Frontios: Ranking - 34

 

Frontios

(Season 21, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 26/1/1984-3/2/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Christopher H Bidmead, director: Ron Jones)

Rank: 34

   'Alright Doctor, we know that was you at the end of time!' 'Oops, what gave it away fellow timelords?' 'When you left your hatstand behind it still contained a long scarf, some ruffles sleeves a cricketing outfit and multiple stovepipe hats - who else would wear clothes like that?!' 

It’s the end of humanity (or at least as close to the end as the Tardis ever goes) and now, after twenty years of programmes asking us to see history as a series of dots on its way to some sort of progress, we get to see what the ‘end’ (or is it?) of humanity looks like and it’s not a pretty sight. Dr Who is, by and large, an optimistic series: no matter what you throw at mankind they’ll find a way to survive and usually make things better, with just a little luck, hope, hard work and the assistance of the Doctor. ‘Frontios’ is different though. In many ways its Dr Who’s most pessimistic story as it basically asks why we ever bothered because we end our days (or near enough) fighting the same old battles of obedience and rule that mankind has always fought, since our cavemen days (both literally and ‘An Unearthly Child’), our lessons still unlearned. ‘Frontios’ is set so far in the future that mankind has used up all of its nine quadzillion lives, the luck has run out, the hard work has all been in vain, there’s nothing to look forward to but a grim and fiery death and even the Doctor isn’t ‘officially’ allowed to interfere (because this is a point so far in the future that it’s the only time we see a date in the series that’s beyond the timelord’s ‘jurisdiction’ of time). Of course the Dr involved himself anyway and saves the day by giving humanity one last roll of the dice (pleading with everyone involved not to breath a word of it in case news get back to the timelords somehow, though we never discover quite how they’d find out and if there even is a Gallifrey to get back to) but even at the end of this story the great unspoken thought is that we’re all doomed, eventually, one day and all we’re really doing now is filling in time until our inevitable rot and decay. We’ve already seen mankind in trouble in stories like ‘The Ark’ and ‘The Ark In Space’ as we leave Earth behind and try again out in the stars but now we’re even further ahead in the future than that and things are ever more desperate. There’s no one out there to come and save us from ourselves, nothing at the end of the rainbow except more rain, and even the Doctor has arrived too late to do much, as stranded and powerless as anyone for most of the story. For all our progress, for all our technology, for all our greatest aspirations, there’s still nothing of us left at the end of days except a few straggling survivors and some cockroaches (well, giant alien woodlice actually, this being Dr Who, but near enough the same thing). 

 ‘Frontios’ is, as you might have guessed, quite a story – it sits separately to most of the gung-ho make-do-and-mend things-always-get-better brave-heart approach of the rest of the series and particularly the more fairytale like feel of the 5th Dr era, as gritty and dark as the series gets (albeit on a BBC budget in a programme still made primarily for kids and all too recently in trouble for violence so they have to turn things down a bit; even so you can tell that this is the sort of Dr Who made in the wake of something guttural and desperate like, say, ‘Alien’ rather than something ultimately twee and cosy, like ‘Star Wars’). ‘Frontios’ is a story that, even by Dr Who standards, asks what is it all for? There is no progress in ‘Frontios’ and none of our brilliant inventions do much to make life better and the sacrifices made by any generation for the benefit of what comes along later ever results in anything substantial because this is where it gets us in the end, in the last generation: being pulled underground as lunch for a giant woodlouse. People talk worriedly now about the state of the Earth and what sort of a world is going to be left behind after the collapse of civilisation, raging pandemics, food and fuel shortages and a boiling planet and what could possibly survive a failing Earth; ‘Frontios’ got there nearly forty years ago, with a future filled with what we always feared most at the end: a few last stragglers struggling with the basics, some overgrown cockroaches and Keith Richards. Admittedly the endpoint isn’t Earth but a colony named Frontios, the cockroaches turn out to be giant killer woodlice named The Tractators that live under the soil and ‘Keith Richards’ turns out to be a bunch of society rebels living a rock and roll lifestyle away from the main pack who still believe in discipline and authority even after events have turned survival into a free-for-all, but basically this is a grim story about the end times and how none of the things we fooled ourselves into thinking represented progress really mattered in the end. You couldn’t do that with Star Trek – but then that’s the point of this story, the gradual dawning realisation that out future isn’t ‘that’ final frontier full of impeccably dressed humans working together for a brighter and better future but ‘Frontios’, where mankind is fighting each other as much as the baddy in a desperate quest for survival that all ends on a backward planet in a nothing part of the universe overtaken by giant insects. 

