Frontier In Space: Ranking - 105

    Frontier In Space

(Season 10, Dr 3 with Jo, 24/2/1973-31/3/1973, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Malcolm Hulke, director: Paul Bernard)

Rank: 105

  '...And that was the daisiest daisy I'd ever seen'

'Oh Doctor, you do tell some awful jokes. Here's one of mine: how many ears does The Master have?'

'You know all timelords have two Jo'

'Wrong! A left ear, a right ear and a frontier...in space'

'Have you been taking those Welsh mushrooms again Jo?!'

‘Frontier’ is one of those complex moral stories by Malcolm Hulke where nothing is ever quite what it seems. At the time it was billed as Dr Who’s big return into space, after years of being exiled to Earth (partly as a punishment for interfering with other planets but mostly for budgetary reasons) apart from a visit to Peladon and the odd planet that looked just like a quarry. Excitement was high for a truly ‘alien’ story, in a very alien world, full of impossible things we’d never seen in Dr Who before – not least because the writer, Malcolm Hulke, was the most openly critical of the era the Doctor spend Earthbound to UNIT. However, instead of being a story ‘about’ outer space and funny aliens it’s really just another story about ‘us’ and our racism and paranoia of other cultures and our fear of the unknown that has plagued mankind across time and which also follows us during our first tentative steps out into space. Instead of the great unexplored unknown offering us endless possibilities we spend most of this story in prison cells, either on Earth or on board spaceships, watching people react with closed minds react with horror to things they don’t understand. 

 If that sounds like a letdown it really isn’t: ‘Frontier In Space’ is as well-written and fascinating as any Who story (if a tad slow at times, being yet another six parter that would have been better told in four, with more padding than an overweight Abzorbaloff). We’re following a full-on space war for starters, one that grows from a tiny misunderstanding to a full-blown skirmish that puts both sides in danger and that’s as big a danger point for humanity as any we’ve seen in the series, even if typically much of it happens off-screen. Mankind has just left the earth to head into space but Draconia has done the same and now we’re meeting each other and squabbling over rights just like in ‘Deep Space Nine’, both sides taking their outdated ideas of borders and restrictions with them into space We start on board a human shuttle with a cargo of flour of all things on the borders wondering why a Draconian battle cruiser has crossed over into our airspace against treaties that have been hastily driven up. At first no one’s that worried: surely it’s nothing and will all blow over, that someone out there somewhere with some perspective will step in and calm things down. But this is six whole episodes of how they don’t and how quickly things can spiral out of control until a simple misunderstanding has been blown out of all proportion to become an outright war. Yet nobody does. And events keep getting worse. By the time we finally meet the Draconians we’ve been built up ourselves as an audience to be distrustful and fearful, to see them as the new Daleks who’ll shoot humanity as soon as look at us and who want to invade our airspace for their own evil ends, but instead we just a bunch of bemused looking bipedal reptiles who are as ‘human’ as any aliens we ever see in Who, dazed, wondering why we’re acting so outrageously to them when they did nothing wrong. That’s as great a comment on racism as any, not just in Dr Who but in scifi and even if the Draconians borrow liberally from Star Trek (Klingons in appearance on the streets, Vulcans in behaviour on their fleets, maybe Cardassians in the sheets given their sexist society) they tap into deep roots within our own propaganda and prejudices, the costume department picking up on the hints in the script and turning them into Japanese shogun warriors, complete with masks and inscrutable expressions (although in another neat nod to this Hulke has the Draconians use that common expression about humans!) Of course in the end there’s nothing to fear except fear itself, but finding that out the long way round results in one of the most memorable moral messages in all of Who, that maybe we ought to start trusting strangers more because they might be more like us than we think. 

