The Time Monster
(Season 9, Dr 3 with Jo and UNIT, 20/5/1972-24/6/1972, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writers: Robert Sloman and Barry Letts, director: Paul Bernard)
Rank: 62
'Hello, this is the Rani speaking. If The Master's going to control time and become a God while overtaking a lost continent then I have to do the same. So I've gained the power of the crystal Meteroid (yes that's a real thing) so that I can control space and become a Queen while overtaking a lost continent of my own. Welcome to Atlantis' cousin continent Mu: a world full of...Well, cats going mew and cows going moo mostly by the look of things. That's disappointing. Where's Peter Cushing in a toga when you need him?!? That's not fair - he got Ingrid Pitt! On second thoughts, maybe I'll try something else?!'
In which a time ram and an Atlantic minotaur collide in a story that some fans say is a load of bull, but which I have to admit I’ve always loved. One of the biggest differences between watching a Dr Who story live in the 21st centuries is the chance to hear what other people think about them, immediately, without having to wait for your next local meeting, the next newsletter of a fanzine or a letter from a penfriend. It has it’s downsides for sure when some racist xenophobic clowns shout loudly about it, but that feeling of a shared experience across a community is one of the best things about being a fan now I think, especially when it’s a story that gets a lot right and you can all delight in how wonderful this series is. Even when I don’t agree over whether a story is any good or not (and my tastes can vary wildly, as you’ll know from my list already) it’s lovely seeing other fans enjoy a story and often seeing it through other people’s eyes is a really useful way of putting my finger on why particular elements worked or didn’t work for me. Occasionally though it’s just maddening. Back when I started watching Dr Who the only people using the internet were the military in secret (now there’s a Who plot for the future! The internet has to be part of a longterm plot by aliens to distract us by making us fight amongst ourselves) and the only other opinions to go on were published in big expensive coffee-table books in the days before home video by people who only half-remembered the stories to begin with. And they all hated it for some reason: ‘The Discontinuity Guide’ described it as ‘watching paint dry while being whipped with barbed wire’, with complaints that it was too slow and too silly by far.
But they weren’t watching
what I was watching, a character piece that grows episode by episode, that
actually gives time to all our regular friends and companions and a situation
that’s actually more plausible than most. The last story before the first
anniversary special ‘The Time Monster’ feels like a summary of all the things
this era could do so well and a sign of how well it had found it’s feet again
by 1972. ‘The Time Monster’ was, for a while, my favourite Dr Who story growing
up – and apparently mine alone. None of the official volumes liked it much and
fandom sort of lazily followed suit. But they didn’t see what I saw: Dr Who at
its most thoughtful, with a story that was properly scary not from the usual
mass invasion or even a God with ancient powers but because it gave The Master
the power over time. Characters in this story age by fifty years in seconds,
are decelerated back to being babies or regressed to toddlerhood (poor Sgt
Benton!), while there’s a ‘War Games’ style sub-plot about WW1 bombers and
Roundheads arriving, blinking, into the present day (Sloman’;s starting point,
as out walking his dog one day and trying to think up a storyline he thought he
heard one of the old WW1 bombers in the sky and for a second hallucinated it
behind the clouds). Time, that one fixed constant of all our lives, is suddenly
vulnerable and that’s a far greater terror than any alien. The idea of time
running backwards so it can age you horribly or run backwards and turn you into
a baby or turn you into a pensioner is a great little concept, especially in
the hands of an unfeeling psychopath like The Master. Even though we’ve had a
few other stories that have touched on it since (notably The Weeping Angels
sending you back in time before you were born) no other story does it quite
like this one: the poor scientist Stuart’s shock at finding himself ageing
fifty-five years and not even The Doctor knowing how to put things right is one
of the all time horrifying moments in the series, far more so than a Dalek or a
Cybermen (by contrast, poor Sgt Benton in nappies and getting the short straw
of army life again is one of the funniest). We’re all in danger and the fact it
invades a UNIT-protected Cambridge university lab (did The Master pop in and
see the aptly named Professor Chronotis from ‘Shada’?
