The Abominable Snowmen
(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 30/9/1967-4/11/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Peter Bryant, writers: Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, director: Gerald Blake)
Rank: 58
'I'm a yeti, on a jetty, feeling wetty and petty and bright! And so furry that I could stay warm all night
The Great Intelligence is charming. Even when self-harming. It's alarming how charming he feels. Not like us yeti. Though nobody is quite sure either of us is real'.
They’re not fast (really really not fast – in the great Dr Who Olympic championships I dream of seeing on screen one day they’d come second last to the Myrka and the Ergon, with Erato and Aggedor disqualified for accidentally demolishing the course), but they sure are fury-ous, as Dr Who offers its own take on the ‘abominable snowmen’ myth, with the yeti of mythology turning out to be robot guard-dogs controlled by a disembodied voice with ideas above its station (only to then have the real ‘yeti’ walk on with a cameo at the end). Because, well, it’s Dr Who. This is the first time really that Dr Who borrowed from existing myths and legends, ‘explaining’ them away with scifi gobbledegook so a lot of future Who stories (including pretty much half the Tom Baker run owe this story big time. In common with a lot of the 1960s Who stories I long to have experienced it on first broadcast, before lots of guidebooks gave the game away about who they were before you got to watch it (err…sorry, I guess this is another one!) and because the show had never done anything like this before (nowadays we’re so primed by things like this that it’s more of a surprise when an alien hasn’t been hanging round Earth pretending to be something else), plus of course the fact that 5/6ths of it is missing (and as fun as the animations are they’re no substitute for the real thing - or, indeed, the collection of telesnap photographs from the episodes with soundtracks, which is the best way to experience the missing stories whatever the BBC seems to think). Not for the first or last time in the 2nd Dr era this story is all about a human colony cut off from the outer world under siege from an alien menace that wants to take over the Earth and picks people off one by one as the tension builds across episodes. That, however, is where the similarities with other stories from the era ends, for this base is not like other bases and ‘The Abominable Snowman’ are not like other monsters. We’re in the Himalayas (actually Nant Ffrancon in Snowdonia, Wales, the first Dr Who filming in the country nearly forty years before it became the Whoniverse’s permanent base) on a rare invasion away from the home counties. The monster is local legend the yeti, who (spoilers) actually turn out to be robots controlled by a disembodied voice. And the colony is a Buddhist monastery, where the people have retreated to be good and kind and meditate and get in touch with the next world, only to be hijacked in this one by the Great Intelligence whispering seductive thoughts of menace in their heads. Many Dr Who alien invasions are about attack but this one is by stealth; most Dr Who villains rant so loudly you’ll find yourself instinctively reaching for the volume control every time a cliffhanger turns up, but this one makes you strain your ears to hear what’s going on; most of all there’s many a Dr Who plot that degenerates into being a thoughtless runaround but this one is all about intelligence, from the name of the enemy on down, a battle of wits between two of the biggest brains the universe has ever seen.
The monastery setting particularly is a brave invention and not like anything else in the series in its first four years - up to this point in Who history the only references to religions we’ve had have been ‘The Crusade’ (where, oddly enough, very few people mention religion) and ‘The Aztecs’ (whose belief in the sun God is shown to be ‘wrong’) but it’s an obvious theme for a series that sits on the boundaries between magic and science to explore (more, much more, on this concept in 1971 story ‘The Daemons’ when the series starts conjuring up devils). They still don’t dare go near Christianity because in 1967 there would most certainly be letters and chances are they would be in trouble for going after Muslim or Jewish settings. Buddhism though is seen as fair game – after all, it’s not very Buddhist to write a strongly worded anything in protest – and it’s an apt choice. Writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, by their own admission knew very little about Dr Who before submitting this story – they commissioned it purely because they were friends of 2nd Dr Patrick Troughton and picked up on him moaning about the quality of recent scripts at a dinner party and figured they probably couldn’t do any worse. Keen to keep their leading man sweet, the production team of the time would have pretty much accepted anything they were given (arguably that’s what happened with their third go for the series ‘The Dominators’, a story so bad and out of kilter with the series that at times it seems like someone must be blackmailing someone to actually get this story put on air). More by accident than design, the writers happen to pick up on one of the key cornerstones of this programme. Many Dr Who ideas come from Buddhism – ‘awakening’ to the idea that there is more to life than the way humans normally live in a capitalist (or communist) culture, the strong morals, the idea of karma for the baddies and vengeance for the goodies, the idea that fate pulls the Tardis towards just where it needs to go to save people, the thought that there’s a bigger universe out there than the one we can see and that this one is an ‘illusion’, frowning on gratuitous violence except in self-defence, the idea that time exists constantly and is only experienced by human brains in a particular order because that’s all they can cope with, that the best path to happiness is to live in the ‘now’ whatever time zone that ‘now’ happens to be in and most of all the concept of ‘regeneration’, of becoming someone else through growth; all very Dr Who ideals (though the Jamieism religion, whoops no that’s worship of Highlanders in kilts and very different, Jainism is even more DW-like than Buddhism as it happens, not least because belief in life on other planets is one of its central facets). The Pertwee era is the biggest example of this thanks to producer Barry Letts’ beliefs that flavoured his co-writes for the series, particularly the showdown ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ where the Dr dies not by alien attack but through his shadow side of curiosity, ‘dying’ and becoming a new person when he ‘faces his fears’. It’s there from the beginning though: as early as the cavemen in ‘An Unearthly Child’ the tribes are believing in unseen natural forces and learning that being nice to people means you’re more likely to live longer.
