never been used properly (bar a spot of telepathy in ‘The Sensorites’). Susan had gradually descended from being the mysterious focal point of the opening episode to being a bit of a sulky brat (it’s no coincidence that Carole made up her mind to leave round about the time of ‘Reign Of Terror’, her character’s lowest ebb in many ways). Luckily the production team had the luxury of a rare break and two stories already recorded to come up with her replacement: a space-age girl named Valerie, then Lukki, then Millie, then Tanni, then finally Vicki.

It took longer than you might think to come up with such a straightforward replacement. The first idea was to hire Jenni from ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’: she was roughly the same age as Vicki ended up being and it was thought that The Doctor could ‘adopt’ her as a crossover with his grand-daughter. Pretty early on they realised they’d made a mistake though: ‘Dalek Invasion’ is a tough story, as brutal as any Dr Who adventure to date. The characters have all seen death, destruction and despair at the hands of the Daleks and poor Jenni is clearly traumatised, cynical untrusting and likely to attack any monster they met. Whisking her off into time and space wouldn’t do her or the audience any favours: she would have hated it.  So they changed their mind and wrote in Vicki, someone who’s basically a more fun-loving and enthusiastic version of Susan, someone who is also clearly a teenage girl who very much belongs in the 1960s (in this era of the Beatles explosion every actress that made the shortlist for the role came from Liverpool) but is also at times very alien (though rather than give the Doctor another relative they made her come from our far future in the 25^th century). It must have been a nightmare trying to work out what to make the new girl like (which might be why they took so many goes to get it right, far more than with any other companion for years): luckily they got it more right with Vicki than most, giving her all of Susan’s best bits but adding in a fun-loving happy-go-lucky streak that made her a far more agreeable companion and an imagination and romanticism that Ian and Barbara were too practical to enjoy. Back in ‘An Unearthly Child’ all the Tardis crew are unwilling passengers to some degree (even if The Doctor is ‘in charge’ the sense is that he’s on the run from something) but now Vicki is exploring the universe as a willing passenger ‘invited’ to come along who clearly loves her time in the Tardis.

Now all they had to do was write her a story. David Whittaker had just handed his notice in along with Carole Ann Ford, keen to go back to freelance work, but the show’s original script editor was still mighty fond of his old series and agreed that his ‘parting gift’ would be the new character’s debut story. Picking up where the production team started with Jenni (travelling in the Tardis because everyone else has died and she has nowhere else to go) he composed a quick ‘Dr Whodunnit’ (the show’s first), one where Vicki would be similarly orphaned and have no ties left to anyone by the end of the story. The production team sensibly decide to make her an orphan (that’s ‘sensibly’ because nowadays we can’t go a story without a companion on the phone to someone and parents seem to end up part of the plot a lot these days). She has nothing to lose when the Tardis comes a calling and has been desperate for adventure during her lonely years there (even if she probably didn’t bargain for quite this much adventure!) Notably though Vicki’s far less traumatised despite having gone through just as much: her mum died when she was a child back on their home (un-named) planet and her dad, needing to start again, was in the process of emigrating with her to the planet Astra when their spaceship instead crash-landed on the planet Dido. The locals apparently invited everyone to a meeting, where the humans were slaughtered, leaving behind one lone survivor/eyewitness Bennett (who became crippled) and Vicki (left back on the ship with a fever). However this apparently all happened a long time ago: Vicki has adjusted to her new life well, made a home out of the remnants of the spaceship, grown a sort-of garden adopted a local wild sand-beast. There have been no other visitors her whole life and no one is answering the radio, so this seems the way things are going to be until she dies – and she is, after all, merely a teenager (even if her age seems to vary from writer to writer between fifteen and seventeen). You wouldn’t blame Vicki for growing up xenophobic against the local alien race (who seem to have disappeared) or mad from the stress and panic and isolation of it all, but instead she stays sweet; no wonder, being so lonely, she adopts a sand beast as a pet for company and will develop a habit of adopting anything that moves and/or doesn’t try to kill her during her time on the series (sometimes even when it does). Though her life is hard and Bennett is not the best company Vicki is an optimistic, resilient and likeable soul (in stark contrast to Susan) who has already made the most out of her lot in life. She’s not traumatised the way Jenni would have been but someone who’s life has been delayed, who’s ready to go out amongst the stars and explore. For Susan travelling through the stars often seemed like an unfortunate punishment on someone who’d far rather have stayed at home; for Vicki it’s a reward, for all those years of waiting and hoping and dreaming of better things, in true Dr Who fashion.  

‘The Rescue’ is the only Dr Who story to date that’s only really about the new companion, rather than simply adding someone to the Tardis who proved their worth during the plot, making ‘The Rescue’ one of Dr Who’s few two-part stories as a sort of breather after the intensity of ‘Invasion Earth’. It’s also notably the first ever Dr Who story with a pre-credits sequence (something that happens in most episodes nowadays), just to shift the emphasis from the regulars to the new girl. With such a small cast (two characters plus the three characters and a brief unspeaking appearance at the end of the story) Whittaker gives more room to Vicki than any new companion will ever get again. He cleverly writes so that she’s a slightly different person whoever she’s with too: low-key scared when alone with the growly grumpy Bennett, a daydreamer when she’s by herself, maternal when she’s with her ‘pet’ Sandy, suspicious when she fist meets Ian and Barbara (as anyone would be: she’s strained her eyes searching for ships and doesn’t know the Tardis can materialise the way it does), then slowly by turns friendly, funny and curious (plus briefly angry when Barbara shoots her pet – a little too briefly to be honest given sandy was her only real companion in all that time). Notably she’s a lot more rounded from the first; she has a different relationship with each member of the Tardis crew as she meets them: Barbara’s motherly tones brings out her tales of sadness and isolation and Ian’s enthusiasm perks her up no end. It’s with The Doctor where she changes most though: while Ian and Barbara are ‘adults’, born to be sensible (there’s a very ‘Barbara’ scene when she interrupts doing the washing up to shoot at the sand beast, in a most unfortunate mixup) Vicki can be her playful self with the Doctor and she becomes close to him almost immediately, seeing him as a mischievous partner-in-crime. She’s used to stern-ness after living with Bennett but sees right past it to The Doctor’s playful side, something that leaves Ian and Barbara a little confused. The adopting ugly aliens and giving them cute pet names is all Vicki’s though, a fun character trait they really need to bring back and reminds us that she’s till the teenage girl she’s meant to be. Maureen O’Brien was herself all of 21 when she took this role, the youngest regular on the show till Jackie Lane’s Dodo after her old tutor and Who fan Henry Moore, knowing she was looking for work in London where her boyfriend and future husband Michael Moulds was based, dropped her a message telling her she’d be great (due to a small quirk of fate she also knew future Doctor Paul McGann, not yet an actor, who was close friends with her younger brother Bernard. Somebody get them together in a Big Finish audio please!) This was her first TV work after a career on the stage (she’s a co-founding of my local The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in fact) but you wouldn’t know it: this script asks a lot of her, with its lengthy scenes and big range of emotions but she nails them all, moving between them with ease. You cry with her when Barbara attacks and kills her pet (mistakenly), you cheer her on when she takes up action alongside Ian and you giggle with her when the Doctor clearly takes a shine to her and recognises the same rebellious carefree spirit as his own. Despite her relative  inexperience Maureen is exceptional for such a TV newbie and the camera loves her from the first. By the end of two episodes it feels as if she’s always been there.

Yes carefree. We’re a long way from ‘An Unearthly Child’ now. The re-setting of The Doctor’s character, from unknowable taciturn alien to playful moral crusader, already in motion since Whittaker’s last story ‘The Edge Of Destruction’, really starts shifting from this story. It’s a great story for William Hartnell too, with Whittaker ‘getting’ him better than any other writer: he’s by turns sad (you so feel for him when he starts talking to Susan and realises she’s not there – even though he was the one that pushed her into leaving!), sly, cunning, funny, sweet and scary, panicking the baddy into falling off a cliff rather than face his ice-cold stare. The Doctor also shifts into the gap that Susan has left, the more friendly open-hearted alien who’s a bit weird rather than a bit scary. Hartnell really shines, especially during the showdown in the ‘hall of judgement’ in the second episode. The extra space from the small cast is great for William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, too, who go through their own stages of grief in missing Susan, Barbara knowing just the right things to say to the Doctor and Ian buoying him up. Once they meet Vicki, too, they act quite differently: we never really saw much of what they were like as teachers in their first story but this story alone suggests they’d have been great ones: they know just when to take charge and when to let the new girl be. They’re both their usual exceptional selves. One moment isn’t just good acting though: Barbara’s squeak of fright when the gun goes off is entirely natural, caused by the pop gun being overloaded with explosives (she picked up burns on her face, poor thing).
Of course a Whodunnit with such a small cast there can only really be one baddy and as many fans will tell you there’s no real plot to this story – it’s the first of an occasional run of Dr Whodunnits in the series working out who the mysterious monster Koquillion might be and on that score (it’s hardly worth a spoiler this revelation) it fails miserably given that we only meet two characters the whole story and one of them becomes a regular so it’s not going to be her. You are drawn for half an episode into thinking that the fierce and spiky Koquillion is this weeks’ token monster but no, this is another story where yet again it’s the Humans to blame and it takes the Doctor about five minutes to work everything out. It’s not really a four pipe problem this one: Koquillion comes and goes through Bennett’s side of the spaceship, where Vicki isn’t ‘allowed’. He talks in a voice very like Bennett’s but higher with a cheap trick set up in his room involving a very 1960s tape recorder (even so, while this twist is obvious to modern viewers who can do it with their phones in a heartbeat this really did seem new back then, when not many people owned them – though thankfully a few did or we wouldn’t have the audio soundtracks of all the missing episodes). Vicki doesn’t know where he comes from or what he wants and there’s no backstory, while the Koquillion mask looks like it was cobbled together in minutes from leftovers. Even so, though, it’s a fun ‘joke’: you’ve been primed, in every single ‘futuristic’ story so far to think that aliens are the root cause of most evil and hot on the back of ‘The Sensorites’ (the previous futuristic story that didn’t feature Daleks) and here David Whittaker in his ‘goodbye’ story parodies his own show, having the baddy literally dress up as a Dr Who monster. Why Bennett does this is a bit more questionable: he is, so we find out, an escaped convict who crashed the ship deliberately to avoid the death penalty back on Earth and who slaughtered the native Didonians so that they didn’t shop him.

