Inferno
(Season 7, Dr 3 with Liz and UNIT, 9/5/1970-20/6/1970, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Don Houghton director: Douglas Camfield (with Barry Letts uncredited)
Rank: 10
''Little miss Petra,
Playing hard to Getta,
Making her eyes at Greg,
When along came a primord,
Who without a word,
Bit her on her leg
Now she's big and hairy
But what she finds so scary
Isn't what its done to her health
It's that Greg hasn't noticed
He hasn't got the remotest
After all, its 1970 so he's quite hairy himself!'
Had this new version of Dr Who with Jon Pertwee in the lead role not worked out then the series was under the biggest threat of cancellation it had ever been, following falling viewing figures across season six in 1969. When Barry Letts took over as producer in 1970 he knew it was one last throw of the dice: the show was given a dramatically reduced budget (that’s why the Doctor was exiled to Earth as a cost saving device and why so many stories ended up multi-parters) and both he and script editor Terrance Dicks were asked to came up with potential replacement series for the Saturday teatime slot. Now that Sydney Newman, the show’s originator, was no longer in charge at the BBC the show had no extra protection, no second chances; this was one last chance at regeneration and if the viewing figures didn’t go back to where they were then the show would die. It had had a long run after all: seven years was good going for any series, never mind a quirky children’s science-fiction one. Luckily for us the ideas Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks made in their holidays (their joint one was ‘Moonbase 3’) were never as loved and soon got forgotten, but then how could they be? Dr Who is a format so clever and special it doesn’t come around very often and even after seven years this story shows how many new places it could still stretch to. As the last story in season seven ‘Inferno’ could have been the end and if the show was going to go out then it was going out with a bang: the complete and utter destruction of the Earth! Of course writer Dan Houghton, the man who’d once given Terrance Dicks his big breakthrough writing for Crossroads, was never quite going to blow up our Earth or there would be zero chance for any future series at all. However he came as close as anyone connected to Dr Who had ever dared…
One of the things that
impresses me most about this series is how so many of the things we think are an
obvious, natural, day-to-day part of Dr Who are there from the beginning, even
though most of them are so utterly different to anything created for any series
ever. Trips to the past? First story. Trips to the future? Second story. Trips
that are neither? Third story. Tardis? First story. Daleks? Second story.
Bonkers surrealism utterly unlike anything ever seen on television? Third
story. Quests? Fifth Story. Monsters who turn out to be less monstrous than
Humans? Seventh Story. Plots centred round the life of a companion? Eleventh
story. Plots that combine history and future? Seventeenth Story. Even the
concept of regeneration (not that they quite called it that yet) that was
unprecedented in all of scifi in any medium comes in just the 29th story. Walk any
modern fan who swears blindly they’d never watch anything that old back to 1963
and they would still recognise practically every aspect of the show, from the
theme tune to the premise to the belief that the universe is a wild and
wonderful and amazing place that’s occasionally sad and scary but also pretty
brilliant too. For my money the last missing piece of the jigsaw that ends up
being your standard Dr Who formula turns up here though, as late as story 64:
parallel universes and an Earth that’s about to be destroyed not from a monster
but through man’s own greed. As the first story created from scratch by the
Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks production team, it’s the last piece of the Dr Who
template missing and opens up a while new universe of stories to explore.
What seems like a scifi
cliché tired writers throw in to brighten a series up now was genuinely daring
in 1970 (we’re still a few months away from the superb children’s series
‘Timeslip’ where two plucky teenagers find themselves in alternate pasts and
futures, including one that’s as hot as this world thanks to global warming and
decades away from ‘Sliders’ where a scientist his teacher, his girlfriend and a
random soul singer – don’t ask – visit parallel worlds every week trying to get
home just like the first season of Dr Who and in the century before ‘Stargate’
did something similar in stories caught at the exact halfway point between Aliens
and Ancient Egyptians). This isn’t just a bit of time-filler either: ‘Inferno’
goes all out, imagining a world that might just be the most scariest ever seen
in the series. Because this isn’t a world where unknown monsters are attacking
unknown people, this isn’t a world where we know the Doctor is going to fix
with a wave of his sonic screwdriver, this is the most terrifying unsolvable
thing that any true proper liberal Dr Who fan can imagine: a right-wing
government getting into power and moulding the people we love into people we
would normally be asked to hate. A lot of Dr Who is about how the Doctor inspires
the people around him to be the best versions of themselves, but this story is
about how the whole of the environment we grow up in shapes us for good or ill.