Did he borrow a book on Ancient Greek myths nestled next to the Ancient and
Most Worshipful law of Gallifrey? Or was The master round the corner harassing
poor Liz Shaw trying to take her phd and wondering why her plastic stationary
kept trying to strangle her?), the Earth’s last line of defence, makes it all
the scarier. It could happen to anyone!
After all, it happened to
Atlantis thousands of years ago, as seen in the second half of the story. That’s
the part a lot of fans laugh at and it does seem to be a civilisation filled
with oddly dressed people out of a prog rock concept album cover. The fact that
the God Kronos, when we finally see it, appears to be dressed as an ancient KFC
advertisement, in an unconvincing chicken suit of armour complete with
feathered pantaloons is the point at which most fans start laughing and switch
over to something else. The fact that the acting goes strongly downhill, with
even usually fine actresses like Ingrid Pitt (hired at Jon Pertwee’s request –
she was a friend who’d co-starred in the film ‘The House That Dripped Blood’
together in the gap between seasons seven and eight) struggling to be
believable. But even though everyone has clearly run out of money (again) the
concept’s a strong one. Atlantis is an obvious idea for a Dr who story, either
a morality tale of an empire that got too big for itself and forgot the power
of nature or a whacking great story, depending which historian you listen to.
Like a lot of the best Dr Who stories it’s semi-real, with enough gaps in the
history to write a story around. You see, only one historian ever wrote about
it and even he was talking in the past tense about a folk tale he’d heard that
was thousands, nearly a millennia, years old. Normally that wouldn’t be enough
to get historians excited, but the fact that he was Plato, one of the great
thinkers of his age, and written as fact when it’s generally pretty obvious
when he’s writing about real life or fiction, has made a lot of people wonder.
Plato isn’t the sort of person to talk about fairy stories for the hell of it.
If true Atlantis would be the first stirrings of humanity away from our
‘Unearthly Child’ like existence as cave dwellers and into what we would call
‘society’ today. However nobody has ever found anything – nothing concrete
anyway. In real life my theory is that’s because Atlantis wasn’t the name of an
island, as it is here and in a lot of history books, but because it was the
name of a region, like ‘The Ottoman Empire’ or ‘Europe’. The people who needed
to evacuate did so to different corners of the empire while it was the
headquarters, possibly even man-made headquarters, that disappeared under the
waves. In the Whoniverse, of course, it’s perfect for The Master to hire yet
another ancient power to do his bidding – and mess up, with great loss of life.
Oh and of course if any ancient God was going to still be around in our day it
would be Kronos, the eternal God of time, here living a lonely existence
outside time (although modern Who has so many baddies doing this now from
Sutekh on down it’s getting quite crowded). I’m not so sure why he’s a bird
exactly (a featherbrained idea from the costume department?) but the idea of a
winged God who has power over time who’s
in all the ancient books of Greek legends for devouring his own children is
surely the most Dr Who baddy ever. Of course The Master’s going to try and
revive him. Of course it’s going to go wrong. This might just be the most
straightforward fight between good and evil of the more usually nuanced Pertwee
era.
And yet, even there
things are told a bit differently to normal. The story starts with The Doctor
dreaming – the only time we see him dreaming before ‘Amy’s Choice’, give or take what might
be happening in ‘The Mind Robber’.