You can tell even without looking at the date that this story was written against the backdrop of a cold war that was hotting up, at a point when the competition between two super-powers had gone from pushing both sides to reach for the stars and instead had sent people scurrying down below ground into bunkers for safety. Only here even that’s an illusion: the Tractators having the power to burrow under the ground and pull us below so they can re-use our body parts for their digging machines. We think of the soil as a place that’s dead – its where we put our bodies when we’ve finished with them after all – but in our world insects like woodlice turn the soil over to make something new grow; it’s just in this story what grows is the insects themselves to massive size. The Tractators are what happens to mankind when we’re looking the other way, the darker more primal part of life that’s always holding us back, with the power to take us out of orbit just as we’re reaching for the stars and send us crashing into the soil of Frontios. For all our ambition, for all our hard work, for all our best intentions, humanity has crash-landed right at the point when the universe was about to be in our reach, the deepest darkest self-destructive instincts of man getting the better of us after all and while all this time man has been fearing the sky (and the meteors seen at the start of this story) we should have been looking inward and downwards, away from our hopes and towards our greatest horrors. 

 As much as guidebooks tell you this is a story ‘about’ giant woodlice, for returning writer (and one-time script editor) Christopher H Bidmead they’re a monster written under sufferance after a request to put them in by his successor Eric Saward, as a ‘hook’ to keep the kiddies watching. They’re a last minute bit of inspiration after a general infestation of the creepy crawlies while he was trying to write made him think about their ability to survive even after he thought he’d killed them all off (and how they might outlast us all). Bidmead’s much more interested in what will become of ‘us’ if we live long enough to be in an out and out war with something that had the same drive to survive and whether we could raise our game to match the survival instincts of an insect. They are, perhaps, the weakest part of this story: on paper they’re a great idea, a grimy ‘video nasty’ update of the 1960s Who stories with spiritual butterflies and 1970s Who stories with giant maggots and angry spiders. The original idea outlined in the script, of alien creatures that were played by dancers and gymnasts so they would appear more flexible than humanity in all meanings of the word, is a great one: they kill by rolling up into a ball and ‘squashing’ the humans around them while symbolically they show just how inflexible and rigid man is and how in evolutionary terms he might be something of a dead end. In evolutionary terms their spindly arms and rigid necks don’t make them look a match even for Turlough never mind hardened survivors from the future and instead of being scary we end up with a lot of stiff unmoving costumes that even I can out-waddle. The poor dancers inside were unbearably hot, so much so that oxygen had to be pumped into the costumes between takes. Worse yet they that don’t even have the skill of expression that most other bulky Who monsters do (this is a rare suit that doesn’t even leave room for ‘real’ eyes or mouths – instead everything is behind a rubber mask). Basically everything Bidmead warned about when he was asked to write them in the first place. They could have got away with that for the drones but the Gravis needs to speak, while John Gilett providing the voices sounds too often as if he’s just a human voicing another human in an animation – there’s no sense that he inhabits this creature the way that, say, Gabriel Woolf is Sutekh or Wolfe Morris is The Great Intelligence to name just the wolfiest examples in DW. Bidmead himself was horrified and saw the costumes as exactly the reason why he didn’t want to write in a monster in the first place (there aren’t exactly many from his short run as script editor either and the Meglos giant cactus and Foamasi pangolins from ‘The Leisure Hive’ were commissioned before he turned up; that leaves the Marshmen from ‘Full Circle’ and The Garm from ‘warrior’s Gate’, neither of which are ‘monsters’ per se). Even so, they work well when they’re an existential threat in the distance the way they for a majority of the story. Even so, as a psychological terror they’re well written (what other aliens in Dr Who take away even the safety of being on safe ground by making you effectively drown when on it?) and they’ve clearly been written to reflect their environment, rather than just a monster helicoptered in that doesn’t belong to be there. As befits a writer with the biggest scientific pedigree in Who after Cybermen creator Kit Pedler, it’s also a story about change and how mankind needs to keep growing, adapting and evolving if he is to stand any chance of survival at all, finding new solutions that arise from new problems. 