All that rigid militaristic casual xenophobia has spread even to the people
we’ve come to know and love, with a Liz Shaw whose distant, a Benton whose
cruel and callous and a ‘Brigade Leader’ whose utterly sadistic. It’s a world
only very slightly different to ours after all: Liz has a different hairdo, the
Brigadier has an eye-patch and a scar but no moustache (Nicholas Courtney
always had his added in makeup and didn’t grow one for real till the reunion stories
so that was easy to do) and Benton’s less formal and more, well, primordial
even before he becomes a primord (‘Inferno’ is the sort of story where the word
‘primordial’ crops up a lot, as if that shift to the right is more of a step
backwards in our evolution). They’re all recognisably like our friends, though,
just with their weaknesses exaggerated and their strengths dimmed: Liz has always
been a little cold compared to the bleeding hearts the Doctor usually surrounds
himself with, a career woman who works for the military under protest but here
she’s a block of ice, all too believably the same person in a different
environment. Benton has always been loyal and followed orders to the letter
without question, which is what makes him such a dependable and courageous
ally, but a solider is only as good as the orders they carry out and these are
cruel and wrong. As for the Brigadier, he’s settled down from the sharp
military brain of the Troughton years into a loveable pompous buffoon who
always thinks he knows best but here he’s scary, all that rigidity turned into
a monster who refuses to tolerate any ideas that aren’t his own. Even though this
is the first Who parallel world story it’s easily the best because we can see
how these people ended up here and became so different (as opposed to, say, ‘Rise
Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel’ where it seemed to be a matter of luck and/or
commerce). We’re used to being scared of the unknowable monsters but this story
is about being scared of ourselves and what we can become when warped by a
regime that isn’t fair and equal. After all those years of Dr Who being about
exploration and bases under siege fighting monsters it finally become a moral
crusade to make the world a better place and Dr ho has rarely been so
inspiring. After all, the one thing this parallel world doesn’t have is an
exiled Doctor to show them the error of their ways (although even there the mad
scientist behind it all, Olaf Pooley, is basically a parallel world Doctor:
scientifically curious to the point of risking the lives of the people around
him, argumentative to those working with him and obstinate and arrogant when
things go wrong – all reasons the 3rd Doctor is forced to regenerate
into the 4th in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’).
It’s the most Orwellian of Dr Who stories this one, full of subtle hints at a regime that’s ruling by fear and lies, right down to such beautifully subtle hints as the posters of BBC visual effects boss Jack Kine on the wall (taking off the posters for the BBC’s famous 1950 adaptation of ‘1984’ where then-boss Roy Oxley did the same thing; Kine was a junior assistant on that series so it’s one of those glorious in-jokes only about three people would have got till the Dr Who guidebooks started coming out). Everyone can see what’s really happening, but everyone is too afraid to point it out so we have a world where people are blatantly lying and passing it off as the truth and assuming everyone else is too scared to point this out. This is a world of doublespeak, where your thoughts and words can get twisted and where you can’t trust anyone, even the people we normally would, because they’ve grown up realising that to survive in this world they can’t get by doing the right thing. Instead of a roughly equal democratic society where people can challenge and debate this is a world where rules are laid down with the law. Interestingly we never see what created this alternate world but there are signs everywhere that we’re in a fascist version of Britain where the Nazis won WW2: to the adults watching this who once fought in the war for real that gives this story an extra shiver of recognition. They’ve even killed off the Royal Family, the fiends (although why defeating a feudal system should make this state an enemy of democracy rather than a hero goodness knows). Like the best Dr Who stories this might be fiction, but it’s close enough to the truth of what might have been to be deeply uncomfortable. That makes an interesting point about UNIT: in our world they’re a last defence, a ‘family’ of loyal soldiers who are dedicated to keeping us safe and fighting only in self-defence, give or take the odd scared genocide under orders of the Brigadier. Despite this era of the show inheriting UNIT as a fait accompli and being uneasy about how the military could ever work in a series that, their producer at least sees as being all about friendliness, karma and democracy for the most part they’re a force for good: your face lights up when you see them because you know they’ve been trained to deal with aliens and are like the cavalry coming to recue our heroes out of trouble. Not in this world: in a military dictatorship the soldiers are all on the side of the people who rule and everyone is at their mercy, often scared into doing the wrong thing because to do otherwise is to risk your life and those of the people you love. This is a story where the vague-democracy of ‘our’ world works so much better though: just look at how scared everyone in this parallel world is in episode six, how quickly the cracks of bitterness and jealousy break through as the regime splinters as everyone fights each other – whereas in our world the worst that happens is a sort-of near miss with a car. In the parallel world we are all enemies of the state in their eyes – in our world it’s the state that’s a necessary enemy that we can still tear down if they go too far and we feel strongly enough.