However that raises all sorts of questions. Like who transports prisoners with ordinary passengers, especially in the future when they’re like busses? What sort of a madman risks crash-landing on a planet and killing himself anyway? How was he ever allowed anywhere near the controls without anyone stopping him? And why, having done all that, did the fellow passengers not lynch/re-arrest him, rather than going out for an outing to the local hall? Why did Vicki’s father leave his only remaining family member alone, sick, rather than stay with her? Also, why does Bennett keep Vicki alive at all? Though not the smartest cookie Dr Who’s ever had Vicki’s sheltered and inexperienced rather than thick – she’s more than clever enough to see through the ruse when its pointed out to her, as if she’s secretly realised it but didn’t want to admit to it to herself. It just seems an implausible plan. While I’ll buy she had a fever as she remembers it too, why did Bennett not slaughter her too on returning? She’s clearly a curious child likely to ask lots of questions (the hint is that she’s basically a servant, but better to keep someone older with more experience surely? Vicki does her best but she’s no Barbara in the household stakes). For someone who’s already killed it’s surely a quicker solution than dressing up every five minutes. Plus is a life exiled on a planet and unable to get home really better than the inside of a prison cell? Especially if Vicki’s vegetable garden is all they have to eat. Bennett really hasn’t thought this through. Somehow, though, you miss a lot of this first time around given Ray Barrett’s strong performance, which has just enough gentleness behind the stern-ness to make you wonder (he was another Gerry Anderson employee, probably nominated by new script editor Dennis Spooner and can in fact be heard using his ‘Koquillion’ voice as Stingray baddy Titan in the episodes ‘The Ghost Of The Sea’ ‘Rescue From The Skies’, both repeated on ITV on Saturday evenings overlapping with the two episodes of this story). To keep up the pretence we also get Dr Who’s first ever pseudonym in the credits of the Radio Times (something that will come in handy in the future every time Davros turns up), ‘Sydney Wilson’ (for Sydney Newman, head of the BBC drama department and Donald Wilson, head of BBC serials, generally considered the two ‘daddies’ of Dr Who. Though personally I’d have gone with David Verity, after the departing script editor and producer, the real parents of the show!)

Mind you, these Didonians don’t seem like the friendly and welcoming ones the Doctor talks about. Why would they set up a trap in a cave system unless they were afraid of predators? Especially one that they themselves would know wasn’t lethal at all (the poor victim of the cave fall might find his face licked by the local sand-beasts or find their shoelaces have been nibbled, but that’s about all). There’s a confusing ending too, when Bennett is shaken not just by The Doctor seeing through his plan but the return of two Didonians. Are they real, people who somehow survived Bennett’s massacre? At first you think they’re phantoms, caused by his panic, but then they start wrecking the ship’s radio so they must be ‘real’ beings (another weird thing to do as it happens: I can understand why they might not want any other visitors to their planet given what the last lot did, a smashed radio is only going to make the pilots more curious – plus they could have done that years ago). Where have they been hiding all this time? The Doctor, too, doesn’t interact with them at all, or worry for their welfare the way you’d expect him to: he has, after all, talked about how they were so kind to him in an ‘unseen adventure’ (another Whittaker trope: there were lots of them in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ as well).  The story would work better without them there, as a rather odd denouement to the story. It’s a surprise that Whittaker, especially, ended up with so many loose ends in this story – usually he’s a much smarter writer than that, coming up with some of Dr Who’s most complex and thorough plots (from ‘The Crusades’ to ‘Power Of The Daleks’ to ‘Evil Of The Daleks’). It’s a real shame, too, that Vicki –having found out she’s been betrayed – never gets a last scene with Bennett along the lines of ‘you killed my father!’

However what ‘The Rescue’ shares with Whittaker’s other works is some truly brilliant dialogue and a story that really makes the small budget and the claustrophobia of a ‘stage play’ like set up to its advantage. This is his first chance to write for the characters he helped create since he adjusted their personalities in the third story ‘Edge Of Destruction’ and he breathes new life into them here, so that they all become less cliched and noticeably more like each other: Barbara gets her intelligence and empathy back and gets to do Ian’s job shooting the sandbeast (albeit wrongly), Ian isn’t just brave but clever too doing the thinking you’d normally think the Doctor would get to do, while part two might well be the best characterisation of the 1st Dr of all: his cross-patchiness hides a warm heart, a twinkle in the eye and an eagerness to see the universe, which in turn hides a cold and very alien type of anger when he works out what’s really going on. His early scenes missing Susan are really sweet, but his delight when a ready-made replacement all but falls into his lap is even better. Just check out the opening jokey scene that shows how much these three former enemies are now best friends: Barbara comments that she’s ‘stopped trembling’ and The Doctor says he’s glad she’s better, though she obviously means the ship (is he teasing? Or pre-occupied? She can’t tell). Judging by the viewpoints of those who were there at the time this seems like one of the happiest Tardis teams behind the scenes too and it shows – this is a real family unit who enjoyed working together, while the Doctor-Vicki relationship resembled Hartnell and O’Brien’s in real life (he liked the fact she backed him up when he complained about attention to detail; she liked the way he treated her like an equal despite her imexperience. Everyone loved their weekly picnic tradition between camera rehearsals and filming, each actor bringing in a different dish from home. One other sign of what a fun story this was to work on: Ray Barrett was so good at playing ‘dead’ that, rather than shout cut, the cast and crew backed away and turned the studio lights out, hiding so he’d think he’d fallen asleep and they’d all gone home. Something that had happened for real during the making of ‘The Reign Of Terror’!) You can also tell it’s a Whittaker story from the emphasise given over to the Tardis: for every other writer a quirky means of transport but to David the single most important character in the series. This is the first time we see it ‘materialise’ using the full prop rather than a model, indeed the first appearance of that word ‘materialise’, the first use of that famous sound effect heard from outside the Tardis rather than within and most importantly what we come to think of as a companion looking in awe at the inside of the Tardis (Ian and Barbara were understandably more scared than awed).    

In another sense, too, ‘The Rescue’  is Whittaker’s parting shot with the same theme he’s been either writing, commissioning or script-editing for most of the show’s first year: colonialism. Lots of these early shows are about alien powers coming in and taking what isn’t theirs: ‘The Daleks’ destroying The Thals, the Voord taking over Marinus, The Sensorites after a misfortunate incident with arriving Humans, The Aztecs (who are doomed to be destroyed by the Spanish after the Tardis leaves). It’s a theme that Who will take a long time to get out of its system in fact (‘The Web Planet’ ‘The Space Museum’ ‘The Ark’ ‘The Gunfighters’ ‘The Savages’ ‘The Tenth Planet’ and Whittaker’s own ‘The Crusade’ are all about what its like to be on the receiving end of injustice, while Vicki leaves in ‘The Myth Makers’, a fight between Ancient Greece and Ancient Troy with similarities to this story).However this is the one story (until as late as ‘Demons Of the Punjab’ in 2018 anyway) that comes out and says the British are at fault, rather than it just being a side effect of humans stretching their muscle into space. Notice that the spaceship that crash-lands on Dido is British, not just from Earth: they’re a colony ship. Given that ruthless prisoner Bennett is on board it reminds you of Britain sending it’s prisoners over to Australia out the way, to the harm of the local aborigines. Especially the way they are slaughtered wholesale for no greater crime than being alive and a potential threat that needs to be covered up. The Doctor talks about meeting the Didonians before, of how peaceful and friendly they were – implying that they’d have had no defences against the mad British.  That’s really quite something for a show broadcast in Britain maybe twenty years after the semi-official ‘end’ of the empire, Whittaker perhaps realising that it’s his last chance to talk about a pet favourite topic in science fiction terms, where he’s less likely to get into trouble.

Many fans chunter that the two parts of this story make it seem out of place, but its the perfect length for this tale – anymore and the plot would have to detract from the characterisation going on here while stretching that too thin to hold our interest. The fifty minute size, the default length of stories in Dr Who these days, also makes it seem very modern somehow, very much like Russell T Davies’ ‘companion entrance season openers’ in fact, the ‘jolly romps’ easily solved like ‘Rose’ ‘Smith and Jones’ ‘Partners In Crime’ or more recently ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ and ‘The Robot Revolution’: you pick up the plot inside five minutes then get to enjoy the new character solving it and bouncing off some old ones. Along the way everything does its job perfectly: not a sentence is wasted, not a scene goes on too long and it’s all about people driving the plot not the plot driving the people (if anything it’s even more like a Star Trek story original or any of the modern spin-offs than your traditional Who stories alongside it; notably we don’t explore this ‘world’ at all– the whole point of Dr Who in its earliest days – just the spaceship and two people in it; when the Dr and Ian try they get trapped in a rockfall). Though it might not have the instant epic power of a ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ or the ambition of a ‘Web Planet’ nevertheless ‘The Rescue’ is a beautifully composed character piece from one of the greatest writers the series ever had.