Bidmead, one of the better read script editors on Who, may well have been thinking of ‘Tractus’, a work by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein written (in its frist draft) from a bunker in the First World war and wondering how mankind ever ended up in what felt, at the time, like the end of civilisation. It’s a work that debates out loud whether science can ever have limits, that even if mankind was to reach the end of its existence and learn everything there possibly was to know about how the world worked there would always be something left over humanity couldn’t explain except through using our experience of life and philosophies of how we feel we’re meant to behave. There’s a lot of speculation about how in essence our experiences of life are always shifting and how we’ll never stop learning because life will never stop changing. There is no scientific proof, for instance, that two people can ever see a situation the same way: the example the author gives is that if he asks two people to conjure up a general image like trees in a yard they’ll have no trouble conjuring up their own version but there will often be a great deal of difference between the two without either being right or wrong; it all depends entirely on their own experiences. In ‘Frontios’, too, mankind is at first doomed because the Tractators can adapt to the physical terrain so much better than humanity. However, in thought they are rigid and inflexible. mankind survives because he adapts and makes the most of every person’s abilities, unlike the Tractator who lives only to serve their leader, the Gravis. The Tractators bring us ‘down to Earth’ (well Frontios, but you get the idea) every time we think we can escape and be our better selves until there is nothing much left. Mankind has fallen into a rut and has run out of ideas and our attempts to re-build a second Earth on this planet, complete with a civilisation farms hospitals and libraries are ‘wrong’ because they belong to an ‘old’ world that doesn’t exist anymore. By contrast The Tractators represent movement – which seems unlikely given the rather clumsy costume but the clue’s in the name: traction means movement and they’ve evolved to outwit man while he sat still, developing powers over gravity and meteorites that’s never fully explained in the story. They even have the power to recycle man, using body parts in their tunnelling machines in a rare moment of pure horror in 1980s Dr Who (it’s a clever move: being chased by a digger sounds like about the least visual and threatening thing you can imagine, but a digger with your dead pal’s face on it? That’s scary – or at least it is in the novelisation!) Mankind has been found wanting, out-evolved by insects, standing too still for too long. They should have been spending their time working out how to fend off our darker baser selves, which have been dismissed as an unlikely fairytale to the few survivors who live to tell the tale of being dragged underground (the few people who can actually see the destruction of man that felt imminent in 1984?), not building up a library for people who’ll never get to read it and planting crops for future generations who will never survive to eat them. The use of the Tardis hatstand too is particularly clever: on the one hand it’s something familiar gone (after all, wherever in time and space you hang your hat, that’s home). Of all the things the Doctor could have used from the greatest machine ever built it’s something that seems to be completely useless (people don’t wear hats when they’re fighting for their life), and yet even that has its uses, with the wonderful scene where Turlough brandishes it as a weapon. John Nathan-Turner, who’d had a bit of a falling out with Bidmead, loved this scene: he’d argued for years that the hatstand was no good now the 4th Doctor wasn’t around to use it and tickled at the way Bidmead turned a long standing request to get rid of it into a plot point; it also explains away to eagle-eyed pedants how android Kamelion survives the explosion (because there’s a theory he’s disguised as the hatstand).