The Doctor admits that even he has a subconscious that scares him, an
intermingling of guilt and fear that makes him more than just your usual
flawless superhero (interestingly one of these voices is female, the first ever
sign that timelords can change gender and I’m surprised the ‘timeless child’
brigade haven’t leapt on it as evidence that the theory has to be true, despite
the 300 other stories it contradicts; it also helps set up his finale ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ nicely with another
Buddhist parable about accepting and learning from your flaws – The Master was
originally meant to be in that story too after all). If he’s scared, if The
Master first contacting Kronos the God of Time has revived a ‘race memory’ even
in his mind, then we mere Humans are in deep trouble. The inhabitants of
Atlantis sense it too, even all those years ago, with bad dreams of their own,
a clever way of connecting the two timezones and the two separate settings in
this story (although they clearly haven’t built the Atlantis sets before
episode four, shot in the dark the way they are). Kronos is a very ‘Master’ way
of travelling through time, violent and sudden, in contrast to The Doctor’s eccentric
police telephone box that’s always going wrong. The Tardis is almost a
character itself in this story for the first time since ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ and The Doctor reminds
us that it’s ‘alive’ (and that he thinks of her as a ‘she’ – he’s right,
according to ‘The Doctor’s Wife’) and
you can’t beat a story where The Tardis is a character and a plot point, not
just a method of transport.
I like the central idea
of a crystal too – and one that’s travelled across thousands of years, no less.
Though organic, crystals have fascinating properties that have made them useful
in all sorts of modern gadgets (including, fittingly, digital watches): they
can house information in a way that seems way too unlikely to be natural.
Anyone who’s ever had any reiki healing done will also know the strange feeling
as a crustal somehow taps into your body’s ‘energy supply’ and takes it over,
in a mirror of The Master’s brainwashing of the mind. Given that many of them
originated under the Earth or from outer space, could they possibly be evidence
of a past civilisation? Atlantis feels like a good fit, with a sort of
triangular crystal referred to as a ‘trident’ in the script (but without the
staff) that’s a fraction of the original full size one on Atlantis (what
happened to the rest? Was there room here for a sequel that never came?) It’s a nice idea: Dr Who has by now given us
all sorts of maguffins that carry special powers, from rings to amulets to so
many body parts of Omega and Rassilon (in the same line as holy artefacts from
various disciples) I’m surprised there’s enough of them to go around, but
crystals make sense. They were here before Humans. They’ll be here after
Humans. They’re already linked in our minds with the passing of time. Not many
series could get away with flitting between scenes set in Cambridge in the
near-future and a city in 1500 BC (a dating that’s surely a bit out, but never mind);
then again not many series would ever think of it. A lot of fans see this part
of the plot as silly, but it works for me – it might not be the most scientific
scifi idea ever in the series but aesthetically it fits nicely.
The Master’s hypnotised
his way into a research institute now (he makes for a scarily plausible
academic) and taken control of an experiment on a giant crystal with unusual
properties named TOMTIT The Humans think they’ve just invented teleportation
but really The Master’s trying to contact Kronos the God of time, with links to
the lost continent of Atlantis, where The Master quite fancies his chances of
being declared a God (figures: by his standards its actually quite a sensible
scheme). If that seems a reach for the Master we first met the year before when
he was more (literally) down to Earth and suave, well, such is Roger Delgado’s
ability that he totally sells it and the contrast between his calm gentile
charm and the Doctor’s emotional outrage is never better presented than in this
story: you can totally see why the authorities are on his side, not the
Doctor’s. You’d think that Atlantis would be less dense than ‘our’ world, but
not a bit of it: once there The Master’s busy wooing Ingrid Pitt and convincing
her that he should be her King and that The Doctor’s a conman. Much of the fun
of this story comes from the Dr, with Jo as loyal as ever, trying to prove his
morals and staying patient until The Master, inevitably but satisfyingly, trips
himself up and lets his real self shine through. The time-ram at the end, when
the Dr tries to park his Tardis inside The Master’s, is still one of my
favourite scenes: these two renegade timelords, trapped on this backward
planet, are so similar they could be twins, were it not for the Master’s need
to conquer the universe and The Doctor’s need to explore it making them mirrors
of each other. Even The Master’s Tardis is so clearly ‘our’ set dressed to look
dark and shadowy. They can’t help but try to top the other and The Master’s
delight as he finally gets to mute the Doctor and shut him up, before making
him speak backwards, is one of the all time laugh out loud scenes.