After all it’s not about what made Vicki become trapped but how she is now free thanks to the magic of Dr Who; as the title demonstrates, this isn’t a story about the ‘problem’ but ‘the rescue’, of having Vicki escape and leave with The Doctor, as a Susan substitute. David Whittaker wrote this all-important story and clearly had something of a ‘Cinderella’ tale in mind, only with the Tardis as the magical pumpkin-coach that takes Vicki away from her nightmare (and the 1st Dr as an unlikely Fairy Godmother for her, rather than a grandfather!) The planet name of ‘Dido’ also suggests Nahum Tate’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ of 1678 where, if she’s ‘Dido’, she represents Britain in the pre-Victorian pre-Empire comeback betrayed by the witches and demons of the people who should be keeping her safe. That’s exactly what happens in this story, where her adopted father-figure Bennett turns out to be a brute, lying to her and keeping her trapped.  Nobody dresses up as a monster in that story, but it is a tale of trust and betrayal. Vicki too is very much a ‘British’ girl, for all that she feels like she dates from a more contemporary time, down to the bob-cut hair and big eyes and – in ‘The Chase’ – a love of the Beatles, for all that she comes from the 25th century.
‘The Rescue’ and indeed Vicki herself rescued Dr Who just at the moment when the series might have come toppling down without Susan there or worse with Jenni as the original plan, delivering a new breath of life and joy into the show in season two just when it was in danger of growing stale. It was entirely possible that Dr Who, so far on a lucky streak no one expected, would drop the ball with such a big move and there was much talk of the new companion – so much so that, with an extra Dalek boost from the previous week, ‘The rescue’ made it into the top ten programmes of the week with 12 and 13 million viewers for its two episodes, the highest average for a very long time (till ‘City Of Death’ in 1979, a story boosted by an ITV strike). Yes ‘The Rescue’ is small scale but it’s great that it’s there and done with so much love and care: it would have been awful if we’d just crashed into the next story and never mentioned Susan again, but this story gives fans time to mourn the old and get to know the new. What you think about this story really depends on what you think of the new companion and, while future stories never quite capitalised on the promise of this one and stopped giving Maureen so much to do, nevertheless I’m a big fan of Vicki, one of the series’ most undervalued companions. She’s more fun than any companion we’ll have again till Rose, is sweeter than anyone else until Harry, is brighter than anyone till Zoe, tougher than any female companion till Leela, sparks off The Doctor better than anyone else till Sarah Jane and will inspire more inadvertent youthful revolutions during her time on the Tardis than anyone else. My only regret is that Sandy the sandbeast didn’t get to join the Tardis too as that would have been fun, a sort of bitier less logical K9. In fact its a surprise Vicki never fully adopts another pet: you’d think the Tardis would be knee-deep in chumbleys, Mechonoids and giant ants by the time she leaves. But those are the problems with future stories that don’t make the most of what’s on offer here, in one of Dr Who’s greatest ever ‘character stories’. Much under-rated, especially if you like your Dr Who stories smaller scale rather than big budget.

POSITIVES + The Koquillion costume is impressive, strange and plausibly alien in the way that other contemporary Dr Who monsters like the Voord and Sensorites are, but also equally plausible as a man in a suit cobbled together from odds and ends. The spines that make him look like a cross between a hedgehog and a lizard are a neat touch and still unlike anything else DW has given us to date. It’s a credit to costume designer Daphne Dare, who apparently got the idea from seeing a fly close-up under a microscope. The Doctor is, apparently, terrified enough to start seeing Koquillion when The Master uses the ‘Keller’ machine on him in ‘The Mind Of Evil’ (although he could, of course, be terrified by how slow he was not to see through such a disguise from very first meeting!)

NEGATIVES - Apparently the UK has enough budget and scientific knowhow to run its own rocket programme to travel across the far reaches of the stars within the next 470 years. Ahahahahaha, I don’t think so! Of all the optimistic far-fetched visions of the future in Dr Who this one is right up there with mankind making it to the year 5 billion without blowing itself up, setting up a successful (till it isn’t) colony on Mars, joining an intergalactic federation on Peladon that’s a little like the EU without being the automatic baddies and a future where there’s actually a political candidate worth voting for in Harriet Jones.  That said Ray Cusick (Dalek designer)’s model is a thing of beauty and one of the best of the 1960s. It even has a working antenna that revolves! Just to add to the atmosphere the model is shot at an angle, suspended on rocks and the TV cameras in the studio were tilted at the exact same angle to emphasise that they’re one and the same – a small detail but one that really sells the illusion.

BEST QUOTE: ‘We can travel anywhere and everywhere in that ‘old box’ as you call it. Regardless of space and time and if you like adventure my dear, I can promise you an abundance of it’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: If you’re asking yourself ‘what was Vicki’s life like before she met the Doctor’ then ‘The Crash Of The UK-201’ (2018) will answer some of your questions. Part of the fifth series of Big Finish’s ‘Early Adventures’ range it finds Vicki waking up back in her space shuttle cabin, her times with the Doctor and her future life in Ancient Greece apparently all a dream. She’s shocked to find that she’s woken up a few days before Bennett’s sabotage (he’s a shady stranger in the distance for most of the story) and has the chance to stop him and save her parents – but by doing so it means she will never meet the Doctor or her true love Trolius from ‘The Myth Makers’. What should she do? This is a fine character story, with Vicki effectively turning Target novel writer and adapting her adventures with The Doctor into books (‘Vicki and The Zarbi’ is a best-seller!)  Steven arrives, in hologram form, in an attempt to get her back to her life in the Tardis but (spoilers) she persuades him to help her instead, getting him to pilot the spaceship away from Dido before Bennett can alter the course of both the ship and everyone’s lives forever, something which causes a time paradox monster to latch onto them (sort of like The Reapers from ‘Father’s Day’, but not really). Which is quite a sacrifice for him too, because he knows that it will affect his timeline as well, perhaps meaning he’ll be stuck in the Mechonoid City for the rest of his life. Vicki, meanwhile, is so happy being back amongst her family, even when she knows to avoid a time paradox, and the moment she effectively has to kill them all over again is a real tearjerker moment. You really feel for both of them in Jonathan Morris’ fine story and the friendship between them where they would do anything for each other, no questions asked, whatever effect it has on them, alongside their perpetual sibling-like teasing. Both Maureen O’Brien and Peter Purves are superb. One of the best Big Finish releases of the lot. 

Previous ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ next ‘The Romans’

 

Boom Town: Ranking - 81

             Boom Town

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 4/6/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Joe Ahearne) 

Rank: 81

In an emoji: 🥚

   'You say I never look my prisoners in the eye? Well look around you, this restaurant is full of my other selves dining with monsters. There's my first self eating vitalite with a Sensorite. My second incarnation is enjoying an ice cream with an ice warrior. The 3rd Dr's forgotten about the nestene consciousness and is hiding under the table from the killer plastic forks. My 4th regeneration is chasing a Fendahl with table salt while munching on jelly babies. My 5th self is  sharing a stick of celery with a Tractator. My 6th self is enjoying a baked potato with a sontaron. The 7th Dr is having some liquorice allsorts with the Kandy Man. The 10th Dr is eating some face of Boescits with the big face himself. Dr 11 is staring at some weeping angel cakes. The 12th Dr is having a KFC boneless banquet with The Boneless. And the 13th Dr is having garlic with the Daleks'. 

 

In Boom Town (Cardiff to you!) the Boom Town rat-Slitheens have all left the sinking ship except for one and Margaret Slitheen does not like Mondays (I’m guessing this story takes place on a Monday for the purposes of the joke anyway). In ‘old’ Who DW flirted occasionally with the idea that the Dr couldn’t swan in and out of people’s lives forever willy nilly without having it come back to haunt him in some way – ‘The Ark’ restarts the story partway through to show a before and after the 1st Dr got involved and the 4th Dr causes the plot of ‘Face Of Evil’ and ends up being declared ‘The Evil One’. But more even than these stories ‘Boom Town’ looks at what happens six months after an alien invasion has been thwarted and the Dr has left – only to return. One of the best aspects of ‘Aliens In London/WWIII’ was the way in which Russell T Davies was at pains to point out that his first alien creation the Slitheen who were trying to take over the Earth weren’t all bad – we were just seeing one rogue family on the make that had grown up crooked (and every planet has at least one family like that – most of humanity’s just happened to be in power in that story, that’s all) and even they weren’t all bad, just opportunistic. Alas as episodes tick by Russell seems to forget this very Dr Who trait that not all monsters from outer space are evil – we get a string of people who want to murder us in our beds, from the Gelth to the Reavers to the Jagarafess not to mention The Daleks - but in this story we get a whole backstory exploring why the monster of the week a couple of months ago turned out the way she did. Here we return to WWIII’s most interesting character, Margaret Slitheen, and her attempts to hide in a human bodysuit in plain sight in Cardiff even after her evil plan’s been rumbled as she runs around making friends, keeping up her job and building nuclear power stations. Yes she still has a scheme to kill us all but she’s slowly losing heart as she goes native and discovers that the humans she mingles with are actual people with actual lives and not just vermin to be destroyed. And suddenly she’s not so evil now her nasty relatives are nowhere to be seen and corrupt her. She starts the story sparing a journalist after learning that she’s pregnant and has by now fallen in love with all the daft quirks of her adopted home world to the point where she’s carved out a new life for herself actually doing some good for the humans around her (give or take the nuclear power). The Doctor’s not having any of it at first – this is the more bruised, less merciful 9th incarnation after all – and for him and an equally sceptical Rose it’s only been a few episodes since Margaret Slitheen was killing people without a second thought. But time changes everything in this series and she really does seem to have genuinely changed with the space to get to know the people she was killing as friends rather than prey and with time to think over her actions. Whether this escaped convict still deserves mercy for changing too late in the day is up for debate though and that debate is right at the heart of this story, which asks all the questions Dr Who had never thought to ask before about things like the death penalty and the morals of how we treat our prisoners (Russell T Davies is a fierce opponent of capital punishment, believing in mercy for all and afraid of mistakes that happen with the justice system, a theme that’s cropped up in a few of his pre-Who shows. 