As such it’s a wonder Dr Who hadn’t done something like this before, though September 1967 is the perfect time for a story about eastern philosophy: we’re smack in the middle between The Byrds, The Kinks and The Beatles all staking a claim to getting Indian ‘sounds’ in popular culture for the first time (on ‘Eight Miles High’ ‘See My Friends’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ respectively) and The Beatles retreating to Rishikesh India to do pretty much what the characters in this story were set to do, the point where for most of their audience back home they ‘went potty’, while acid casualties were beginning to mount up (this is the very month most people agree Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett went from being quirky eccentric to having a mental condition). It’s not quite the summer of love when joy was in the air, but it’s not quite the Winter of discontent either when a pessimism began to creep in across hippie records like ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ ‘After Bathing At Baxters’ ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ and ‘The Who Sell Out’ – more the sort of Autumn of light drizzle. The 1930s setting is fooling no one: this is the writers talking about what’s happening under their noses, right now, with a certain disdain it has to be said. They weren’t alone: till 1967 most parents and grandparents who’d watched the rise of rock and roll considered it something their children would grow out rather than anything dangerous, but then the Vietnam riots, the outrageous costumes, the long hair and the belief in concepts like peace, love and mysticism they couldn’t relate to at all began to add up and left many of the elder viewers watching this story on first transmission feeling as if they were sharing planet Earth with a bunch of aliens. It’s one of the running themes of this book (and this blog) that a lot of Dr Who stories, particularly in the 1960s, are discussions between parents and off-spring watching about what’s going to happen in the future when the youth grow up (yes, even in stories set in the past), with Dr Who one of the few programmes regularly watched by both adults and children. Stories like ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ ‘The Space Museum’ ‘The Web Planet’ ‘The War Machines’ and ‘The Macra Terror’ are from the youth’s point of view and how they want the future to be different, to free themselves of the parental and grandparental trauma of world wars. Stories like ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ and ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ are more nuanced, about how mankind is doomed to repeat cycles and end up in wars, whatever the generation.
Haisman and Lincoln are unique in writing for this series in that they only seem to be on the side of the ‘adults’: in their three stories wars are a necessary evil, pacifism is just an open invitation to mass invasion and trying to solve problems in any way other than militarily means you look like a big girl’s blouse (literally given what they’re wearing in ‘The Dominators’). It’s no surprise that the Doctor’s days working alongside the army begin on their watch (with their second story ‘Web Of Fear’), while this story is similarly cheeky in that it hints, as best it can, that all the great celebrated thoughts from Eastern philosophy that the youngsters are all getting into are all just alien gibberish and make no sense in the cold light of day. It’s a sign, though, of how little people in a still predominantly Christian country knew about other faiths that the names the writers give the characters in this story, ‘stolen’ wholesale from Buddhist texts, seems to have passed the production team, the actors and the vast majority of the general public by. Actually Padmasambhva, who turns out to be the baddy (after possession by The Great Intelligence), was the name of a ‘goody’ who actually lived in Tibetan folklore: he’s the author of ‘The Tibetan Book Of The Dead’ and kept Tibet safe from evil spirits much like the yetis do in this story, by guarding the gates to the sacred buildings, without turning out to be an evil disembodied voice as he is here. Though Buddhists don’t tend to get angry and seek revenge, so the production team were quite safe, I’m surprised there wasn’t at least some outcry – it’s still quite a rude thing to do to make one of the biggest noblest figures of a religion out to be a ruthless killer turning people into zombies (I mean, it’s on a par with turning Jesus into a Cyberman really). In other words, you can tell the writers consider all the wisdom and spiritual teachings coming out of India (and Tibet, as in this story) are a bunch of fairy stories not to be believed in at all. Which puts this story in danger of seeming very un-Dr Who.