Though its less obviously
Buddhist-based than Letts’ other co-writes (again with his friend Robert
Sloman) it still fits a lot of the same ideas: the idea of another world more
advanced than others saving us is ridiculous when the whole point of humans
being alive is to make mistakes and learn from them, while karma does a lot of
the heavy lifting in this story, Co-writer and producer Barry Letts even writes
in a page long Buddhist parable, known to followers as the ‘flower sermon’,
that knowing something from being taught it isn’t the same as ‘understanding’.
This is the ‘daisiest daisy’ scene where a worried 3rd Doctor tells
Jo a story from his own background about ‘the blackest day of his life’ (one
fans have unofficially seen as either the day he looked into the un-tempered
schism and ran away, the day The master looked into the schism and turned evil
- with a percussive accompaniment to boot as per ‘Sound
Of The Drums’ – or the day The Doctor was packed off to war), before he
visits a hermit on the hill who makes him feel better by pointing to a daisy
growing in the middle of a barren, presumably Gallifreyan landscape and The
Doctor changing his mindset (in the original Buddha calls his disciples for a
lesson and merely points at a lotus flower, beautifully whole. At which a lot
of them who’d walked a long way decided to ‘unsubscribe’).
It’s very Who, that idea of the ordinary everyday becoming extraordinary, depending how you look at it and a far more ‘benign’ one than the usual ‘killer plastic’ style menace. The idea is that beauty can just exists, it doesn’t need to be described (a lesson, err, which I really should have learned before being 3000 pages into a 4000 page book series). It’s a very ‘human’ moment for a Doctor who doesn’t usually let down his defences this way and who seems more vulnerable than usual, someone who realises his bad ways are catching up with him, a long way from the arrogant know-it-all of most of the era. After all, if he’d been more charming like The Master and less brash he might well have charmed the Atlanteans the way his rival does. The Master’s ego and thirst for power the one thing that gets in his way of ever having it and the idea of the interconnectedness of the universe, where everything affects everything else. Notably, too, the Dr defeats The Master this week by learning to reign in his emotions and becoming effectively zen and prepared to live in the ‘present’ (even if its a present that keeps changing timetracks), while his rival gets all emotional and goes to pieces. The Master, of course, is still as arrogant as ever and has some great scenes with Dr Percival, bossing the esteemed politician around as if he’s an underling, able to fit in anywhere and everywhere from his oily charm and manipulation while The Doctor himself will always be a outsider. It’s the interplay between the two that’s so clever across this story, with Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado on peak form. There are some classic Doctor-Master clashes in this story, with both Pertwee and Delgado at the top of their game, and I’d go so far as to say it’s the best ‘Master’ story out there (as opposed to the best story with The Master in it, which is a very different thing. Only ‘The Mind Of Evil’ is a better story for the Delgado Master, who often either doesn’t turn up till halfway through or with Daleks, Axons or The Devil getting in the way and taking all the best lines gets shunted off to the sidelines by a token monster). Episode five is basically a whole episode of them bitching about each other and playing pranks on each other from their respective Tardises, an episode a lot of fans tend to skip but which I adore as the height of their banter and competition, each one quietly sure they have the upperhand yet only one can ‘win’. The Master even has that oh so rare thing in Dr Who, a moment when he admits to liking the Doctor’s companion as he admits to being fond of Jo (so pure and uncorrupted that everyone likes her, a key part of the Buddhist parable). It’s a strong story for UNIT too, with six parts and not too much plot giving plenty of space over to the regulars Yates gets to be the dashing hero, while The Brigadier gets to be as exasperated as ever and Nicholas Courtney especially excels taking on the ‘Doctor’ job of being haughty to politicians. However its Benton who gets all the best moments, the simple soldier roped into a time experiment he doesn’t understand at all. You find yourself sighing ‘poor Benton’ rather a lot in this story, not least when he gets sent backwards in time and becomes a baby (its a brave series that spends the final shot of its twenty-six run on a close up of an awkward soldier’s bottom), though he also becomes one of the few people to ever outwit The Master besides the Dr, a moment that will have you cheering him on in what’s maybe his finest hour (perhaps alongside ‘The Three Doctors’). I’m really fond of the Pertwee family and this is, alas, the only story where you see them altogether. Indeed, Roger Delgado only appears in one more story and in ‘Frontier In Space’ he’s basically a patsy for The Daleks without even a proper farewell scene. This would have been a much better way for him to go, fully in charge – until he isn’t. In terms of pure dialogue ‘The Time Monster’ is Dr Who at its height, in the colour ‘classic’ era anyway.