There’s a sense in this story of inevitability, that we always knew this was going to happen and most of our society has been about pretending it won’t: Turlough, for instance, has a folk memory of his own people The Trions (still un-named on screen as yet) being invaded by the Tractators and spends most of this story yelping with fear even by his standards and knows the danger everyone is in. Though The Doctor and Tegan react as if he’s just Turlough being Turlough he’s properly scared out of his wits in this story because this isn’t a potential threat any longer and his people know the dangers of invasion by Tractator firsthand. You can see it in the eyes of most of these humans too as their colony dwindles quicker than they can rebuild it one by one, each of them afraid to say anything about it, until Tegan in particular blunders in and starts asking awkward questions (her straight-talking and bluntness turned into a strength for once rather than a weakness, in the hands of the man who ‘created’ her character. The ending is particularly interesting: for one awful moment you think the Dr is just going to save the day with a wave of his arm and some technical gadgetry, which would have been even more irritating in this story about realism and survival than usual. Instead the Dr ‘tricks’ the Gravis, the Tractator leader, with his own ego, daring him that he couldn’t possibly have the power to re-assemble the Tardis, then after he does using the Tardis’ power to cut him off from the rest of his people who, without him, don’t have the brains to try anything. Some things never change, whatever the evolutionary process: even all conquering Tractators can get carried away by their own smugness. 

However that ending is far from a foregone conclusion – a lot of this story is dark and sombre. Even when the Tardis, that bastion of hope and recovery which has become across the past twenty years as cosy and familiar as any real manmade invention, arrives it’s no match for the Tractator assault, seemingly destroyed in a meteor storm in a glorious episode one cliffhanger. Only the hat-stand survives uselessly as a cruel reminder of the days when man still had enough of a civilisation to worry about such petty things as dress, decorum, manners and sunburn on a planet where survival is an hourly struggle and the planet’s being shot at by meteorites that are making it burn up. Back in season 18 when Bidmead was script editor he’d re-written the usually infallible 4th Doctor to someone who sometimes loses, writing his final trilogy as a doom-laden finale where everything goes wrong despite his best intensions. Here h does it again but for the 5th Doctor, deliberately putting him on an ‘equal footing’ with the last of humanity so that he isn’t the person come to rescue everyone but a last survivor trying to stay alive himself. The really memorable image of this story that stays in the mind long after the DVD has finished playing is the shot of bits of the Tardis – our home from home – embedded in the walls of the cave, a neat twist on the age-old idea of Dr Who showing the ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’ because here it’s the Tardis, which we know to be extraordinary, stuck in the ordinary, in the far future where there are no other timelords around to save everyone and put the timelines ‘right’. Producer John Nathan-Turner loved getting up to mischief and playing the media like a violin and in this era dropped all sorts of ‘hints’ that he might be changing the shape of the Tardis alongside the Doctor at the end of the season. Fans had already heard the rumour that Davison wouldn’t be in the last story of the season and we didn’t actually know when he was going to leave – could it be that, shock horror, both ended up being replaced in this story? As it happens no and the Tardis isn’t replaced ever (despite another tease in ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ the following year), but it’s a measure of how big the stakes are in episode one of this story that, even as someone who came to this story after some of the later ones so I knew it would all work out, there’s a small part of you that starts thinking ‘they couldn’t really could they?... 