 This is a story, then, not so much about a frontier in outer space but the frontier of human’s understanding how to co-exist in a universe teeming with life, to put down the prejudices that have caused our bumpy progression from different tribes at war with each other to a civilisation that’s lasted long enough to go out and play with the big boys. Hulke is clearly basing this story on real events from out past, the dispute over something as simple as flour recalling the Tea Party wars that saw America overthrow their British rulers to become independent, or the Flour War that caused more than 300 riots across France in the 1770s because of escalating bread prices. You could ask what’s a Draconian supposed to do with flour? (Make lava bread?) but it’s really an excuse the cargo of flour: it’s really about the rudeness of a shuttle being where it’s not supposed to be, of a race who expect the humans to be up up to something bad re-acting in an over the top way when they apparently break a treaty, albeit in only a very minor way. It’s also one of the baldest metaphors yet for the cold war, the bad blood between jumpy super-powers that runs across the entirety of Dr Who’s original twenty-six year run, a battle that was always one mistake or misunderstanding away from blowing up half the planet (seriously, neither sides really wanted a war – they were just frightened that the other side really did). This is the era of the Yom Kippur War in Egypt, a Soviet state in those days, which attacked Israel. Nixon, president at the time, sent in American troops on the Israel side to help sort things out; Russia agreed to send in troops too, but after umming and aahing Nixon refused their offer, fearing that he’d never be able to get the Russians out again. To this day we don’t know how much of a genuine offer it was: it would be perfectly keeping with the rest of the cold war if the Soviets were up to something and yet, equally, Americans were supporting Israel partly to block wehat they saw as a Soviet advance that wasn’t part of their game-plan at all. Where does it end? Where do you start trusting your enemies? Or is everything they’re going to do push you into a war you don’t want? Hulke says that if you stare at the other side long enough you’ll always see an excuse for all-out war, but sometimes, just sometimes, your enemies realty aren’t your enemies at all but people who want to survive just like you. Hulke has studied enough history, however, to know that wars are rarely about one single trigger event but all the longterm causes that lead up to them and that their roots really come from both paranoia and injustice. Both sides think the other side is up to no good, when really if they’d worked together from the first and overcome their mutual enemy, The Master, then the universe would be a better place. This is really, of course, a story about being at the frontier between each other, how we respect the space that exists between each other, but how if we try we can find common ground and an understanding that’s better for all of us despite our differences. Politically this is ‘The Silurians’ all over again, a story about how two species fighting over the same territory can find common ground and learn to share. A moral lessons as true on the playgrounds as in empires in space, a common recurrence of the human condition with a lesson each and every generation has to learn eventually, or perish. If, as Sydney Newman realised when he was commissioning it, Dr Who is really an extended version of Cowboys and Indians in space then this is the truce, when the tools of war are replaced by the pipes of peace and there can be no more important moral message than that. ‘Frontier’ is the Hulkiest Hulke story that ever lived then, as left-wing a Dr Who story as any you’ll see, written by a practicing member of the communist party who believes that our ‘enemies’ had more in common with us than we realised and exactly the sort of thing Dr Who should be doing, even if – in pure space and alien terms – a bit of a letdown, given that because of the way the plot’s written the Draconians don’t really do much other than talk and sulk, just like we are. 

 It’s a clever script that keeps us on our toes throughout. The first third of the plot makes you think that the Draconians, gentle gentile reptilians, are secretly aggressive like many a Dr Who twist when wars break out with the Humans (I mean, they must be named after draconian or harsh laws for a reason, right?!) Then after we see things from their point of view you think the Humans are the real aggressors like many other a Dr Who twist, only they’re innocent too. Actually each side has been respecting the treaties drawn up to keep people safe and separate but the distrust and fear of what the other side is up to is a powder keg waiting for something to light it. What the humans don’t see (and which Jo only half-sees) is that a master of manipulation has been behind it all the time with a lit stick, using a device that emits soundwaves to convince each species that they’re seeing things that just aren’t there. And who could that master be except (spoilers, but not really given that in this era he’s in every other flipping story) The Master himself? Suddenly all becomes clear: he’s the one whose been stirring up trouble, making two species who only want peace head for war. Aha you think, that’s that then, plot sorted – and then (more spoilers) there’s another twist as The Master ends up selling everyone out to The Daleks, the real villains of the piece (though not till the following story as it happens). Hulke was a master (no, not that master!) of making you feel for everyone in turn: the Draconians (who are really rather sweet), the Humans (who are just naturally suspicious – as anyone would be they’ve had so many invasions of their home world by now), the Doctor and Jo (as the only people who can see the truth and who stick to it even when nobody listens to them) and even, shock horror, The Master, who is a far more rounded character and pitiable character here, in Roger Delgado’s last appearance, than he has been for most of his run. Politics in the future aren’t any easier or diplomatic than in the present be it 1973 or 2023 and the fall-out of the conflict is well handled, growing more and more out of control as the episodes mount up. 