The crystals are perhaps
another example of the ‘ordinary turning extraordinary’, although it maybe
fairer to say they’re the incredible being made to seem even more incredible. Crystals
are a big thing with Letts in particular, with the blue crystal of Metebelis 3
appearing in later stories as The Doctor’s equivalent of the Kronos crystal for
The Master, a symbol of their weaknesses. For The Doctor, described once by
Letts as a ‘knight in shining armour rushing into the rescue, but flawed with a
bit missing and a suit made out of home-made tin cans’, it’s greed for
knowledge, of understanding how the universe works, something that made him so
impatient he stole The Tardis and fled to see it. The Master, though, won’t
settle for seeing it: he wants to rule it, to have power over the universe
because he’s tired of it having power over him. He’s the antithesis of The
Doctor’s ‘live and let live’ approach, where individuals are encouraged to be
themselves; The Master wants everyone to be like him (quite literally in ‘The End Of Time’). Notably most everyone in the
Atlantis section story is flawed. The Master of course is a greedy so and so,
for all his charm and manners (something The Doctor, who automatically puts
everyone’s backs up, never has). Queen Galleia is trying to manipulate The
Master for her own ends. Hippias is trying to control things through what he
sees as his superior knowledge. Of course Atlantis is going to fail – not just
because of The Master but because it’s become corrupt, all that glorious power
lost to bickering and infighting (is this another period comment on the
stupidity and hopelessness of the cold war? If so it’s one of the more subtle
ones). One of the bigger names to first appear on Who is Susan Penhaligon as
Lakis, but alas she gets a tiny part (as a last minute replacement for a rare
Who actor given the sack, for unpunctuality).
So anyone looking for the future ‘Fine Romance’ and ‘Emmerdale’ star
might have missed her entirely (especially in those clothes). Atlantis used to
be powerful but now it’s in terminal decline, having eaten itself from the
inside out and made one poor choice after another, like Ancient Rome (or modern
day America). Only Jo comes out of this story well, her pure heart serving much
the same purpose as at the end of the similar previous season finale ‘The Daemons’ (though not as clumsily). Oh
and the Atlantean cat (who, in a moment of method acting, hissed at Ingrid Pitt
and bit Roger Delgado!)
As times have gone by my
tastes have matured (well, ish), I’ve grown to love the bonkers weirdo
imaginative or courageous political stories that are not like anything else on
television and become obsessed with history so this runaround time has fallen
down the rankings a little. I’ve also come to see this story through the eyes
of other fans: unlike other years when Letts held a bit of money over to make
his season finales look good, here the budget has clearly run out (‘The Day Of The
Daleks’ and ‘The Sea Devils’ taking
most of the funding this year). The visual effects are often shockingly poor, Kronos
represented by two images, super-imposed over the crystal: a real dove flapping
its wings (which is fair enough) and a man dressed up to look like a bird
(which isn’t: a shot that’s aiming for fright and sophistication ends up
looking like an anaemic albino Big Bird). The minotaur is somehow far less
convincing than the one in ‘The Mind Robber’ four years earlier (one that,
being fictional, didn’t have to be anatomically accurate) and curious Star wars
fans who choose this as their first Dr who story because Darth Vader is in it
will have been shocked at him being in such an odd looking suit (except for the
stunt where the minotaur ends up in the wall, which even he thought was stupid –
that’s Who’s regular stuntman and Doctor double Terry Walsh, who also plays the