So, ‘Boom Town’ is Dr Who at its most hippie-ish then, like the days of the 1960s when the Doctor hung around Tibet and inspired six youthful revolutions before breakfast? Not quite. This story (originally called ‘Dining With Monsters’) is about second helpings but also just desserts. This doctor in particular is no mug (despite looking like a Toby Jug) and doesn’t buy anything Margaret Slitheen says to him across the story – rightly so given some of her obvious ploys but even when she’s obviously telling the truth. During the course of her ‘last super’ before the Doctor hands her over to her people to be executed she both plays on his sympathies with tales of what they actually do to prisoners (dissolve them in acid and feed them to the venom grubs from ‘The Web Planet’ while still conscious, the sort of fate too nasty even for certain politicians) and physically attacks him, but the Doctor sees every attack coming emotional and actual and just sits there with his best stony face on. Usually the Doctor leaves this sort of mopping-up operation up to other people (UNIT have their uses after all!) but here, for the first time in a long time, he has to look at one of the people he’s captured and look them in the eyes. Rose doesn’t get off the hook either and has to face the consequences of her actions in this story – it’s been a while now since she ran off with the Doctor and her mum and her ex have developed new lives without her, something she finds hard to take. But why should they live their lives waiting for her? Dr Who has always been at pains to point out that everyone is special and even the girl the Doctor chose to travel and fall for above all others is no more deserving of a full and proper life than anyone else. Rose left a void, but it’s a void that other people deserve to fill. This is a rare story in this first series when you side with comedy coward Mickey and narrow-minded mum Jackie over brave but selfish Rose and you get to see the universe through their eyes, trying to live their ordinary lives at a normal speed while Rose flits through it with tales of adventure but nothing solid for them to reach to. ‘Boom Town’ is, then, the quiet beating heart of the series, asking all the questions of the main characters they haven’t had to answer till now –in any era. That’s what I love about ‘new Who’ and the one thing it gets ‘right’ consistently over the ‘classic’ series: that idea of consequences, that even the Doctor in a space-time travel machine can’t escape the ripples of his actions. It feels as if the series has been set up to make this episode a pay-off for those thoughts. 

 So much so that this story, which returns to the scene of the first story filmed for new-Who (but shown 4th) feels like it was written decades later by a much subtler and thoughtful writer and all part of some grand Russell T Davies masterplan story arc, one where he would show us how nothing in the Whoniverse or our universe is ever quite as black and white as it seems on the telly and how the real moral of this show is to be kind to people when you don’t know what they’re going through, even when they’re not being kind to you; this is, after all, a rare series where the lead hero never acts out of revenge and doesn’t believe in an eye-for-an-eye, who never carries a weapon (bar a sonic screwdriver and the occasional tin dog), someone who offers mercy more times than not. It’s the perfect near-ending of the 9th Doctor’s story arc as he moves from angst-ridden wounded warrior with survivor’s guilt who hates the universe he sacrificed so many people to save in the time war to the sort of person who, mostly thanks to hanging around Rose, believes in second chances and that things can get better. Except ‘Boom Town’ was very much a last minute substitute, a deliberately low budget episode at the end of the season. Because, ah yes this is the infamous ‘difficult 11th episode’(though for some seasons such as series three, it’s the 10th): the one that’s always written in the schedules in pencil because of last-minute changes and cancellations and over-running stories, tucked away near the end of recording schedules as an afterthought. Something always seems to go wrong here (it’s same slot as ‘Fear Her’ Utopia’ and ‘Midnight', all of which had teething problems of their own). Originally this slot was meant to house a story from Stephen Fry (who not only dropped out unprofessionally late but then rudely slagged the series off in the press). Then it was a story by Russell’s friend Paul Abbott but that fell through too when ‘Shameless’ became his breakout hit (of all the writers who’ve submitted proposals for modern Who he’s the one with least idea of the series: he submitted a story proposal that undid everything Russell had carefully set up at a stroke by writing a plot that had Rose as an artificial construction bred to be the Doctor’s ‘perfect companion’. There’s a tale that Russell got the scene breakdown and rang up mock-angrily laugh-shouting ‘what the hell did you do to my creation?!’) For a while this story was what became ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ but Russell realised quickly that it would cost too much for this slot, which had to be dirt cheap with what was left over from the other episodes (which wasn’t a lot). Knuckling down to work Russell started a story that sounds a lot like what became ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, where the Doctor and Rose find themselves walking down corridors in a land so far in the future that the normal rules of science don’t apply, finding themselves revealing secrets about their guilty past as they walk – this was nixed because the technology wasn’t there to do it back then and it gave away a bit too much about these characters that other stories had already told better. Instead, with deadlines looming and time ticking, Russell wrote ‘Boom Town’ at more or less the last minute – his only script of that first year having seen how the series looked in the rushes and so was able to tweak it to the characters he saw. Most of Russell’s stories thus far had been in his head for years, even decades: this one’s turnaround from first draft to last was just weeks. 

 This particular story was inspired by two things: one is that Russell had been given the chance to act as a stand-in on Who’s first recording session (he was ‘being’ Christopher Eccleston while they set the lighting rig, although even Eccleston isn’t quite as tall as Russell) opposite Annette Badland and found himself apologising for how wasted she clearly was in a part that gave her little to do and that he would write her a bigger one next time. The other is that Wales isn’t just ‘the cheapest and most easily available place willing to make Dr Who’ anymore – it’s become a home, the place where Dr Who regenerated. So far this year we’ve only seen Cardiff standing in for London or as various alien planets with the exception of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ but even that was how the city appeared in the 19th century. Here Russell uses every trick in the book to show off his new home city at its best, repaying the favour the city took by giving Dr Who a home and being so welcoming and so proud of the series made on their doorstep, a place so wonderful even aliens fall in love with it and find themselves reformed. There’s a lot of Wales in this story – officially because it was the nearest place to film and Russell knew the area well after a year there filming, but also you suspect because he’s fallen in love with the country that had so taken to having DW made there for the first time. Among the buildings we see prominently are The Glamorgan Building, home of the city council who had been so helpful with filming requirements and Millennium Centre Square (the place where the Tardis lands) which Russell could actually see from his home writing desk. I also wonder if this story is a Russell T in-joke about the famous Pertwee quote (in a Radio Times interview no less) where he rather defensively said of the Earthbound format of the 1970s that ‘it was scarier to come across a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Bec’ than in outer space; here we start the story with a Slitheen actually on the loo in Cardiff – not Cardiff pretending to be somewhere else, but very much the actual Cardiff. Watch out too for the brilliant and heartfelt dig put in by Russell after 26 years of DW being such a London-centred series almost always made in the nation’s capital: Margaret Slitheen can hide in Cardiff because ‘London doesn’t care – the South West Coast could fall into the sea and they wouldn’t notice’ (this is the moment she realises ‘God help me, I’ve gone native!’ So native she even apparently lives in the same block as flats as Owen from Torchwood: how bad at alien hunting is he?!) A lot of people Russell had worked with that year were saying much the same to him and how pleased they were to house a series that would put them on the map that normally would be made in London automatically. Re-using an actress who’d been a proven hit and a local setting that was cheap were also big plusses for what was the lowest budgeted episode of the series (and therefore the whole of the ‘reboot’ series so far, given the extra money Who got after this). 

There’s no way even Fry, one of our celebrated intellectuals, could have come up with a script this clever: ‘Boom Town’ feels like Russell, the two-part finale finished, writing the last episode for what might be his one and only shot at writing for Dr Who (which had only been commissioned for a single series at the time) and making the most of this unexpected chance to ask the big questions that have been puzzling him all his years as a fan: what happened when the Tardis left at the end of a story? Did things go back to normal? Were the baddies changed by their experience? Was the Doctor? Would all of them have done the exact same thing if they’d known how everything turned out in the end? Being one of the more empathetic and character-driven writers for the series in any era, it’s no surprise he’s the first writer to ask out loud ‘what happens to everyone when the Dr leaves?’ It may well be writing ‘Long Game’ as a set-up for the ‘Bad Wolf’ series finale set Russell off thinking down these lines as there, too, it’s the vacuum left by the Dr’s interference that causes all the problems. That story’s a Dalek trap though, left because they know one or other Doctor will come along and try to put things right; this story returns to a tale that was deliberately written to feel very much like a traditional Dr Who story and isn’t a trap so much as an accident; Margaret Slitheen thinks she’s gotten away with her crimes and thinks she’ll never see the Dr again. It may be, too, that Russell was inspired by this story’s namesake, a 1940 Western: two men from out of town down on their luck hatch up a plan to steal drilling equipment and make their fortune by stealing from the locals, only to find the plan takes so long that they fall in love with the place and become locals themselves, desperately trying to cover up their guilty secret of why they first came into town (the story ends with the being accepted and turning their money over to the locals, before being given equipment legitimately so they can start all over again and make their own fortune). In that sense the title works as a triple pun: it not only references the film but also the earthquake that shatters the restaurant windows and Russell’s plan to put Cardiff on the tourist map and make it a ‘boom town’. 