That’s a lot of ground for any story to cover, although the sad truth is that we hear about what’s going on rather than see it firsthand. There are more scenes of being locked up and escaping per minute than probably any other Who story, with both the humans and Draconians distrustful of The Doctor and Jo, while The Master locks his old enemy up for safekeeping too. Poor Jo only spends half the first episode and half the sixth free: in every other one she’s staring at prison bars, with or without the Doctor. We also see very little of space considering that it’s actually in the title: we see the Draconians on their plush spaceship and the humans on their grimy one and we get a quick run around with Ogrons London’s alien-looking West Bank when nobody’s looking, but that’s about it. Enjoying ‘Frontier In Space’ is often an exercise in patience, as Hulke writes a realistic skirmish in more or less real-time that at times leaves you reaching for the skip button. The good news though is all these empty spaces provide for another frontier of sorts, with more emotion and little quiet character moments than we’ve had in years, since Ian and Barbara were on board The Tardis. Some of my favourite scenes in ‘Frontier’ have nothing to do with the plot at all but are some of the most ‘human’ moments of the 3rd Dr era: this is the story where Pertwee’s Dr gives his much quoted scene about travelling to see a hermit who, rather than offer the secret to life, merely showed a new way of viewing the world he was on so that that what he’d dismissed as ordinary became extraordinary again (a strong candidate for the most Dr Whoy scene of them all), as the Doctor suddenly realised the drab grey world that reflected the way he was feeling was really in vivid colour and his life could be too if only he changed his mindset. This is also the story with the lesser known anecdote about the giant rabbit pink elephant and purple horse who attended the Third Intergalactic Peace Conference (the Doctor destroying a perfectly good medusoid mind probe with this information when it found he was telling the truth), which is one of the series’ funniest bits of surrealism. You’ll find yourself cheering on Jo as never before as this hapless assistant, who spent her first story ‘Terror Of The Autons’ trying to blow the Doctor up when The Master hypnotised her and has been on the cuter side of clumsy ever since, not only stands up to The Master but becomes the only human clever enough to cancel out his brainwashing. Both are at their peak here and their obvious affection for the, on and off screen, shines through. 

 As for The Master he was rarely better than here both in terms of Hulke’s dialogue and Roger Delgado’s masterful performance, where his suave prim and proper demeanour, much like those of the Draconians themselves, conceals a cruel streak that runs through him like a stick of rock. Hulke views The Master a little differently to other writers where he’s an outright villain whose evil because he just is. In Hulke’s hands he’s a stirrer, poking humanity with a stick like a boy with an ant’s nest to see what would happen and to enjoy the chaos he unleashes. The fact Earth happens to be the Doctor’s favourite planet is part of the fun but he’s almost friendly with the Doctor here, as if he’s playing a prank on someone he likes making look silly, almost with affection behind the teasing, rather than the timelord with evil coursing through his veins the way he was in ‘Terror Of the Autons’. The Master almost pleads for The Doctor to pat him on the head and tell him how clever he’s been, desperate to make the universe reflect the chaos he carries in his heart beneath all that charm, which here more than ever is just a front for a bitter ball of spite and jealousy another people getting the peace he so badly desires. The Master’s wonderfully sarcastic here (oh to have a baddy with a sense of humour behind the intensity for a change!), telling Jo ‘you have my sympathies’ and rolling his eyes as the Doctor starts talking about olden days and knowing the pair so well that he even guesses, correctly, that plucky Jo will find a way to escape her cell and writing that into his Master plan. He also finds time to read arguably the first ever scifi book H G Wells’ ‘War Of the Worlds’, a fabulous character moment (The Doctor, in reply, reads H G Wells’ Time Machine’ in ‘The TV Movie’. Which is ironic given that this is one of the few Whos that doesn’t borrow from Wells somewhere: this isn’t an invasion or a story about time travel or set in a lost jungle for instance it’s a political negotiation of the sort that simply didn’t exist in the nineteenth century age of empire and conquest, one of the few Dr Who stories Wells could never have written in his time).The scenes between the three regulars, each trying to outdo the others, are real highlights of this story – so much so it’s almost a shame when the plot kicks back in. 