Writer Don Houghton could
have stopped there – goodness knows that’s enough mileage to begin with, even
for a story that for budget reasons has been stretched out to a whopping seven
episodes – but he goes even further by doing the most Dr Who thing ever,
throwing an alien threat at this world and seeing how this slightly different
world copes with it compared to our own democratic one. Being fascist, with
ruthless efficiency, they’ve got there a bit quicker, reaching Armageddon point
at speed: the Nazis did make the trains run on time after all, even if they cut
off people’s right to go anywhere. They’re far less prepared for disaster than
‘our’ world though: nobody trusts anyone, nobody listens or collaborates and
the hierarchy of obeying orders means that when their Stahlman scientist gets
infected with Fendahl gas there’s no one brave enough to point out he’s wrong. Interesting,
while most stories (and the first half of this one) have the Doctor rage
against petty bureaucracy in this case it’s a lifesaver, literally: the delay
seems courtesy of the extra debate around the safety of the drilling in the
more liberal world of UNIT at the start of the story, something that seems a
minor point at the time but arguably saves everyone’s lives by episode seven. All
critics in this parallel world are silenced into obeying, including the Doctor
who knows exactly what’s going on but, like most 3rd Doctor stories,
nobody listens to him at all in either world. This is a world held together by
threats, bullying, guns and masking tape and it’s fraying at the edges long
before the world is blown up. Because yes, the Earth really is destroyed, in an
episode six cliffhanger that’s one of the best in the series – with the Doctor
saved but returning to the exact same scenario a few hours later in ‘our’
world. Ha, get out of that one Doctor! ‘Inferno’ is gloriously tense, a seven
episode thriller where the stakes get higher with each and every episode
because we know how easily things can go wrong if the Doctor can’t get people
to see reason and while a few later stories also see variations of the Earth
blown up none do it with quite the visceral thrill of this one, while the use
of the ticking clock counting down to our destruction is quite unlike anything
else the series ever tried. It’s a brilliant way of upping the stakes and the
second half of ‘Inferno’ is amongst the best bits of drama ever made, never
mind ‘Dr Who’.
And where does this threat come from? Rather than an alien invasion from outer space it becomes, like ‘The Silurians’ two stories earlier, a threat from the depths of the Earth itself. Only the real villain isn’t a bunch of sleeping reptiles from Earth’s past but the core of the Earth itself, exploited by man’s greed. It’s a very clever idea, having a threat that effectively goes down and up rather than side to side or from above, like usual. Houghton had been intrigued by a real-life secret drilling operation named ‘Project Mo-Hole’ which had become a byword for Cold War extremism. Both America and Russia had drilled as far humanity had ever dug into the Earth’s core. Officially both sides were drilling into the gap between the earth’s core and the Earth’s mantle out of ‘scientific curiosity’ and to collect geological samples, but given that both were doing it in competition it felt more like a case of ‘my drill’s bigger than your drill!’ by two superpowers who, for some reason, thought the cold war might spill over into the underground as well as outer space. The Americans officially got to 4.8miles below the surface; the Russians claimed unofficially to have got to 5.5miles. I’ve read a lot about this project down the years and I still don’t really know what they were trying to do – its just one of those curious quirky side effects of the arms race where two sides were doing things because of rumours that the other side were doing them even though they weren’t, with no real idea what they were doing. Houghton, as part of his research, phoned the American side up to see how it was going and got some very cagey answers: one phonecall it was still ongoing, the next he was being phoned up to say it had been cancelled, thenext that it was going brilliantly. The British Science Museum, who were collecting the data, were similarly unhelpful: yes it was still a thing but no they couldn’t point to anything concrete that the project had actually uncovered. It struck Houghton, as it must have struck most people, that it was all a colossal waste of money. We know now, thanks to the release of official documents, that actually it had stopped a few years earlier but wasn’t made public in case the Russians got wind of that and laughed at us’ the idea was only abandoned after the project, which had been given an unlimited budget by the military, cost too much even for JFK-era America and was quietly written off, but not before whispers about it had got out. Don Houghton was clearly one of the people who was whispered to and has all the same questions that I do, making the Doctor not the outsider he is but the everyman voice, the only person who can see just how stupid and dangerous the ‘Inferno’ project is (I mean, even calling it that is kind of asking for trouble).