 A lot of fans dismiss this story as the runt of the series one litter – this is, after all, the one story this year with monsters we’ve seen before in a Cardiff setting that’s become as familiar as our own back yards by episode 11 (even if meant to be somewhere else) and on a sheer spectacle level its clear how much excitement levels have dropped since we got crowd scenes of monsters in episode two when all we get is one big blast, a little bit of running and a lot of talking. But that’s precisely what I love about this story: there’s no special effects to hide behind, no big monster to be the ‘shock absorber’ that lets everyone get away with a subpar plot, no incidental character to get all the good lines. Instead it’s just a cracking script full of wit and character that goes to places no Dr Who story before or since bothered to visit. Arguably we learn more about the 9th Dr in this than his other 12 episodes put together now Russell has seen how Eccleston plays him on screen, as a tough man forever trying to break into a smile before he remembers what he’s been through. He’s deeply in love with Rose by this time and she’s brought out his compassionate side, even while Captain Jack brings out a very human streak of jealousy we’ve not seen from him before and the Slitheen brings out his callous ruthless side to boot, triggering his merciless angry side. We also see the darker flashes hinted at in ‘Dalek’ (which clearly surprised Russell when Robert Shearman came up with them but which he loved, judging by the Radio Times preview and his emails to Dr Who magazine), with the Doctor clearly stung by Margaret Slitheen’s pot-shots that the Dr’s no different from her, becoming the unelected judge and executioner of so many baddies (best put down when he talks to her about how letting some people go doesn’t automatically make her good – ‘only a killer would know that’). This is a doctor who once killed strangers at the press of a button in the time war who now has to look his enemy in the eye and you can see that it haunts him in new ways all over again, as he thinks about all the people whose eyes he didn’t see who still went through the same agonies. One of the biggest surprises in Christopher Eccleston’s brief time in the Tardis was how good this famously dark and brooding drama actor was at the comedy (he’s kind of the opposite of Jon Pertwee and Sylvester McCoy, who were hired for the laughs and ended up making their Drs more serious and darker-edged – Eccleston’s CV practically had ‘gritty kitchen sink northerner’ all over it); Russell’s clearly taken that on board and written him a comic tour de force here which he sells to perfection. The scene in the restaurant for the convicted Margaret Slitheen’s ‘last meal’ (look out for the girl dining who screams when the glass shatters by the way – that’s Billie Piper’s series double Kim Garritty in her only on-screen appearance) where Mrs Slitheen tries every trick in the book on him where he just nonchalantly stops her poisoned darts and poisoned breath without glancing up from the menu is one of the funniest Dr Who scenes of them all and a perfect example of how comedy works at its best in this series, complementing rather than subtracting from the drama and horror. This is, after all, a person so desperate to stay alive they’re resorting to desperate measures, even if they’re measures the Doctor sees coming a mile away. Only at the end does the Slitheen give up tricking him and beg for pity – and then we see a whole different side to this Doctor, one that he thought the time war had taken forever but which, mostly being around Rose, he begins to re-open up. 

It’s a neat bit of character development we’d miss if this moment wasn’t there and the 9th Doctor simply regenerated a story later (and it’s vague whether Russell T knew this would be his last story for Christopher Eccleston or not). It’s been an unspoken rule that each regeneration of the Doctor has to ‘learn’ something before they can move on to the person they’re meant to be next, something which is underplayed in ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The ways’ because of the need to set up a really big potential ending point for the series. The first Doctor’s arc slowly moves him from self-preservationist to sacrificing himself for others. The second Doctor slowly learns the need to be responsible and doing the right thing, even when knowing what his own people might do to him (a far cry from where he starts, making jokes tooling on his recorder and trying on hats). The third Doctor learns that his curiosity gets the people around him into trouble. The fourth learns that even he can’t outrun fate and gravity forever. The fifth Doctor learns the high price of being such a given person and so on (things trip up because the 6th Doctor is effectively exterminated by Michael Grade before he’s ready – although this arc would have been the most explicit of them all had it gone the way Colin Baker and Eric Saward planned – while the 7th and 8th Doctor eras ended prematurely). This Doctor’s arc is in many ways the opposite of the 5th Doctor in ‘Caves Of Androzani’ – the time war made him a bitter, angry man afraid to feel for any other living thing in case it meant them dying too. But in the next story (spoilers) Rose literally saves him from dying (not just regenerating but dying, because there’s no way the Daleks would have stopped when he turned into David Tennant) because she cares for him so much. It’s here that Russell T shows the contrast most with who the Doctor is now compared to what he was when we first met him in ‘Rose’ and warning Rose off because he worked better alone – now he’s got a team around him and he’s ‘domesticated’ for lack of a better word, looking comfortable walking round a city in modern-day Britain with a gang and hanging around dining in restaurants. He’s healed, at peace with his actions as much as he ever can be (it wasn’t that long ago, in ‘Dalek’, he was scaring Rose with his darker side) so even the thing that would normally set him off and trigger him (Margaret pointing out that he’s a killer and not that unlike her deep down) doesn’t affect him anymore. Last minute substitution for a ‘bigger’ story ‘Boom Town’ might be but the series one arc wouldn’t work as well without it. 

 The Doctor bounces between all these many different sides in this series like an alien pinball machine and in the end, rather than be his usual decisive self, he leaves it up to the Tardis what happens next and she pops out an egg, ready to live her life all over again. The (spoilers) ending is seen by some fans as a trick and has been much criticised but I really like it: Russell’s been thinking hard about his stance on capital punishment and like many an empathetic soul before him can see where people go wrong isn’t always because of their nature but through nurture and the effect of the people around them. Freed of the need to impress her evil family Margaret Slitheen has discovered a whole way of thinking she never even knew existed and is worthy of a second chance – the ‘badness’ in her might be too ingrained to make a difference, but then she’ll end up meeting the Doctor all over again and facing the same fate. Until then the script cleverly keeps you guessing till the end whether the Dr’s really going to go through with sending Margaret Slitheen back to Raxacofalipatorious to be executed or whether he’s going to go ‘soft’ and let her go free. Indeed, of all the ending in Dr Who, this is one of my favourite: the Doctor isn’t judge jury or executioner but the bringer of hope that things will be different next time – and whether they are or not is up to you. I’m amazed, in fact, that the more Buddhist end of the Dr Who spectrum, writers like Barry Letts and Christopher bailey, hadn’t got their first. Yes it would have helped if we’d known the Tardis had this capability first, but then the Tardis should always be surprising us: it’s not like other machines and the way things turn out is entirely in keeping with the earliest Dr Who stories like ‘Edge Of Destruction’ that stress how much this is a machine that can ‘think’. 

One thing I wish had been developed more is the political satire that made ‘Aliens In London’ so memorable. Margaret Slitheen gets out of trouble repeatedly by effectively being a ‘politician’, hiding in plain sight amongst other human politicians who are just as corrupt as she is. Near the start the script throws in the fact that she’s been working on a ‘Bad Wolf’ nuclear station in the heart of Wales and conned everyone into thinking that it’s a good thing that she’s been cutting safety measures and checks. There’s even another Russell T Davies dig at the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco with the story’s best gag as a reporter challenges her about the nuclear safety test inspectors all coming to sticky ends like Dr David Kelly in real life (‘He slid on an icy patch’ ‘He was decapitated!’ ‘Well, it was a very icy patch’). I love the satirical side of Russell T’s writing, the best aspect of ‘Aliens In London’, but here it’s just another passing phase this story goes through before it turns into something else entirely and we’ve never really had it again since (well, not till lockdown when he turned Boris Johnson into an Auton anyway).

 Regardless ‘Boom Town’ is still the perfect near-end to a near-perfect series, one that delivers all the high drama, charm and comedy of the best of the returning series one but in a script that digs a little deeper than any have had the space to dig before in the newer, faster series (if this had been the olden days of four parters then this would have been the last part of ‘Aliens In London’). There are, admittedly, not as many fireworks or indeed booms and bangs in ‘Boom Town’ as in other stories, the Rose-Mickey sub-plot gets boring fast, Captain Jack needn’t have bothered to turn up at all (he’s there mostly so that he can learn about the time rift and thus launch the ‘Torchwood’ series from Cardiff in another year and a bit)and one Slitheen is maybe not as impressive as three or four. That said, though, for all the bigger budget in ‘Aliens Of London’ that story doesn’t get anything as right as this one: that’s story’s a sometimes uneasy mix of horror, politics and laughs with Slitheen who spend too much of their time farting and with arch jokes that don’t always connect and occasional dodgy effects; this is a character piece where the characters are deep, the writing is exquisite and the actors know what they’re doing that bit more and can bring so much more confidence. Even if this story gets forgotten and overlooked now, subtler than probably any other story of the five-year Davies comeback run, the rest of those stories wouldn’t be as strong without this episode there as his era’s ‘conscience’. Possibly the most under-rated story of the entire run of new-Who, this one is an under-rated gem, not the fine wine and dining of other stories perhaps but a gourmet meal on a budget that hits the taste-buds all the same. 