 Alas, though, its Delgado’s last performance. The actor died mere weeks after filming this story when he was in Turkey filming for a low budget movie that in English translated as ‘Tibetan Bell’. Not having the budget to pay for limousine cars the movie hired a taxi to rush Roger to the set, only he got lost and was running late so decided to take a short cut, the taxi careering into a ravine and killing Roger and two of the production crew on impact (though the driver miraculously survived). It was a devastating blow that had huge repercussions for the rest of the show: Pertwee was devastated at the loss of one of his oldest friends and particularly sad for his widow Kismet: he’d helped introduce the pair to each other and they’d enjoyed many dinners while filming for Who. Without Delgado around a lot of that fun that Pertwee brought to the show just wasn’t there anymore and his death played a big role in Jon deciding to give up his Tardis key after another year (although, technically, what he actually did was go to the BBC and ask for a lot more money or he’d step down; the BBC couldn’t afford it and set about finding a replacement). Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were distraught too: they’d planned a big finale for the following year that would explain a great deal about The Master and his motivations that they never got to write, where he would turn out to be the Doctor’s brother who had kept him alive all these years out of family loyalty and who dies by sacrificing his arch-nemesis in a sudden act of kindness (plot elements that are recycled in ‘Planet Of Fire’ ‘The Last Of The Timelords’ ‘The End Of Time’ and especially ‘The Doctor Falls’ amongst others). As repetitive as The Master turning up every five minutes gets his charm was the perfect foil for the Doctor’s gruff bluster and one of the finest actors to ever work in the series and, though recast often, The Master is never quite as effective a foil again (see the ‘prequels’ section under ‘The Deadly Assassin’ for what happens to The Master next in various often contradictory media). The worst of it is, because everyone was expecting a big finale the following year, this is one story where the Delgado Master doesn’t get a proper goodbye. A mix up during filming (and a vetoed ‘Ogron eating monster’ that apparently looked too silly on screen even for 1970s Dr Who so the director refused to use it, except for one shot in the distance) means that you don’t see what happens to The Master in the skirmish at the end. His last act is to shoot the Doctor – but uncharacteristically its by accident, in a panic, so that he doesn’t even seem to have noticed that he’s wounded his mortal enemy (indeed, the wound wasn’t in the original script at all: Terrance wrote the second half of episode six and the first half of episode one of ‘Planet Of the Daleks’ to better cover up the join between them, after deciding what Hulke had written wouldn’t work as filmed). 

 In fact the ending’s a let down all round – alas that Dalek reveal, added in a desperate attempt to make a story in this anniversary year as epic as The Dalek’s Masterplan had once been and equalling it at twelve episodes, isn’t one last great twist in the story so much as a re-set button for a different and most inferior simple action story that can’t match the depth and intellect of this one. It feels like a cop out in so many ways: there was a better and more complete ending in the script (and the book) but even that feels like a poor reward, comparatively speaking, after following this ever-moving story across two and a half hours. It’s also so out of character that The master should be working for The Daleks, who are everything he isn’t: they don’t have his subtle or charm. While it makes sense that all those other tyrants and dictators across Dr Who history should want to work with The Daleks or The Cybermen out of power (most of them played by Kevin Stoney) what does The Master ever get out of this? He’s meddling with earth history out of a petty feud with the Doctor and knows better than anyone that you can’t trust your colleagues in a war; surely he’s bright enough to know the Daleks are only going to double cross them. Plus he really really really wants to kill the Doctor himself: handing his arch enemy over just doesn’t have the same satisfaction. The moment we see The master turn up on a cliff with the Daleks in tow has never made him look more like a bully out to steal your lunch money with his goons in tow – and this mere minutes after he was delightfully dancing round the Doctor as an intellectual exercise, taking such glee in outsmarting him. 