Mercifully, this story is a bit gentler about it all than its two twins and is more banter than bullying, a tease about how going to gurus in the Far East to search for ‘answers’ to life might not be the best thing for any of us when for all we know they could just be tuning in to some alien voice that wants to enslave us all. Thankfully the big hero amongst the supporting cast, who sees through all the lies quicker than the learned mystics, is Thomni, whose practically a flower child himself. The fact its set in an era the writers themselves lived through as children when the yeti boom was at its peak and turned out to be a ‘mirage’ (Haisman was born in 1928, Lincoln 1930) makes it feel more as a gentle ‘we’ve been there before you and there was nothing out there, so be careful’ warning rather than the right-wing travesty that is ‘The Dominators’ (a work that at times feels less like a story and more of an excuse to point at hippies and laugh). At its heart this story ‘works’ in a way its two successors don’t (at least for me) because, above and beyond the Buddhist messages, this is still a straightforward Dr Who story about right and wrong, of being careful who you listen to and making your own mind up about things. Padmasambhva might be treated as a learned man and professor but he’s far too trusting, falling into the clutches of alien voices in his head. The monks who work under him so believe in his inner innate wisdom that they go along with it, even when his policies start turning nasty and cruel (after all, the first thing they do after seeing the Doctor is lock him up and threaten him, which really isn’t very Buddhist of them). Professor Travers, our token European, has spent his life tracking down the yeti but he’s become so caught up in his quest that he’s lost sight of the bigger picture: he wants his discovery to benefit mankind but there’s an alien presence out to harm us all and he’s just gone along with it as the easiest way to reach his goal.
The biggest twist on the usual way of doing things comes at the beginning though: for once it’s the Doctor meddling with the monks, rather than The Meddling Monk messing with the Doctor. The opening refers to an unseen story (the first time that happens and it isn’t just an anecdote and pure name-dropping) and in many ways the Dr’s past actions causes the story to happen by him having ‘stolen’ the holy ghanta of the monastery (basically a bell, the Earthly equivalent of the Tardis’ cloister bell, though it is a sacred Buddhist symbol meaning ‘balance’ and representing our more feminine side; notably there are no females in this story bar Victoria). Quite why the Dr took it is never made clear – he’s not usually in the habit of stealing things, Tardis aside – but he seems to treat the whole thing as if he’s just late returning a library book rather than causing fear and panic (the upside of having a time machine I suppose is that normally you can borrow things and return them before anybody realises; perhaps that’s why he claims to have read every book in the universe later – he manages to avoid library fines). The Great Intelligence causes this story to happen partly because it wants the ghanta back. And in the meantime has been sending robot-yetis out into the wilds to do physically do what disembodied voices usually can’t (dibs on a sequel to this story where they turn up in the foreign sections of the British Museum). Which has made me wonder: Haisman and Lincoln professed not to know Dr Who but they did know Troughton well and probably got from him the unusual demographic that meant the series appealed to the very young up to the very old and a few snapshots of what the series stood for and its’ more liberal leanings in between fighting monsters to the death. So is that the whole reason for this rather oddball plot – that programmes like Dr Who, which promised a better more hopeful future based on peace and unity, inadvertently cause a future where we’re all under attack and the namby-pamby young of 1967 don’t know how to fight back anymore?