 POSITIVES + There have been many great actors and actresses playing the parts of Dr Who monsters down the years but Annette Badland is clearly one of the best. Russell obviously thought so too, picking up on how her Slitheen in ‘Aliens Of London’ was subtler than the other performances, a baddy who was opportunistic rather than cruel. Badland’s career was mostly spent playing sweet dotty ladies before this but she’s an excellent baddy – her sudden switches from self-pity back into cruel sneers and confident charm keep you guessing what side this Slitheen is on right till the last few minutes, but she’s also believable as a scared, sad, regretful alien too. There are very few acting roles in this story but all are excellent – a shout out to William Thomas as Mr Cleaver, becoming the first actor to appear in both ‘old’ and ‘new’ series along the way (he was the undertaker in ‘Remembrance Of Daleks’ who gives Davros a literal ‘helping hand’ and also played Gwen’s dad in Torchwood; even today there are comparatively few actors who’ve spanned both centuries of this series). 

 NEGATIVES - We said in our review of ‘Aliens Of London’ that the fart jokes smacked a little too much of children’s telly and as the first script Russell wrote for the new series seemed pitched at more of a children’s than a family audience. There are notably less fart jokes here (and less opportunities for Margaret Slitheen to undress from her human bodysuit) but these seem even more out of place somehow in what’s one of the series’ more grown-up scripts. I mean, the closest to this story in the ‘old’ Dr Who canon is ‘Face Of Evil’ and you can’t imagine Xoanon crowing ‘Who am I?!? You are the evil one Dr. Not least because you’ve taught me, a computer, how to fart!’ 

 BEST QUOTE: Margaret Slitheen: ‘This is persecution. Why can't you leave me alone? What did I ever do to you?’ Doctor: ‘You tried to kill me and destroy this entire planet’. Margaret Slitheen: ‘Apart from that!’ 

 Previous ‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ next ‘Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways’

The Face Of Evil: Ranking - 82

           The Face Of Evil

(Season 14, Dr 4 with Leela, 1-22/1/1977, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Chris Boucher, director: Pennant Roberts)

Rank: 82

   'Well then Leela, what do you think of this mountain that your ancestors carved then eh? Just like back home for you. That George Washington you know,  very good kisser, never told a lie. Well except when we got home that night as I recall. Next to him is Thomas Jefferson - I took him down the Haight Ashbury in 1967 and turned him on to the Jefferson Airplane. He was tripping acid when he signed the American Declaration of Independence you know! I went out shooting with old Teddy Roosevelt. Actually it was the Brigadier in a fur coat but never mind. And then there's Abraham Lincoln. I'll show you his Gettysburg address on the space-time visualiser sometime. Awful picture though doesn't look a thing like him...'

This is one of the cleverest scripts of the entire 20th century run, all the more so given that it plays with the sort of tired old ideas we’ve seen in Dr Who dozens of times before: there’s a planet in the future that’s run by a mysterious force that turns out to be a computer, while the savage life we meet on this planet turn out to be a colony of humans in a few millennia’s time who’ve reverted back to their primal ways because they’ve forgotten how to work it. This is yet another possession story in an era full of them. If you’ve come to this story after the Hartnell and Troughton eras you’re permitted to start yawning now. Only (spoilers) the possession is technological and Xoanon the computer isn’t like any we’ve seen before: it’s having a bit of a breakdown and not in a ‘gee I wish there was a pc world on this planet so I could fix my spark plugs’ way either but by actually going downright raving bonkers. As a lot of computers tend to do to be fair, only this one happens to be running the planet, even when everyone has forgotten what it is, which is a bit of a problem when the locals are the things it starts de-fragging. And what causes this breakdown? The repairman. Who happens to be The Doctor. By accident. In an unseen but very Dr Who-sounding story in an attempt to help the local population re-discover their lost knowledge – only the Doctor forget to remove his ‘dataprint’ from the computer, leading it to think that it actually is the Doctor and causing it to develop a split personality (the novelisation says this happened the first time this Doctor took off in the Tardis in ‘Robot’ when he was still a bit manic, well OK a lot manic, which might be why he didn’t do a thorough enough job and by the look of things can’t remember ever turning up here before. Unless somehow he first turned up on this un-named planet in a different body and the computer knows to update its depiction of him depending on what age he must be now. After all, this meddling without having thought of the consequences sounds a lot like something the 1st Doctor might have done in the days before we met him and might explain why it was so longer the Doctor is struggling to place being here. No? Oh well, please yourselves). 

In many ways this is the most 21st century of all Dr Who plots: we’ve had computers in Who since the 1960s but they tend to be distant, colossal, impenetrable unknowable, doing the routine things humans can’t do, driven by tape machines and used for nefarious purposes by an Earthbound baddy. This one is almost human –well, timelord anyway – and as to err is to be human it’s no wonder he’s got his wires a bit crossed. Xoanon doesn’t just have one identity but two: he’s remained part computer but he also had the Doctor’s personality imprinted on his datacore, so that he’s torn in two: a machine that sees things absolute and a personality that, perhaps of all the Doctors, is mercurial and malleable. Chris Boucher’s debut script for the series feels much more like how we’ve come to think of computers in the present day, as something that could both do great harm and great good: Xoanon runs the entire planet and was doing it nicely until it went wrong, when it starts developing a mind of its own and killing people off, while given his power it’s not a simple case of turning him off and on again. He’s a person now and regrettably people don’t come with a re-set button: we just have to muddle on through with the best of what we’ve got. For Xoanon being ‘alive’ isn’t easy. He’s used to the safety of numbers, of binary code, of things either being one thing or another. Even as a futuristic impossibly brilliant technological creation he simply hasn’t got the bandwith to cope with all of the feelings that come with being alive and especially all the conflicts. For who we are is a shimmering, ever-changing state that changes depending what you learn and who you’re with and how you interact with them, updating second by second as your view of the world and your part in it changes (it might be significant that the split personality of Xoanon features a father, a mother and a child: we are different things to each of these people depending on their needs and life experience, however much we think we’re essentially the same: the people who potty-trained you, for instance, will never view you the same way as the people you potty-trained even though you stay just as clever as you always were with many of the same mannerisms your whole life). Being alive is a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes, of grey areas in between the black and white thinking that computers enjoy. The Doctor tells Leela in episode one to ‘never be certain of anything’ (a sentence rather undercut by his need to have her trust him a couple of episodes later but no matter): The Doctor knows that everything on this un-named planet is a lie. But computers can’t tell lies and they have to be certain in order for their programmes to run. The Doctor also says, in the story’s most quoted speech, that ‘very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alters their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering’ (It’s a wonder there isn’t a picture of Donald Trump on the mountain alongside him as the ‘evil one’). Little does he know about Xoanon when he says it but Xoanon is this way of thinking precisely: it cannot compute being wrong so instead it computed everyone around it as being wrong. Xoanon is neither powerful nor stupid really though, just ill with schizophrenia, that impulse to believe in two separate contradictory statements, of being different things in different situations. Only Xoanon literally controls life on this planet, being in charge of the life support systems, dividing the human population on this planet as if they were binary code and leading them to grow up resenting and hating each other even though – in s shock twist (spoilers) - they turn out to be one and the same all along. 

 It’s the single best use of computers in the series because it’s so original and unexpected, a long way ahead of where the technology was at the time and far more in keeping with how we see man’s greatest technological friend today in our age of AI and sophisticated programming. Usually in Dr Who the computers go wrong and the Doctor has to solve them, but in this story it’s his solution that’s gone wrong and the computer isn’t really the baddy at all. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the big fear with computers was that they would replace us and make humanity redundant as it did all our jobs for us and a lot of stories like ‘The War Machines’ and ‘The Green Death’ built on this, making computers that are scarily human-like, taking on all our bad character traits like jealousy, ego and anger. But ‘Face Of Evil’ feels more like a story from now, where computers become smarter than us, as smart as a timelord, so smart we don’t know how to turn them off. It’s at one with series like ‘Humans’ and ‘Intelligence’ from recent TV history where computers don’t just allow humans to turn on humans but where they run the show with a callousness and efficiency that puts our worst dictators to shame. There’s no scarier threat than one that thinks you’re just a bunch of binary code and which wasn’t born to cope with all the subtleties that come from being a person, all the contradictions and paradoxes involved in being alive and which can’t show mercy or give second chances and whose only response to the contradictions of everyday life is to keep people apart, creating divisions in this society that huge ramifications for all of them. It’s not for nothing that this story was submitted with the title ‘The Day God Went Mad’, a title the production team would never have allowed out for reasons of being both controversial and out of keeping with their set format (it’s hard to imagine a target novelisation with the subtitle ‘Dr Who and The Day God Went Mad’ for instance). However it’s a fitting one: for the Sevateem and Tesh alike their computer is their God, with the same mercurial temper that changes with the wind, utter control over all life and a background that’s impossible for the locals to understand. 