 There are a few other ideas that don’t quite work too: particularly the pacing. Because the sets are so big Hulke has divided them up that way, so that for instance we get more or less a whole episode set on board an earth vessel, 26th century earth (via the South Bank), a penal colony on the moon, The master’s prison ship, the Draconian Empire headquarters and a quarry. This helps the feel of a story increasing in size with every throw of the dice, but of course each episode has to begin and end roughly at this point of being somewhere new for the sake of easier filming and drama just isn’t that neat, so the plot-beats seem weird. It’s a definite plus point that everything unfolds in real time the way it properly should, but it makes things feel awfully slow, especially in the modern age when we tend to watch stories in one go (something nobody had planned for in 1973) but even at the time most fans were eager to skip to the end. We keep seeing things that make us gasp, but then seeing them again just a few minutes later. The model shots for instance are really good (part of a job-lot bought from Gerry Anderson when their sets were being broken up, most of them seen in Space: 1999), the futuristic earth vessels looking exactly like what our future designs might look like for real and the Draconians being just alien enough, each making you go wow look at that the first time we see them, while by episode six they’ve had so much screentime you never ever want to see another one. To keep the momentum of this story moving Hulke can’t risk the Doctor getting involved directly to quickly or he’ll solve it in seconds, so he does everything he can to keep him apart. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. To sum this story up the little moments between the plot when the Doctor and Jo are locked up are the best bits, but not so good that you want to see yet another one an episode later when the pair are locked up again. The cliffhangers especially are some of the weakest around: we’ve seen a lot of them before and the end of episode four is particularly daft (The Master beams a message to an Ogron, big deal).’Frontier’ is, it has to be said, one of the few Who stories that works better as a novel than it does as a bit of TV (as the far less descriptive ‘Dr Who And The Space War’). I’d also take The Keller Device from ‘The Mind Of Evil’ over The master’s very similar hypnosound device in this story anyday: though both are subtle cleverly written stories about phobias making good people turning bad you really feel the horror of it far more in the earlier story; here it’s just another space toy. Some of the science is questionable too: a reader actually wrote into TV Action pointing out that things outside in space can’t catch fire because there wouldn’t be any oxygen, to which a shame-faced production team tried to pretend it was ‘just sparks’ from the friction of the shuttle in flight, fooling no one. 

 The Draconians themselves are a highly interesting race, more intellectually savvy than most warlike aliens we get to meet in Who and perhaps the most obvious popular monster the modern series hasn’t brought back yet but must surely inevitably turn up one day, and with very striking costumes that are both alien and strangely ‘human’ given that they involve less of a ‘mask’ than usual, with half the actors’ facial expressions still there. John Friedlander’s masks are fabulous and some of the best in the series, a particular favourite of Pertwee’s who regularly told the story about chatting with an extra between scenes (about space travel) and ‘forgetting’ that he was in costume and not a real life alien (if the masks look familiar they were based on a most unlikely source – needing a ‘one size fits all’ mask in a hurry the costume department based them on a face mask they had in stock, which happened to belong to comedian Dave Allen). John Woodnutt is excellent in everything he was erver in (her’s Merlin in ‘Knightmare’ as well as multiple Dr Whos) and makes the Draconian Emperor come alive, but his lackeys are a pretty similar lot. It makes sense, given our limited knowledge of life in the universe, that aliens should have evolved out of reptiles and the idea of having a calm cold-blooded race who don’t give much emotion away is a strong one. Even so, we don’t really get to know them as individuals in the same way as we do, say, The Ice Warriors or even The Sensorites. They’re conglomerate whole that all tend to think alike and with an oddly sexist society that banishes female Draconians from speaking in public or having any senior roles (that’s more something I’d expect from the Terry Nation script than the Malcolm Hulke one). Even if it’s there to show that Draconian culture, too, is flawed and they’re at roughly the same stage in evolution as we are there’s no scene where the Doctor points this out. Just as well this is one of those stories that shows Jo off at her best to redress the balance or this plot-point would feel unforgivably, well, ‘alien’ now. On the other hand the view of Earth society is as utopian as Who ever gets: at Terrance’s suggestion the earth president in 2540 is a woman; for context Margaret Thatcher, our first female prime minister, isn’t even leader of the opposition yet. There are also black news casters on TV: the ever wonderful Louis Mahoney (the older Billy Shipton, the policeman who fancies Sally Sparrow in ‘Blink’ and my favourite character in ‘Being Human’) reading the news in a Jamaican accent a few months before Trevor MacDonald became the first person in the ‘real’ world to do the same (that settles, it: Hulke’s clearly been watching Star Trek on the quiet). That said the humans are a pretty faceless bunch too: Hulke has far more fun writing for the regulars than he does the supporting cast, who mostly exists to lock the Doctor up and get hold of the wrong end of the stick. 