 For a programme about time travel that moves about its dates and settings like crazy paving it never ceases to amaze me how you can tell when each story is made, just by looking at the events the people making it are trying to process and the biggest of those in the ‘old’ series was the cold war, an event which kicked into a new gear with the Cuban Missile Crisis a year before DW was first broadcast and which ended only with the collapse of the Berlin Wall less than a year after the last original story ‘Survival’ in 1989. This is the era when it moves from the background to the foreground of the series though, as nuclear warfare enters a new era and edges closer to turning into a full-on war for real. I like to think that Bidmead had been watching the 1980s public announcement films on what to do in the case of a nuclear war when he wrote this story, perhaps hiding under a table of his own while he wrote it, as it very much taps into that fear of ‘either we get through this somehow or everything we ever achieved will all be for nothing’ common to dramas of this era. It was, so he said later, a story inspired by news reports of the Lebanon War and how quickly the civilisation of Beirut had been destroyed by fighting, which was sort of cold war linked in all but official terms and his fears that the war might spread out to the rest of the world. This is after all the era of the first 24 hour news channels, when the world seemed a lot smaller than it used to, when people began to see events in places that one day seemed far away but now seemed very real. Bidmead is a writer with enough foresight to know that the shots of families happily gathering everyday supplies were silly propaganda, that all this stuff would be of no use to them in a life underground a radioactive Earth and there to make people feel better in the present; honestly anyone who did survive a nuclear attack would soon wish they hadn’t and wouldn’t be caring about books to read or having enough vegetables in their diet. The worst of this story is the unpredictability of the alien, which again feels very much like the early 1980s when people in the West said many times that a suicidal move that doomed us all is exactly what the Russians might do. The Gravis, after all, doesn’t behave in a way that the humans can understand: they can’t predict his next moves at all, partly because he, too, isn’t out for revenge or power or control but is really just trying to survive too in his own way. Now I’m not saying that Bidmead was an old-fashioned warmonger or anything because other stories prove that he isn’t, but in context of the backdrop of 1984 and super-powers in a wars race kept napping versus a race with a bunch of mindless drones driven by an all powerful leader it does feel as if the Tractators have at least a little something of the way the western world viewed the Russians at the time or at any rare the fears over what might be next. Lord Brezhnev had been in charge of the Soviet empire until November 1982 (feasibly around the time this story would have been first commissioned): by comparison to Stalin and Khruschev, Brezhnev been a fairly benign kind of dictator and under his watch the cold war had cooled a smidgeon, with more emphasis on Russia regaining her stability rather than pointing big shooty things at other people. The succession of Andropov saw many people in the West holding their breath – needlessly as it happened, as Andropov was one of Russia’s better world leaders too, but his ill health from kidney failure would have been a worry (he died a month after ‘Frontios’ was broadcast). 

 The gist of ‘Frontios’ is basically that ‘gee, we should have been using all that spare time when Russia was weakened and looking the other way to work out how to destroy them properly, instead of treating their superpowers as a fairytale that didn’t really exist, because with a really charismatic leader in charge they could wipe us out of the sky – whoops too late now’. The humans literally don’t see the ‘gravity’ of what the Tractators can do, with gravity as it happens – they’re too busy looking up at the ‘star wars’ lights going on in the sky, the shiny things Ronald Reagan commissioned as much to make him look good as to do anything practical and useful; they’ve forgotten that their enemy can play ‘downright dirty’. Meanwhile Turlough discovers a whole new way of thinking everyone else has forgotten about underground, the ‘retrogrades’, who despite their names have a much better solution than all out war: they’ve found out how to play the Tractators at their own game and disrupt the nice neat corridors they need to crawl along and which disrupts their sound-wave-gravity devices. In other words, Bidmead argues that fighting a big battle in the sky isn’t the way the cold war’s going to play out – it’s by outwitting the Russians, of separating the people from their cruel world leaders because without them they’re ‘blind’, and sabotaging their nice neat ordered communist rows of building blocks hits them harder than taking their lives in all-out war that will let the West survive (something that seems even more true now with an official mad psychopath in Putin in charge). 