 This unusual script was commissioned in an unusual way too, with Boucher sending in a script to the production team unsolicited: not this one but a different script, lost to time. This might seem to outsiders like an obvious thing for a writer to do but maybe only three Who writers ever did it that way: one of them was Andrew Smith, who shocked the production team as an eighteen year old when he came u with ‘Full Circle’ and the other was Robert Holmes, who tweaked his submission ‘The Krotons’ from his original intended for the series ‘Out Of The Unknown’ and with perfect timing it landed on Terrance Dicks’ mat just when he was low on stories. Holmes was by 1977 working as script editor himself and it might have struck him that he’d found just such a writer who had been in his shoes a decade or so earlier, so he tried Boucher out on a script that’s very similar all round, with a mad computer whose divided its planet into two warring tribes (‘Face Of Evil’ is, in many ways, ‘The Krotons’ ‘cubed’, from the blocky designs on down!) Originally called ‘The prime Directive’, Boucher found while writing the script that it was developing almost a mind of its own – a bit like Xoanon – and was turning into a very different story, more of a philosophical story than the runaround he’d been commissioned to write. Thankfully Holmes saw what he was doing and rather than make him change it, as a lesser script editor might have done, encouraged him to see the idea through to the end. 

 The idea of the story having implications for the Doctor and caused by his visit some time before came from producer Phillip Hinchcliffe who was becoming worried that the Doctor was too infallible, with no uncertainty as to whether he might come out of a story on top. ‘Face Of Evil’ is thus the first story since ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ to really ask questions about the Doctor’s morals and why he goes about the universe trying to save it, more often than not while leaving before anything better can be put in its place and hoping the people left behind are smart and kind enough to follow his example while he moves on to something more ‘exciting’. In many ways the 4th regeneration of the Dr is the most blasé: he swans in, topples empires he thinks are ‘wrong’ and then leaves again with a swish of his scarf but in this story, for pretty much the first time, there are consequences to his actions. Even though everything he did both before and during this story was designed to be for the greater good, inevitably somewhere sometime that slapdash approach is going to cause harm. The modern series has tried this a few times now (notably ‘Waters Of Mars’), suggesting that he too is fallible and can get carried away with his own brilliance. In another sense that title isn’t just about Xoanon; it suggests that the Doctor, too, is a ‘God’ that can ‘go mad’, one that through his interactions with so any different civilisations has perhaps more universal influence than anyone and wonders what would happen if he did. It’s unusual indeed to see this Dr, whose usually so many quadzillions of steps ahead of everyone, look guilty and admit he might have got something wrong (I’ve always thought the scenes where this works so well and gives Tom Baker a new emotion to play with gave in-coming producer Graham Williams the idea of adding Romana, who is always proving the Dr ‘wrong’). 

 There are a few interesting pot-shots at religion here too: both sides have ‘faith’ in something that really happened, but not in anything like the way they think it did, a case of science being turned through the Chinese whispers of the centuries into blind worship. It turns out that the people we meet here are the descendents of Earth explorers who crashed into an unknown and still un-named planet generations ago – we don’t know exactly how long but it’s long enough for the history of their mission to have been lost in the mists of time, twisted and re-worded and adapted into a entirely different history. Boucher was a committed atheist who thought the Bible was a misinterpretation of events that had really happened, distorted by time, much like what happens here. The word ‘xoanon’ in fact comes from the Ancient Greeks where it was used as a word for as ‘fake’ God, a representation generally carved out of wood that was thought to be imbued with special Godlike powers even though it had none of its own. Xoanon lives (if that’s the right word for a half sentient computer) in a ship marked ‘survey team’, only nobody on this planet can remember what the words ‘survey team’ means, so they have concocted their own history based on things they half-understand. They’ve divided up into two tribes: the technological experts (the ‘Teshnishians’ in local speak, the tribes having forgotten what the word really was and what it means) and the survey team (‘Sevateem’ in local speak), who rejected the technology to forge out a new home for themselves in the local jungle. The story goes that when Xoanon went mad and blocked entry to the ship the survey team were outside and the technicians inside, trying repairs, when the Doctor showed up to give a hand, both sides devolving once their technology is beyond repair. We’ve had lots of savage tribes in Who before and indeed this whole plot is not new (see, umm, ‘The Savages’ for a simpler take on it and yet another story about two polar opposites at each other’s throats learning they’re secretly one and the same). Only Boucher is smarter than most. He doesn’t write the Sevateem or the Tesh as being stupid, just savage and superstitious; the two tribes are every bit as clever as each other, its just that this one have developed more of their primal instincts as befits a tribe of hunters and the Tesh’s have more logic. Everyone on this planet ruled by computer have, ironically enough, eschewed logic in favour of what they need for survival on an ever-changing planet in the wilderness: intuition, a sixth sense that senses danger and which is impossible for a computer to understand: logic is a luxury that comes with civilisation when we’re protected enough to make sure that the local wildlife won’t kill us. Technology is a measure of intelligence in Dr Who across all species, because it means that particular race have conquered the things that might kill them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re any better suited to survival if something goes wrong. Sometimes technology can be a trap, blinding us to where we came from – especially when there’s an error code in the computer left in charge. 

 Where Boucher’s script soars is in the way that he manages to juggle both contradictory points of view, recognising that unlike Xoanon Dr Who audiences can see more than one point of view at a time. While the Tesh and Sevateem are both at each other’s throats over fundamental differences in how to live both views make sense: living in a jungle is hard work but at least you’re freer than living your lives to a computer’s say-so. It’s a shame we don’t see more of the Tesh as potentially they’re the more interesting of the two, having grown up around technology they don’t understand (what did they think was going on this whole time?) Boucher is clearly trying hard to be fair to both sides but clearly likes the Sevateem more: they’re all intriguing characters in their own ways but by far and away the most interesting is Leela, who becomes the new companion. Louise Jameson is excellent from the first and what could have been an irritating thicko becomes a fascinating character whose bright but inexperienced yet always learning, always questioning, always living off her instincts. We start off with Leela rebelling against the law of the land because instinctively she knows it’s wrong and in that regard she’s very much like the Doctor, courageous and moral and bright, just with less experience. Leela is very different: we’ve had no end of orphans in Dr Who before and since but only Leela witnesses her own kin die in the opening episode and because of her own defiance of the tribe (though if Leela is troubled by this she’s learned not to show it). Boucher wasn’t asked to write a companion for more than just one story – like the David Tennant specials of 2009 there was meant to be a different one each story – but the production team really liked Leela. Boucher modelled her on Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled, who came across innocent and glamorous despite being a mass murderer and how contradictory Boucher found those two aspects of her personality (no wonder Dalek creator Terry Nation poached Boucher for the ‘terrorists as our heroes’ series Blake’s 7 as this ability to juggle multiple viewpoints is fundamental to that series). Louise Jameson nails a tricky part from the first, capturing the contradictions of a character whose both incredibly pure (with no idea of science or how the universe really works) but also a true warrior, happy to kill in defence or for a greater cause. Jameson says she got a lot of Leela’s personality from watching a neighbour’s child who lived up the stairs from her and the way she would eye Louise suspiciously like an old man before realising she was ‘safe’ and openly being her boisterous self in front of her; another source was Louise’s pet dog Bosie who would sense danger by cocking her head to one side and listening, a mannerism Louise adopted for Leela; the end of this story when she wanders inside the Tardis and the Doctor debates about keeping her is exactly like he’s adopted a stray canine). It’s a sad fact of ‘old’ Who that with so many writers and not enough time to tweak scripts companions tend to all end up the same eventually and that any character development they make in one story is forgotten by the next but Leela does better than any character till Ace: she stays fundamentally the same intuitive warrior whose part animal, always on the alert for danger and willing to fight, yet also learns knowledge along the way. It helps considerably that Boucher writes three of her scripts including the next one ‘Robots Of Death’ so that future writers have a much better understanding of her than some companions down the years. She’s the perfect companion for the Hinchcliffe years that were a similar mix of innocence and knowingness, more child-orientated in some ways and more violent in others – alas she won’t be allowed to be quite the same in the Graham Williams era when the BBC demand the series get softer and more peaceful. 

 Poor Louise went through hell in this part in a highly revealing costume (that was originally even more revealing, as just a leather cat suit before the leather straps at the front were added), with painful contact lenses that changed her blue eyes brown (because it made her look more like a ‘savage’ apparently, though I’m not at all sure why), a liberal layering of dirt and months of jibes from salivating technicians (no wonder Leela hates the Tesh). That scene when Leela has to run past the invisible monsters was particularly difficult: the effects were on wires that could have garrotted her if she’d memorised her steps wrong and the contact lenses meant she couldn’t see properly where she was going. That wasn’t the half of it though: lots of people working on the series made cracks about her revealing costume, the most infamous a lighting director on this story who asked to stay on for the rest of the series because ‘I wouldn’t mind lighting that for the next six months!’ So much for progress and civilisation: it doesn’t take a mad computer to take us back to the dark ages and it really wasn’t that long ago. The ‘old’ team were far more welcoming: by chance Louise had tickets for a play Elisabeth Sladen was starring in the day after learning she got the job and nervously went backstage to say ‘hello’ – Elisabeth was due at TV centre the week of recording and left Louise lots of ‘best wishes’ messages and cards with the BBC staff to pass on for her first week.