At the time using the not-quite-opened London’s South Bank (the Hayward Gallery end) to stand in as a Draconian prison cell was probably clever too – but less so with time when, instead of feeling you’re on an alien planet, you find yourself pulled out of the story and your mind wondering to what Draconian theatrical productions might look like (‘Draconian The Barbarian’ anybody?!) You have to pity the poor homeless people just trying to get some sleep who were moved on by the production team so they can film too, especially the poor chap they couldn’t wake up so they let sleep, only for him to wake up just as an Ogron was looming over the top of him! The Draconian Embassy, too, is a little too obviously just a nice plush 1970s house (one that belonged to director Naomi Capon, who never worked on Dr Who but did work for the BBC and was always loaning her home out for productions by her colleagues). There’s also yet another quarry for the big finale: Beachfields in Reigate. 

 Those are all reasons why ‘Frontier In Space’ isn’t a top-tier classic and as an attempt to match the grandeur, size and scale of ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’ it’s a non-starter: this is a story that’s best when it’s going small not big and the split down the middle between the two stories is as artificial a link as any in the Whoniverse, with one of the most left and one of the most right wing of writers stapled together in such a way that these stories have almost nothing in common with each other, despite being intended from the outset as a twelve-parter split in two. In its own right though ‘Frontier’ is a qualified success, a brilliant story with a scope and a moral message like few others and I have a lot of time for this story whose heart is very much in the right place and which asks all the right questions, whatever the few mistakes about how some of the answers are shown along the way. A lot of fans find this story too ‘talky’ without much action, but when the dialogue is written by someone as brilliant as The Incredible Hulke the action feels like an intrusion anyway; this is a story that’s about more than bangs and flashes (even though the cliffhangers could be better), it’s a spy thriller where everyone is pushed to their emotional limits and savagery that has both the Draconians and The Master acting suave and sophisticated as if they’re attending a dinner party. If you’re patient enough to let this story wash over you, can overlook the odd flaw and appreciate the character moments and action sequences without nodding off too badly during the padding, then you will still find more to love than you will to hate. Much under-rated. 

 POSITIVES + This is the first DW story to give us info-dumps as part of ‘news stories’, an idea Russell T Davies will revive forty-two years later. It’s a great way of providing us with the information we need to follow the story in bitesize pieces without actually needing to see it, allowing us to get the sense of how a wider group of people is reacting to an event without having to lose budget on hordes of extras and which also makes this story feel more ‘real’. When Russell did it though it was less of a surprise: nowadays 24 hour news channels are everywhere and dipping in and out of the news when a big event happens is par for the course. That was less true in 1973, when your only way of knowing that something big had happened was to be watching something else interrupted by a news bulletin. I also really love the fact that in 1973, an age when everyone thought you had to speak the Queen’s English when reading the news or no one would take you seriously, they not only have a Jamaican reading the news but a giant intergalactic space lizard. Now that’s progress! 