That trouble is a big
green goo that gets uncovered and turns mankind back to his primordial,
near-werewolf like state, big hairy beasties as Jamie would say. Really, though
it’s not the goo that’s the ‘enemy’ but more mankind’s greed, as Professor
Stahlman basically invents fracking a couple of decades too early and reckons
there’s money to be made from the gas trapped deep within the Earth. He’s
greedy and obstinate enough to continue even when the Earth is literally
screaming in pain. As much as the primords are a real physical threat they feel
symbolic too: other Dr Who stories are about how man’s future lies in the
stars, reaching out to other planets and cultures, while this one finds us
burying back into the darkness of the underground again like Neanderthals
burying themselves in caves, fighting over resources and profits that aren’t really
there. Using our mother Earth, the giver of life and abundance, to fight out
our petty walls is entirely the wrong use of our resources and all the
advantages evolution gave us. Watching ‘Inferno’ always used to be a chilling
experience at the best of times but watching it now, post-fracking when we know
man really is stupid enough to do this for real, adds a whole different layer
on top, as if I’m now watching this story’s slow unravel from minor problem to
absolute chaos in real time across seven episodes of my own, in some parallel
universe where all the worst warnings of this story came true. All we’re
missing in ‘this’ world is the sight of David Cameron (who allowed fracking to
start) and Boris Johnson (who allowed fracking even to continue after
environmental concerns over earthquakes were raised because, duh, if you stick
a whacking great drill into something there are going to be repercussions,
that’s science) turning into slathering hairy primordial primords and we’re
there (and there were moments during Boris’ most unkempt months in power when I
seriously wondered if that was happening). So far the Pertwee years have given
us unfeeling plastic mannequins, kind aliens who woke up on the wrong side of
the millennia and kind aliens who have got the wrong end of the stick and sent
us some space aliens of their own, but ‘Inferno’ is the real start of the 3rd
Doctor era because despite a whole universe of aliens and threats out to kill
us nobody causes more harm to man than man himself. It’s a great moral message
that other Who stories had touched on (‘Planet Of the Giants’ was warning about
pesticides as early as the start of season two) but here you can’t escape it:
our greed will be our downfall and is of far bigger consequence to us than our
galactic near-neighbours on the other side of the globe. What’s great about all
of this is that ‘Inferno’ isn’t set in a time set in the far or even the near
future, like so many other Dr Whos, but one that’s absolutely now just a small nudge
away and it’s a story that asks us all to be on our guard not in some
existential future but here and now.
That goo might not make much sense (I mean scientifically it’s a non-starter and we never get a proper back-story as to how it got there or why it affects Humanity the way it does – in a story that, otherwise, is all about asking questions the author uses a lot of deflection to make sure we don’t think about it too hard) is one of the series’ best metaphors too which works as both a plot driver and as a symbol of something deeper. For surely it’s greed and money, the evils that drive this story and which are motivators about safety for so much of the story. Greed is infectious: everyone who starts cutting corners and trying to take more than their fair share might as well become primords for they they devolve from kind clear-thinking open-hearted individuals into monsters who only care about themselves. And the more people see other people make their money the more they become ‘touched’ by it too, wanting to keep more for themselves. It’s no surprise that big business and corporations are at the heart of this story, institutions too big to be told no: the green goo is capitalism gone mad, drilling for the sake of not information or science but profit margins. But what good are profit margins to you when your customers are all turned into hairy zombies fighting for survival? Greed is like a plague in this story that can touch everyone unless they’re very very careful. ‘Inferno’ brilliantly laughs at mankind’s arrogance foere thinking it can conquer nature when we are still in thrall to it and need to be nice to out planet to survive; that despite our intellect and technology we’re just hairy primeval beats who just learned how to shave and put on a suit; that our planet will always be the boss of us. And having that idea as early as 1970 is astonishing in retrospect: some of the more, uhh, primord-brained Humans out there still haven’t understood this message now In 2023.