 The regulars are all good in this story – something Bidmead was always good at and he’d created two out of the three (Davison’s Doctor in ‘Castrovalva’ and Tegan in ‘Logopolis’) so understood them better than most writers did. Davison’s Doctor is more troubled in this story and as such more believable than we’ve ever seen him before (kick-starting a late run of stories where he’s out of his depth that lead into his finale ‘Cave Of Androzani’ in three stories’ time). For other writers the 5th Doctor is written more as someone whose the opposite of Tom Baker without really knowing who he is, but Bidmead writes him the way Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor will be, as an impossibly old man in a young man’s body, with so much experience that no one else takes seriously. This is the first story in a long time to make use of the half-moon spectacles that make Davison instantly look younger and Bidmead series him as someone whose smart and experienced enough to know he’s out of his depth but still with a gentle naiveté that every problem has a solution somewhere if you survive long enough. Tegan is as emotional as she ever is, but it’s an earned emotion that’s utterly in keeping for someone in an impossible situation and she’s notably far more independent in this story than she usually is, while putting that caring heart of her to good use as a sort of fill-in Doctor (in all meanings of that word too). Bidmead had never write for Turlough, who wasn’t even in the first draft, but this is his best story by far. Mark Strickson gets a new way to play Turlough as someone whose terrified but still does the right thing anyway (something lacking in his earliest stories, which just make him out to be a coward - just think how good the Black Guardian scenes would have been if played with the same sense of ‘which way will he go?’ as here). We get a lot of the background that we’ve desperately needed for multiple stories now and the plot works well against Turlough’s backdrop as the ultimate survivor, someone whose prepared to both sell out his friends and make pacts with the villain if it feels like the only we can live longer (which is why he got mixed up with the Doctor in the first place). Notably, in a story where the humans are desperately trying to hang onto authority because it’s the last bit of civilisation they have left, all three are highly against that: Tegan is too emotional, Turlough too scared and the Doctor too curious to just stand around obeying orders. 

 And it’s just as well because the humans who give the orders don’t come out of this story very well. Peter Gilmore is well cast as Brazen – the star of naval series ‘The Onedin Line’ he’s everyone’s idea of an unruffled ship’s captain, able to cope with any wave the sea can throw at him, so to see even him out of his depth going to pieces makes you realise just what danger everyone finds themselves in. Some fans find him a bit wooden but that’s exactly how his part needs to be played: as inflexible as the Tractators in his own way, buttoned up and repressed. It’s a masterstroke making him the less experienced security chief rather than the leader – and then killing the leader off a few minutes into part one so that he really is as inexperienced and out of his depth struggling to keep this disparate base together. Plantagenet lasts a little longer: he’s not ready for the responsibility for the last humans and goes a bit mad, surviving only when he learns to delegate and trust the humans under him to make the right decisions. Bidmead is one of those writers who always chose his character name with care and it might be significant: the Plantagenets ruled at a time of great change, going from William IX in 1153, a King who ruled absolutely with the divine power of God, to King John who died in 1216, by which time the Royals ruled in tandem with governments who held all the ‘real’ power (John signed the Magna Carta that gave a lot of his power away as we’d already seen in Who the year before, in ‘The King’s Demons’). The humans do best when they’re a community using each other’s strengths in the right places, not barking orders at each other. By contrast with the Gravis, the only Tractator allowed to speak or even do much thinking, the humans still have the brains and ability to work together to come up with solutions. If you shoot the Gravis it’s all over, while the humans will just appoint a new leader using the same pool of human resources – the difference perhaps between capitalism and communism? That’s how humanity survives this story ultimately: in evolutionary terms the Tractators are far more flexible, with far more ways to kill at their disposal, but humanity is a lot more flexible when it comes to out-thinking their opponent and finding new ways to survive. Note that the Doctor makes Tegan pretend to be an android so that the Tractators don’t just kill her, turning their own trick back on them by coming up with an imaginative solution they’ll buy while making her appear to be enslaved just like they are. 