 Though they clashed a lot in the recording of this and most future stories (mostly because Tom wanted to work on his own without a companion and thought the production team were ignoring his suggestions) Louise also brings out the best in Tom Baker: his Doctor is less flippant in this story (though still often very funny) and his horror at realising he’s been the cause of the events in the second half brings out an earnest wisftulness we won’t see again till his closing trilogy. Tom got few chances to be subtle during his seven years as the Dr but he’s actually surprisingly good at it when the script demands it and this script demands much more from him than most; he also re-wrote perhaps the best scene where he threatens the Sevateem, by threatening them with a ‘deadly jelly baby’ rather than use violence (he probably meant the green ones – they never did taste very nice. Leela’s comment: ‘They say the evil one eats babies!’) There’s another very ‘Doctory’ scene where he fools the local monsters who work on vibrations with an alarm clock he just happens to have in his pockets: this gag appears to be in the original script but I would happily believe that this was a Tom Bakerism too. Given that this is the period when Tom Baker was taking over it might also be that this was a message to the actor that he wasn’t infallible either, though if so it’s a shame that the story ends with the Doctor having apparently learned nothing (‘Are you always right?’ asks Leela just before they leave. ‘Invariably’ he replies). Notably the Doctor never tries to put things right by going back in time and fixing it: he treats the ‘mistake’ as if it’s a fixed point even though he only did at most a century or so ago (that’s peanuts by Dr Who standards!) 

Those monsters are perhaps the weakest link in the story, yet more invisible beings to save on budget that live on the other side of a barrier (a sort of firewall, only because this is Dr Who it’s carved out of stone and the two halves are taking place a few seconds apart in time). While the idea of having two separate things co-existing uneasily on a planet is very in keeping with a script about binary code versus schizophrenia it’s never fully explained how that barrier got there and why. The monsters also seem like they’re there purely because a computer doesn’t give the characters in ‘The Face Of Evil’ much to face off against. Equally poor are the Horda, a cross between giant maggots and cybermats that crawl around in a way that’s meant to be creepy but just looks a bit silly (one of them at the front had a motor inside so they could move independently but the rest are all too visibly moved by wires). It doesn’t seem much of a threat for hardened warriors like Leela or her father to be thrown into a pit of them. In time we’ll see Leela defeat killer robots, gigantic killer slugs, killer Rutans, killer Sontarons and killer baking foil, so insects shouldn’t be that much of a concern for her really. ‘Horda’ is an interesting choice of word and we’ve seen already how much research Boucher did for his character names; it means ‘mob’ in Polish. Could it be that the Horda are more a symbolic monster? Boucher knows that in some ancient past when religious leaders were more jumpy he’d have been the first to be thrown in a pit for questioning the way everything is run and Leela and her father are basically tried by committee here without a chance to speak out what they believe: they’re killed by mob mentality that you have to fit to a set way of life as much as anything, the human race as inflexible in its own way as a computer that thinks in binary code. Alas, though, if that was the intention it gets a bit lost on screen.

 It’s also a bit wordy without a lot of action till the last episode – oddly so given that most of the story revolves around two bloodthirsty tribes out to kill each other; the most ‘savage’ thing we see anybody actually do in this story is sit around debating the death penalty. It’s harder, too, to get a handle on this world and how it works than Dr Who’s very best planets – an inevitable consequence of the fact that we’re so many generations on that everyone’s forgotten their origins, but its a shame there’s never a scene where the Dr recalls landing there in flashback and talking about what it was like or looking through his 500-year-diary and showing us what it was like last time he was there. Doing jungle sets in brightly-lit colour is a whole lot harder than in black-and-white and this isn’t one of the more convincing ones - you never quite lose the feeling that you’re watching actors walking round a set. If I was going to be mean as well I’d point out that both Tesh and Sevateem look a pretty weedy bunch who more closely resemble goggle-eyes actors and extras looking uncomfortable half-naked and clearly working out what angry thing they’re going to say to their agent for getting them on this job next tea-break, not people hardened to living in the wilderness their whole lives. The costumes raise a few questions all round actually: where did they get the leather from? There’s no animal life on this planet that we see, unless they’ve killed them all off but the leather tunics look new. Wouldn’t they be more likely to be wrapped in twigs and leaves? (there’s no end of foliage on this planet after all). Although given how hot this planet appears to be its maybe a bit strange they’re wearing clothes at all – not that they could possibly have put that on TV at a Saturday teatime, but it’s not like a writer as smart as Boucher and script editor as smart as Holmes not to fit in an explanatory comment somewhere along the line. 

 Forget the body though, on more than the face of it ‘Face Of Evil’ has a lot going for it. There are lots of candidates around for Dr Who’s scariest moment/cliffhanger but one of the best ones comes at the end of episode three when the computer is having the sort of existential crisis computers should never have and screaming at the Dr in a child’s voice ‘Who am I?!’ Technologically for 1977 standards it’s a triumph and never more than the scene of the Doctor-Xoanon talking to himself, recorded using Tom’s face against black drapes, that footage re-recorded onto a video camera to be coloured and distorted, then played back to three monitors surrounding the set and recorded live with Tom Baker’s response. The lad, Anthony Freise, was a pupil in the class of director Pennant Roberts’ wife’s and he’s perfect, menacing and cute all at once; the other voices were ‘borrowed’ from actors then in rehearsals for ‘Robots Of Death’ Pamela Salem (Toos) and Rob Edwards (Chub). Even I’ve never had a computer breakdown quite like this (and believe me, my computers have found a lot of creative ways to break down over the years); I dread to think what Xoanon would have done with windows updates. That’s the moment that gets all the attention but the first cliffhanger is pretty thrilling too, as after ten minutes of people calling him ‘the evil one’ the Doctor sees a carving of his face, Mount Rushmore style, into the local cliff (a literal cliffhanger and another Hinchcliffe suggestion; despite the Doctor’s quip about not getting his nose or eyebrows quite right it’s taken from a plaster model of his face). It’s a clever twist that the story is solved by having the Doctor bridge the two worlds through the bridge in his nose, when his face happens to be the gateway between the two worlds.There’s a highly satisfying ending, too, where the Doctor cures the computer by doing the human equivalent of switching it off and on again, showing it how to integrate multiple personalities without causing harm to itself or anyone else, but it’s a closer run thing than most 4th Dr stories and he very nearly comes a cropper. This is one of those rare DW stories where there’s no baddy really, which makes for such a satisfying change: the computer doesn’t mean to be evil any more than the Doctor meant to make it that way and Xoanon’s attempts to destroy the Doctor come out of rage that his presence challenges its world view, not because it wants to rule this un-named world. 

The result is a triumph, one of the most original stories Dr Who ever did: with practically every other story you can point to some source material somewhere (nearly always a combination of Nigel Kneale, H G Wells and Isaac Asimov, with a dash of John Wyndham, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein and ‘Pathfinders In Space’ for variation). This is a rare story that doesn’t have any of that. Yes you could point to a few earlier stories, even a few earlier Dr Who stories, about a computer running a planet that goes wrong, ven a Bob Shaw story about a planet ruled by a being named Xoanon, but that’s only the starting point for a story that adds whole layers of identity and existential crises. It’s all the more impressive for coming at the tail end of the Hinchcliffe era that, for all its brilliance, was more about recycling than originality. I’ve always maintained that Dr Who is one of the smartest series around: not necessarily every week, not necessarily even in what’s presented on screen, but the way it’s format is so elastic that you learn a little bit about a lot of things if you watch it for long enough. It’s the sort of series where most showrunners and script editors throw ideas at you that you can either ignore while people run around doing things and be quite happy or can go away and look up afterwards, falling into a rabbit-hole of research following the breadcrumbs the authors have left for you. Quite often that’s with science, sometimes that’s with history, occasionally that’s with some other thing you might not have thought about regarding mathematics or geography or religion or literature or even home economics. My favourite Who stories though are the sort of things you can’t look up in books but which make you think all the same, about philosophy and bigger concepts about what it means to be alive and few stories are as strong in that regard as ‘The Face Of Evil’, a story about how you can be alive without having a face and how there might not be such a thing as evil, only perspective and mental illness. What seems, on the face of it, to be just another Dr Who story about jungles and computers ends up being one of the most intelligent and sophisticated Who stories of them all. 

 POSITIVES + Of all the clever things in this story one of the cleverest might just be the title. You spend the whole story expecting to see a monster with a face of such horror they even refer to it in name, which would after all be more in keeping with other Who plots, but no – it refers to the Doctor’s face, as carved into a Mount Rushmore style mountain, which Xoanon takes to be its evil side. On the face of it the face isn’t evil at all (and we know the Dr too well to assume that) but for the people of this world its symbolic of everything that went wrong, the ‘face’ of all the problems in this world. Even more than that it’s about how a face is evil if it only points one way: the Doctor’s face only peers out one way and is blind to the barrier on the other side and you can’t be a fair and powerful ruler if you haven’t got all your facts straight, perhaps especially if you’re a computer. And even more on top of that part of the problem of the story is that Xoanon has no separate personality, no body and no ‘face’ that exists that’s his because he’s everywhere inside the spaceship – and by having the Doctor’s identity inside him he desperately craves one even though he fears it, a ‘face’ that means he has a separate self, which it thinks is ‘evil’. 

 NEGATIVES - The ending needs the two tribes to come together for better reason than just the Doctor’s say-so (especially as he flipping caused the problem in the first place) – joining together to save everyone from a common foe rather than a mad computer whose been put right through the usual jiggery-pokery might have been the way to go, especially in a script that’s all about coming together despite your differences and contradictions. The last episode feels a lot more rushed than the rest, perhaps because by then Boucher has already been given the commission for ‘Robots Of Death’ (Holmes wasn’t used to his writers – shock horror! – getting their scripts in on time!) 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Killing me is going to help you. It’s not going to do me much good either!’ 

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