The result is a tale that’s one of the more thoughtful Troughton stories, one that whether by accident or design suitably leaves a lot of space for thinking and meditation on the themes between the big ‘action’s scenes, a story that’s solved more or less by thinking hard. Traditionally 99% of Dr Who stories are influenced (i.e. ripped off) Quatermass, the 1950s serials by Nigel Kneale that ran in the 1950s and had aliens running amok. We know the writers were fans because ‘Web Of Fear’ is the most blatant of the many many homages (i.e. knock-offs) in the Whoniverse, right down to having an alien ‘discovered’ in the underground. Well ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ isn’t like those others: this isn’t a tale of mass invasion or discovered entity deep underground – nope, the writers take their inspiration from ‘The Abominable Snowmen’, a 1957 film about mythological beasties written by…Nigel Kneale. Ah. So much for that originality then! Sticking the Quatermass-like Doctor in a story that’s otherwise very unlike Quatermass feels, in retrospect, like the single most ‘Dr Who’ thing Dr Who can be doing (having fallen out with Dr Wjho post –Dominators’ and figuring that TV was a passing medium people forgot easily the writers even tried to re-write this story as a novel using another Kneale series, using the explorer Professor Challenger). That said, somebody had to have the idea first – considering they’d never written scifi before the writers quickly come to grips with it, putting the threat in the shadows so that it lurks rather than invades and adding the idea of possession (something only computers have really done in Dr Who before) which offers a twist on the usual formula of Dr Who stories being all about physical control of the planet and making it more about the mental control of the individual.
They clearly understand this series too. Though it’s not exactly high on thrills and spills there are many lovely scenes to enjoy with some of the most delightful Dr-and-companion scenes of the era. Jamie is at his best here, resourceful brave and protective, far from the comedy dunce of most of season 3, while Victoria gets more to do than any of her other stories by far, alas paying for a rare display of bravery by getting brainwashed (which might be why she tends to stay back in future stories). As for the Doctor, he’s more in the middle of the action and less on the fringes than he usually is in this regeneration with a lot of great comedy scenes along the way. Also one of the most horrific: even the Dr gets possessed at the end of this story and while we can’t see it (only episode two of this story exists, alas) it looks like a tour de force from the telesnaps and audio soundtrack as even our ‘hero’ falls prey to an invisible force he can’t fight off in the usual way. The supporting cast are strong too. Professor Travers, played by real life Victoria’s real life dad, is a great part: in normal circumstances he would be the ‘outsider’ at this monastery but instead he becomes our eyes and ears, the very English link with a world that’s ‘alien’ in two ways, his belief in an unseen force that lies just out of reach actually closer to the truth than the Tibetans, even if the yeti he searches for turn out to be aliens. Thomni, too, is one of the unsung heroes of DW supporting characters: for all that his elders treat him as a junior he’s actually closer to the pure heart and noble spirit they preach about and the first to believe the Doctor’s stories and see the truth of what’s really going on. Considering he’s a disembodied voice and a possessed man with fingernails for so much of the story Wolfe Morris’ whispering Great Intelligence has a lot of presence too and is one of DW’s better baddies, giving Dr Who a whole style of threat it hadn’t explored before: the sheer terror of someone being inside your head while you’re fully conscious and aware of what it’s doing but powerless to stop it is more frightening than a Dalek invasion in many ways (after all, you can’t hide behind a sofa to avoid a disembodied voice). Also, is that really Harold Pinter as bit part ‘Ralpachan’ (the guard at the gates) using his regular ‘acting’ name of ’David Baron’, back in the days when the hard-up playwright got extra money acting on the side? I’d like to think so, as it looks very like him and his characteristic squint, just with a fake moustache and no spectacles, even if the writer himself denied it when he was asked (and he sounded embarrassed rather than dismissive)– if nothing else I like to think the long...pauses...when… Padmasambhva...speaks had an influence on his famous writing style (while much of this story could be titled ‘Waiting For Yeti’ as they don’t turn up properly till quite a way through; another extra is the spitting image of David Tennant...except it can’t be because he isn’t born for another four years yet.
The result is a story that’s big on atmosphere and ideas, that works to different rules than the usual plot-based stories of the era and comes in different shades of terror: for once no one on screen is actually an outright ‘baddy’, they’re just easily manipulated. Compared to the more straight-forward sequel ‘Web Of Fear’ the difference is night and day: that story is a perfectly watchable action yarn with yetis roaming around being scary. This story, though, makes them more than just furry foot-soldiers: the yetis are a shadowy presence throughout, called to action by a whispering voice and the invisible tug of a moved playing piece. The yeti belong here, amongst the mountain ridges and caves of mock-Tibet, far more than they do down the London underground and this earlier, cuddlier look suits them more too I think (The ‘Web’ ones have clearly been on a diet). The spheres that move, calling the robot yeti to them with their distinctive robotic chiming, are highly memorable too, particularly if you were watching on first transmission (I’m willing to bet this was the first time probably 90% of the viewing audience had heard a sound played on a synthesiser too, a good ten years before they became commonplace, and that the soundtrack felt even more other-worldly in 1967 than it does today). There’ no other story in this series quite like it and in an era that’s the most formulaic in so many ways (humanity cut off from civilisation and guarding something of big importance that’s invaded by an alien with bad intentions) it’s impressive just how different this story is to its peers, turning the usual formulas on their head.