The real monster though
isn’t the green goo or the primords or even Stahlman but the hierarchy that
means no one is allowed to disagree with the star scientist or the big
businessmen behind them and say slow down a minute till we know it’s safe’. Nobody
has the power to step in and say ‘no’ across this story – well nobody except
the Dr and of course no one’s listening to him, he’s the ultimate outsider in
‘Inferno’ who didn’t want to be sodding here in the first place. The 3rd Doctor’s
at his absolute best when squaring up to authority, with all the gravitas and
haughtiness of the pen-pushers he’s fighting but an insight and experience
which means he can run rings round them all. That’s never more true than in
‘Inferno’, a story that gives Pertwee plenty of opportunities to huff and puff
and eye-roll his way through the plot and be the dashing hero we all remember
rather than the sometimes shady character of his first few stories. Some 3rd Dr
adventures like making him impossibly distant and sometimes even cruel ort
callous but Pertwee works best as a favourite uncle rather than a strict
authoritarian and he’s never better than in this story where his hearts are
breaking with the sheer suffering going on around him (Dr Who guidebooks love
calling the 3rd Dr a ‘Tory’ because he’s a posh git in posh frilly shirts who
loves name-dropping, but really he’s the most liberal leaning of all the
generations who hates authority and power because of class or inheritance or
money; he just dresses up on their terms to argue with them about it –
politically he’s a natural Whig rather than a Labour voter, from the days when
the working classes never got a vote. And no, that’s not a dig at Pertwee’s
hairstyle, honest).
The big reason I love
‘Inferno’ so much is how cleverly it inverts what a ‘normal’ Dr Who story would
do, even in an era of such change as season seven, as if the writer got the
memo about the Doctor being exiled to Earth and figured they meant earth as in
soil, working on his own twist on the formula quite unlike everyone else’s:
instead of outer space this story is about the Earth’s inner core; rather than
the Doctor being brought in as a scientist to help a UNIT military operation
this time he calls them in to help him on a shady scientific project where he’s
been working part-time to get power for his broken Tardis; instead of threats
from advanced technological races from the future the big threat here is a
slime that takes us back to our primitive selves. It’s a mirror to the usual
story just as the parallel world is a mirror to our own. Even set-wise its
different: as with all season seven stories this one makes great use of its one
big set (Cheaper than building dozens of little ones), but has it here from the
start rather than as a showcase to keep till partway through, a scientific
hubbub which seems light and airy when we first see it but quickly becomes
claustrophobic as the primords take more and more of it over and our heroes are
backed into a series of increasingly tiny rooms. There arew lots of lovely
touches that suggest people have really thought this through: the Brigade
leader, for instance, has two telephones – his normal white one and a black one
from whom he gets unofficial instructions from a ‘shadowy source’ above him. Forget
the less than sutle eyepatch just check out the scar: though never mentioned
its clear, without saying it, that this Brigadier will resort to fisticuffs (he’s
always been a leader whose always prepared to do what he asks of his men:
clearly he was a good soldier or he would never have been granted promotion but
‘our’ Brigadier never sees fighting as anything but a last resort when talking
is hopeless, a lesson learned the hard way through The Doctor). And then there’s
the soundtrack: most Dr Who stories have incidental music that’s light and airy
and spacey and alien and uses that as evidence of something weird happening,
but this one goes the opposite way: the alien sounds are all from stock (mostly
stock recordings by theme tune arranger Delia Derbyshire such as her signature
piece ‘The Delian Mode’) and they feel familiar and cosy and safe – it’s the
industrial drilling that feels alien and strange and increasingly like an
‘invader’, growing in volume until by episode six everyone is shouting over it
just to be heard.