 NEGATIVES - You’re The Master, one of the cleverest beings that ever lived and you have all of time and space to choose from as you pick your army and lay your plans of galactic conquest. So why, for goodness sake, do you pick The Ogrons to be your assistants, ape-like simpletons who were they bright enough to own shoes would struggles to use the Velcro, never mind tie their own shoelaces. In a story that’s full of clever people trying to outwit each other by doing clever things they seem even more dense than in their other appearances alongside the Daleks. Their masks are too obviously masks too, all the poorer for being seen next to the brilliant Draconian ones. It’s a bit of a whacking clue, too, that the race we’ve seen working as slaves for The Daleks turn out to be working as slaves for The master and a mysterious shadowy other…who then turn out to be The Daleks Originally the first draft of the script had The Master working with the Cybermen (something that will happen for real in ‘Ascension Of The Cybermen’) but Terry Nation had it in his contract that the Daleks wouldn’t play second fiddle to The Cybermen and nobody wanted to lose the rights to using them so The Ogrons it was. BEST QUOTES: The Master: ‘You know as well as I do that this man does not fear death. I want him to suffer a much worse punishment. My skill and cunning has brought about this war which will make you masters of the galaxy. Leave the Doctor with me and let him see the result of that war. Let him see the galaxy in ruins. Let him see the planet earth that he loves so much in ruins, then exterminate him!’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Love and War’ (1992) is a ‘New Adventures’ book by Paul Cornell that’s one of the best loved in the range (Big Finish also did their own adaptation in 2012). Set thirty years after ‘frontier’ it sees the 7th Doctor and Ace witnessing the tentative peace between the Humans and Draconians that followed the events of the story and set on a neutral planet, ‘Heaven’, that’s kind of the ‘Switzerland’ of the Whoniverse that was the last standout to remain independent of the war. It’s a graveyard world filled with the dead of all sides in the war, mostly uninhabited except for a nomadic tribe a little like the Sevateem whom Ace instantly befriends while the Doctor visits the library and gets his nose stuck in an ancient text. Also hanging out with the locals is future New Adventures companion Bernice (Benny) Summerfield, prototype of River Song and future star of her own Big Finish spin-off series. They all help each other out when the planet is infected by fungal alien The Hoothi who have even infected the dead in their graves. Once again the Doctor is acting shadowy and mysterious and Ace is appalled by his actions in this story, so much so she elects to stay behind with Benny leaving instead – presumably it’s this falling out Ace refers t in both ‘Power Of the Doctor’ and the ‘Tales From The Tardis’ edition of ‘The Curse Of Fenric’. Very nice, especially the scene-setting early part, though it would have been better still with Draconians actually in it rather than noises-off. 

 Benny meets the Draconians again in ‘Bernice Summerfield and The Draconian Rage’ (2003) part of Big Finish’s long running Benny spin-off range. In this story twenty million Draconians have just died in a suicide pact caused by an ancient curse the locals don’t understand at all. They’re forced to send for Benny as an established archaeologist despite the fact that she’s everything they fear and mistrust, being human and female. Benny uncovers a conspiracy similar to the one The Master uses in ‘Frontier’ and an assassination attempt similar to ‘The Deadly Assassin’ in a gripping story that Malcolm Hulke would have been proud of. 

‘Paper Cuts’ (2009), number #125 in Big Finish’s main range, is a 6th Doctor story that – finally! – sees the Draconians make a full appearance in the main series. Marc Platt has fun making this story a true sequel where the Doctor has become almost a mythical heroic calming presence, something shattered when they send for his help again and find old Sixie staring back at them instead of Dr Three. The problem, too, isn’t a natural fit for the Doctor to solve: there’s a power vacuum with a fragmented Draconian society unsure which o their kind to promote when the old Emperor dies. For a moment it looks as if he’d going to be elected Draconian Emperor before the locals see sense. Platt really understands the Draconians here with more of Hulke-style characterisation, though the plot’s a bit thin – by Platt usually highly complex standards anyway! 

‘Catastrophea’ (1998) is part of the ‘missing adventures’ series of novels, this one featuring the 3rd Dr and Jo. The Draconians only turn up at the end briefly but the story is very much inspired by ‘Frontier’ with the Doctor acting as mediator in an inter-planetary war before the novel pulls back to show the bigger pcture that it’s in the middle of this same interplanetary war. The locals really should know better than to name their planet ‘Katastropheia’, that’s asking for trouble! Not one of the better books in the series, although it’s interesting to see Terrance Dicks writing for his pal Malcolm’s creations and seeing just how much input he has a script editor into the original script. 

 The Draconians look particularly good in comic strip form and found a home in the pages of Dr Who magazine for ‘War Game’ (issues 100-101) in 1985 when again Colin Baker was the Doctor. This is more of a comedy script, with the Doctor and his shape-shifting whifferdill companion stuck in the shape of a penguin (no really) Frobisher sold into slavery in a Draconian market. This story treats the Draconians the way Moffat treats the Sontarons, as a race everyone else thinks is noble but alooks a little stupid out of context.

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