 The result is one of the cleverest scripts that the series ever had, full of layers and metaphors that packs quite a whallop watching it now but would have taken on another level of meaning if you’d been watching this in 1984 in between news reports trying to work out what the Russians were up to now and public announcement messages about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Even that idea of gravity as a weapon is new and something Dr Who had never done before, even slightly, something which was becoming rarer and rarer by the show’s twentieth year (after all, we know the Tardis can withstand usual enemy weaponry, but gravity? That’s a whole new matter). It’s how that script ends up on screen where things unravel slightly. The BBC have just introduced a new electronic tool named ‘Paintbox’ that allowed images from two sources to be combined much easier than before, used here for the first time when the Tractators first drag their victims underground and again for the meteor strike. In time, when the production team have got the hang of it, this will be one of the best in their box of tricks, but for now – certainly with modern eyes – it looks silly, clearly fake. Not all the performances are convincing and having that many static Tractators up against so many one-note humans can make the story come across far duller than it out to be, even with the regulars at their best. The horrific deaths, which are really quite moving in the book, are all too obviously actors lying on an airbed that’s being slowly deflated, covered in soil. The great ideas found in the scripts – the mining machines with human limbs, the destruction of the Tardis, the Tractators themselves – nothing quite works on screen as well as it should, partly because some of the more horrific aspects got toned down but mostly because of the usual Dr Who bugbears of money and time. If ever there was a story that proved that you have to have an imagination as a Whovian so you can imagine what an adventure was supposed to look like, rather than judging everything with how it appears on screen, then season twenty-one in general but particularly ‘Frontios’ is it. That might be why half the people in this story are treating this as a straight gritty drama and the other half are going for OTT children’s television. Still, that doesn’t matter as much as it sometimes would - if I was about to be pulled under the ground to be munched on by a giant woodlice I’d probably be screaming in an over-the-top way too.

 To be fair, too, at least two of the people working on this project weren’t expecting to be there at all and ‘Frontios’ is as close as we’ve gvot to a ‘cursed’ story in Dr Who history (if you ignore union strikes anyway). The designer assigned to this story, Barrie Dobbins, worked on the early sets then went home one night and shot himself, leaving everyone to wonder why someone who was usually so punctual wasn’t turning up for work. It was a colossal blow: so many people lost a beloved colleague and nobody seems to have seen it coming. In practical terms, too, his assistant David Buckingham was thrown into the deep end, working overtime on this shoot while still mourning the sudden loss of his friend. And then, just as ‘Frontios’ was entering its first recording sessions, actor Peter Arne, a famous character actor hired to play Range, was discovered murdered in his flat mere hours after a costume fitting. We still don’t know for sure how he died and the papers were full of speculation for weeks: the closest anyone came to a lead was when a student that Arne had been in a relationship with was found drowned in the Thames but they were by all accounts very happy together and nobody has ever uncovered a motive – it could be that the murderer was someone else who disposed of two people that night. His absolute last-minute replacement William Lucas ends up giving one of the worst performances in the story, but that’s not really a surprise: it’s a wonder he knows the lines enough to say them, never mind deliver them perfectly. 

 Despite everything working against it, though, ‘Frontios’ is still hugely impressive, nothing like the rest of the Dr Who canon in its sheer bleakness (only ‘Caves Of Androzani’ at the end of the year comes close – and that’s just bleak for the Doctor and Peri, as opposed to humanity as a whole). Despite looking on the face of it this is just business as usual (and it is amazing how much a story as important as this one seems to have passed a lot of fans by). Yes its set in the future like the vast majority of Who stories in this era, but its the far far future, where we’ve never ever been before. Yes it’s a base under siege story, but in many ways its the ultimate base under siege story – if mankind loses this one there’s no chance of coming back from it, this really is one last desperate roll of the dice. Yes its yet another story about giant insects, but unlike the Zarbi or the Wirrn or the giant maggots the Tractators seem to take an actual glee in wiping out mankind rather than the mindless way we wipe out insects smaller than us. Yes we’ve had cold war parables before (including just two stories ago with ‘Warriors Of The Deep’), but never one quite as brutal or desperate as this one. ‘Frontios’ is a special story that gives you a real understanding of people’s primal fears not just for themselves and the people they know but for everything that ever came before them. If nihilistic drama with no hope of escape and killer insects is your thing then you might just have found your favourite Dr Who story; even if you haven’t there’s a lot to live in this one which does things a little differently to normal yet still feels like ‘proper’ Dr Who in a way that a lot of the 5th Doctor era doesn’t, putting the horror and characters up front again where they belong. No its not perfect but then it is a story about how it doesn’t matter what condition you’re in to survive another day, just as long as you do. Most under-rated. 