hapless comedy window cleaner frozen in mid-air). Atlantis is just plain silly,
looking more like a part of Greece that’s let itself go rather than a lost
continent of wonder and magic, full of new age hippies wearing next to nothing
and no sign of any water at all, one of whom is even called Hippy-Ass. Apparently
Earth’s 1970s look is based on Ancient Atlantis too, given that everyone seems
to have walked in straight from a 1972 Top Of The Pops episode. It’s one of the
era’s obviously cheaper sets, so flimsily built that, far from being a city of
impossible power, you have to ask why it didn’t collapse under the waves long
before The Master caused an eruption. Though far closer to both Plato’s
description and dating it’s weird that the otherwise far flimsier ‘Underwater Menace’ had a far more
convincing set built on an even flimsier budget five years earlier (although I
still say that’s a ‘future’ Atlantis based on this past one, given that there’s
no way anyone on Earth would have ever heard about the legend). The volcano exploding
is understandably stock footage (it’s the same clip used in ‘Enemy Of The World’ in fact and ‘Inferno’), less understandably so is
the V1 bomber – and it’s in black-and-white. Even the Tardis is in poor health,
with Letts thinking the interior set was looking a bit tatty and deciding to
design a new one, only everyone took one look at his new ‘roundels’ (likened by
the production team to ‘washing up bowls’) and laughed. The new design for the 1973
season goes back to being as close to the original as they can get away with.
‘The Time Monster’ is
also, it’s probably fair to say, one of the more dated 1970s Who stories around
too: it’s hard to believe anyone wore those clothes underneath those hairdoes and
that we had two characters bitching about whether feminism means marriage and
staying in the kitchen by people who to modern eyes are quite obviously lesbian
and gay. The scenes with Ruth and Stu in episode one are quite a chore to sit
through, though he ends up quite sweet once he ages half a century and she decides
to drop her bickering and help. It’s all part and parcel of Barry Letts and
Terrance Dicks trying to make Dr Who hip and trendy, whilst being a generation
or two too old to ‘get’ it – something true of more than a few period stories,
but especially this one (Katy Manning says it’s the only script where the
dialogue made her uncomfortable – and did you see what she got to say in other
episodes?!) The downside of having room for so many sweet character moments is
that we get an awful lot of padding too, with this one of those bloated six
parters that would clearly be better off as four: nothing happens for the
entirety of episode two, what with Stu still aged as he was from the
cliffhanger, The Brigadier shouting his mouth off to officials and Benton fooling
The Master before getting knocked out anyway (the episode even ends the exact
same way, with Kronos’ arrival, though it’s not interrupted the second time
round). Things seem to be going in slow motion long before the Master’s TOMTIT
device (not what you’re thinking – this isn’t a Steven Moffat script - that’s
‘Transmission Of Matter Through Interstitial Time’ to you). slows down The
Brigadier’s attack on Unit HQ too, the second half in Atlantis so lethargic it
feels as if it’s running backwards. And I don’t just mean the neat but unlikely
trick of The Master reversing The Doctor’s words on him either! This is also
quite possibly the worst score by the usually reliable Dudley Simpson, full of
corny matador music and vaudeville punchlines (wa wa wa wa waaaah!), low on his
usual effortless atmosphere and the music makes a bigger difference than people
usually think. What seemed such a tight clever, exciting little story with all
my favourite characters back when I was around seven now seems a flawed, cheap
and often silly mess that’s a little too big for its own good.