Of course, as so often with this series, not everything works: this is one of those stories that’s oddly paced, with the cliffhangers coming at just the wrong time in the story just ad things were beginning to build. This story spends such a long time delaying the yeti invasion, seeing them arriving in ones and twos first for no good reason really, that there’s a real lull in the middle, then episode six struggles to keep going and have anything to say after the previous cliffhanger of the Dr’s possession is resolved. It’s a bit of a shame, too, that a few more Buddhist principles couldn’t be tacked into the storyline – after inspiring the starting point and the names the writers seem to forget about it and just have the Doctor doing something clever with science the way he always does (I suspect the writers were simply taking the mickey but script editor Peter Bryant at least is taking the idea seriously – he should have pushed for that theme to tie up a bit more; after all if ever an enemy needed to get its comeuppance through karma and what it did to the people it tried ton possess it’s a story set in Buddhist retreat, so it’s a shame the Doctor simply fights it off at the end as per normal). The same with the returned ghanta, which is such a driving force in episode one but is forgotten after that; it ends up being just a means of having the Dr visit the monastery, except that he’s the Doctor – he’s never usually needed an excuse to go wandering beyond his own curiosity before (which would have made this story even more of a Buddhist parable, more akin to ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ to come).
Still, the safe ending is a shame mostly because this is a story that takes so many impressive risks: where other 2nd Dr stories are all about plot this one centres around character; where most baddies shout this one whispers; where most stories are about the discovery of facts this one is primarily about faith. Is it Dr Who’s best? Not quite. It still feels as if there are a few loose ends in this story that never quite tie up. Is it Dr Who’s most Buddhist story? Actually not that either – that’s Kinda’ and its sequel ‘Snakedance’, which do for 1980s Who what this story did for the 1960s (and ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ did for the 1970s; goodness only knows what the new-Who equivalent would be; ‘Turn Left’ with its giant beetle changing people’s life paths perhaps?) But it is one of Dr Who’s most intelligent stories, one that really stretches the intellect of everyone involved from the Great Intelligence down to the Doctor down to us, the viewer, one that manages to juggle big concepts with the need to fit in with the other more action-based Dr Who stories and which introduced a big monster (in all senses of the word) that manages to be both genuinely threatening and unsettling and super cute all at the same time. You wouldn‘t think one of these writers was responsible for the tosh that was ‘The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail’, the book that inspired ‘The Da Vinci Code’ nonsense would you?! Forget those made-up symbols by painters that really weren’t there to begin with at all, this is a story that makes far better use of the idea of codes and symbolisms and throws in a cuddly robot yeti for good measure too.
POSITIVES+ The monastery have one of the strangest fashion senses in DW. Given that the followers are all here to be quiet and contemplate their inner minds it’s amazing just quite how outrageous their clobber is across this story. Now, I have all the fashion sense of a potato so what looks weird even for aliens often strikes me as quite normal and I don’t often bother to talk about costumes in this book, but my these hats are quite something, a cross between a jester’s ‘fool hat’ and the sort of bucket hat you see at music festivals (oh for a sequel set at Woodstock!) Even for 1967 it would have looked weird (and again, were the writers just being rude about hippie dress and how ridiculous it all looked?) The only shame is that the 2nd Dr doesn’t get to wear a hat (as far as we can tell from the telesnap photographs); he is, after all, quite a collector of hats.
NEGATIVES - Considering that its a six parter its notable how comparatively tight and pacy ‘Abominable’ is. Right up until Padmasambhava speaks...ve….ry...slow...ly...in….deed …eve…ry…sin…gle….time. Particularly at the end, when the story is at least trying to be full of urgency, the scenes of him whisper-speaking seem tortuously slow. Even that makes a nice change though after a season and a half of people shouting and doing things noisily.
BEST QUOTE: ‘Victoria, I think this is one of those instances where discretion is the better part of the valour. Jamie has an idea’.
Previous: ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ next ‘The Ice Warriors’
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