 POSITIVES + The set is one of Who’s best and certainly the biggest, coming in multiple levels to make up for all the digging that goes on in the story. They could afford to make it large by cutting back on the location filming; this is one of only a handful of Who stories, particularly in the 1980s, that’s all shot a television studio without even a model shot. While that doesn’t offer a lot of variety that works for a story that’s meant to be claustrophobic and where there’s nowhere to run. By now there have been dozens of tunnel sets in Dr Who but this is one of the best too, with the feeling of the dirt and soil underneath everyone’s fingertips rather than just a flimsy set. 

 NEGATIVES - In the book there’s a hugely powerful scene where Brazen is caught between a rock and, well, a Tractator, abandoning a colonist he views as a ‘deserter’ to be mercilessly shot at the hands of the ‘Rets’ in a gruesome and horrifying death, thinking to himself with relief that at least he’s survived and then feeling guilty for that thought when he’s meant to be keeping the people under his protection safe, only to stagger into the clutches of a Tractator excavating machine that cuts him into bits where he feels every bit of that primal agony and fear anyway. On screen? A man falls over and gets sat on by some over-acting extras before Peter Gilmore walks clumsily right into the path of a whacking great machine he really should have seen coming. Some things really are better left to the imagination. BEST 

QUOTE: ‘As an invasion weapon, you'd have to agree that The Tardis is about as offensive as a chicken vol-au-vent…’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The wittily titled ‘Life After Queth’, part of the Short Trips anthology book ‘Farewells’ (2006), is one of the most direct sequels of them all taking place mere seconds after the end of ‘Frontios’. The Doctor makes good on his promise to take the Gravis in the Tardis to find a new home but – surprise surprise – the Tardis goes wrong and lands on a planet filled with an army of alien armadillos. In a continuation of the free-for-all scrabble for life seen in Frontios, set in the far future, The Queeth have lost lots of planets to alien attack and bombardment and are paranoid the Tardis crew are here to do the same to them. In a foreshadowing of both ‘Journey’s End’ and ‘The Day Of The Doctor’ The Queeth protect their planet by putting it out of time in a pocket dimension, powered by their own minds. There’s a neat twist about what’s really going on that I won’t spoil – all in all Matt Kimpton’s story is one of the better ‘Short Trips’ although you do have to wonder why the Gravis is written in as part of the plot as he doesn’t do very much at all and simply meekly leaves at the next inhabited planet at story’s end (it’s called Kollokrun if you want to send him a postcard). 

 ‘The Hollows Of Time’ does however have lots of Tractators and is one of those largely promising stories written for the cancelled season 23 in 1985 that got replaced by the largely disappointing ‘Trial Of a Timelord’ in 1986 instead. Written again by Christopher H Bidmead it was finally made as part of Big Finish’s ‘Lost Stories’ range in 2010 and features the 6th Doctor and Peri on holiday in the Leadworth-like sleepy village Hollowdean. Like a lot of holidays all the days end up in a blur – unlike a lot of holidays that’s because they’ve been brainwashed by a mysterious professor who once worked at Bletchley Park and has been experimenting with alternate realities. In this, the most ‘Sliders’ of Who stories, the parallel world involves familiar looking giant woodlice. This script isn’t quite up to ‘Frontios’ and I suspect had they made it on TV with the usual Who budgetary problems of the 1980s it would have all looked a bit silly, but on audio the sound of these aliens not on a scarred abandoned planet but in the middle of the very English gentile countryside is a perfect Dr Whoy combination of the ordinary and extraordinary colliding. Bidmead still has his touch with characters and writes better for this Doctor and Peri than almost anyone (only Phillip Martin perhaps beats him there) while the Gravis himself is almost a goody this time around. Like practically all the lost stories highly recommended, especially if you love ‘Frontios’ as the two stories are very similar all round. At one point a draft of this story featured The Anthony Ainley Master, but that’s not the draft used by Big Finish (it’s hard to know where he would have fitted in this version). 

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