Even so, I’ve never entirely
lost my love for ‘The Time Monster’ and don’t understand why its hated quite as
much as it is, especially compared to the other similar Barry Letts season
finales which are, every bit as daft in places (I mean, take your pick from
giant maggots, giant spiders and The Devil: by contrast a whacking great bird
created by a God brought back to life by crystals in a legend that might well
have some truth to it seems almost sensible). It is, after all, a story that
plays around with the time element of the format (a toy so few other scifi
series get to play with) and this story is a lot of fun, summing up all the
reasons Dr Who was great in this era: the sparking between the regulars,
especially Delgado whose really got to grips with The Master’s polite and
civilised yet unhinged madman character by now, the wild ambition combined with
nuggets of actual plausible science, the alternating scenes of humour and
horror that chase each other’s tail throughout the story and the strong visual
ideas that are quite unlike any other Dr Who story. Not all the effects are bad
either: Stu’s aged makeup is far better than anything the modern series have
done with aged prosthetics and while ‘Logopolis’
usually gets the credit for the creepy idea of Tardises within Tardises this
story got there first by nine years. There’s lots of little smart nuggets of dialogue
and character, from Benton’s ‘in the soup without a ladle’ to Stu’s unfortunate
choice of words when he wakes up from being aged that he’s got the ‘Grandaddy
of all hangovers’ to The Master getting out of a carvary lunch with The
Brigadier by pretending to be a ‘lifelong pacifist vegetarian’ to the nifty editing
that cuts from The Master outlining his dastardly plot to the hapless Percival
to The Doctor working it out in real time. Even the behind-the-scenes stories
are fun for this one, with The Doctor and Jo taking off in a souped-up ‘inertia
drive’ tweaked Bessie and, not hearing the director yell cut, kept going – they
got hopelessly lost and a search party had to be sent out for them! And in
another scene they got interrupted by a herd of cattle…There are better stories
out there of course, deeper more imaginative and moving stories with stronger
moral messages to tell – some of them in this same season. But few stories put
a smile on my face as much as ‘The Time Monster’ does and sometimes in a story
that’s all you need. You have to be a fan to love this nonsense, which is why
so many non-fans just see it as cheap effects, but as a fully paid up fan I
love it to crystal fragments.
POSITIVES + The Doctor’s
never been more like the mad English inventor of the Peter Cushing films than
here, as he creates a ‘time flow analogue’ out of odds and ends, a bottle of
Moroccon burgundy, a mug, spoons, forks, corks, key rings, bits of string and
some tea – it works fine until it explodes, as you always know it will. There
are even some tea leaves, the most English thing The Doctor could have chosen
but which also ties into the idea of crystals and echoes of time passed down
through generations (maybe if The Doctor read the tea leaves he’d know what was
going on quicker. It’s that kind of a story, full of premonitions and intuition
rather than the usual scientific logic). The special effects, with lots of
impossible things balanced on top of each other in a way that looks impossible
and which you assume are glued on before the Dr’s tea mug revolves round and
round is a really impressive effect for the age. The series really should have
done more with scenes like this – it does the hearts good to have a tinkering Doctor
in the Tardis again and the ‘ordinary household objects blocking a high-tech
masterplan’ is such a Dr Whoy idea.
NEGATIVES -
Unfortunately Who has rarely been more chauvinistic than here too and it seems
such a backward step so soon after season seven and brainy university graduate
Liz Shaw (not to mention super-brain Zoe in season six). On paper Ruth should
be another Liz: she’s a respected female scientist with a degree and lots of
expertise, but she spends the whole story complaining about being told by men
what to do and then doing what they tell her to do, even her underling (Stuart
even utters the line ‘God bless women’s lib and all who sail in her’ –
sarcastically it should be added). You can usually rely on Ingrid Pitt to add
some gritty feminism to a series (not least her other Dr Who appearance in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ where she kung-fu
kicks a Myrka – not a euphemism sadly) but here she’s just a gooey-eyed
innocent who totally believes everything The Master tells her, even when its
obviously false (she is, in a way, ‘his’ Jo but Jo was far more interesting and
multilayered than this). What with Jo at her drippiest and dimmest across this
story too and you have quite possibly the worst portrayal of women in the whole
run of Dr Who. Until the end when God turns out to be a girl anyway, in a sort
of last minute apology (Letts knew he’d messed up which is why we ended up with
Sarah Jane when he next had to sit down and create a companion). It’s worth
saying though that compared to the rest of telly around in 1972 its still
remarkable just how ahead of its time this series was...
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Mutants’ next ‘The Three Doctors’
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