What I love most about
‘Inferno’ though is the pacing and the unique way they show this collapse on
screen. Generally speaking Dr Who stories ebb and flow: things build up to a
climax for a cliffhanger ease off in the middle of the story then get tense
again to get you to tune in next week. Not this one: what starts out as one of
the slowest and most laidback of all Dr Who stories in episode one, with room
for the characters to breathe and out-posh each other in haughty sullen
silences and genial discussions we get to properly know them, with a bit of
light digging going on in the background where its warm and cosy, has by
episode seven escalated to the point where everyone is screaming to be heard,
from the Earth on down, with constant background noise and a world that gets
increasingly hot, with the cast visibly dripping in sweat. The monsters arrive
as noises-off, as almost an incidental detail (mostly because they were: Letts
and Dicks wanted a monster in there somewhere so the primords only turned up in
the second draft) and only slowly move towards the centre of the story before
taking it over by the second half in what becomes a fierce fight by the end
that doesn’t let off steam for even a single scene (give or take the final
episode). We as the audience can also see what no one in this story – except
perhaps the Doctor – can see: the bigger picture, what the individual soldiers
and scientists who accidentally touch the goo and are slowly transforming into
but trying to hide from themselves and each other. There’s no time for padding
in this story after its leisurely start, just seven episodes that each build on
the last, until the end feels as if it’s a real fight to survive that we
(spoilers) only just make it out of alive. Such a simple idea, but it allows
this story to say so much: a lot of Dr Who is about imagining the future and
preparing for the worst while hoping for the best, but never more so than in
‘Inferno’, which practically comes with flashing red warning lights for every future
scenario that might be a little like this one: that it’s all very well to be
curious but if you’re going to meddle with something you don’t understand then
be prepared to put the brakes on, not the accelerator of greed.
‘Intense’ is the word for
‘Inferno’ – it’s a story that gives no quarter for anyone, cast or crew or viewer
and which demands a lot of all three. It’s no surprise that it was this story
that made its director ill, Dr Who regular Douglas Camfield collapsing from a heart
condition midway through production for episode three: Letts hired him for the
story because he knew it would appeal to his very un-UNIT-style military precision
direction, which was already intense at the best of times. Spare a thought for
his poor wife Sheila Dunn cast in this story as Petra too, who saw how sick her
husband was and tried to get him to listen and for the production team to slow
things down but nobody did (the message of ‘Inferno’ in a nutshell) and yet who
still had to carry on acting for five weeks when he was in hospital then at
home recuperating; unlike a lot of other Dr Who examples of nepotism and the
director using their wives she’s really good and gets the part of a sweet but businesslike
secretary who realises how misplaced her life priorities are spot-on. Barry
Letts himself stepped into direct the rest of the story using Camfield’s
detailed notes (he’d got as far as midway through episode six when Barry
started adding a few touches of his own), rather sweetly keeping the fact quiet
for decades after in case word about his friend’s health got out and people
stopped hiring him for being ‘unreliable’. Both men are excellent: a lesser director
or producer might have misunderstood this very different style of story but
they both get the structure of how the early episodes dance as the characters
beat around the bush following protocol and the later episodes are a guttural
fight to the death. I don’t often raise highlights od direction 9as its harder
to get an angle on than writing or acting) but some of these shots are sublime:
just look at the cross-fade between primords-infected soldier Slocum picking up
a wrench and delivering a heavy blow – which turns effortlessly into the
Brigadier using a hammer on some nails in his cosy office.
‘Inferno’ is a story that
relies heavily on its cast but they’re all on top form, one of those stories
where every part is played to perfection, with everyone having fun dressing up
as their parallel world selves: too much fun given one of the most famous Dr Who
anecdotes of them all, about everyone turning up in eye-patches for the scene
when they have their backs to the Brigade Leader who swings round in his chair
in an attempt to put him off (although being the pro he was Nicholas Courtney
carried on with the scene anyway while everyone else giggled; Steven Moffat
loved this anecdote favourite that he wrote in a world where everyone was in
eye-patches for ‘The Wedding Of River Song’, the story he was drafting when
news about Courtney’s death first broke). The Brigade Leader is a nastier,
tougher version of the Brigadier without the humour or the twinkle in the eye
and Nicholas Courtney plays him much more like Bret Vyon, his character in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ with just
the odd hint of the man we’ve come to love and respect. It’s a powerful
reminder of just how much the Brigadier, a character Courtney always wore so
naturally, really was just an acting job he made look easy. Liz is even harder
to get right – she’s already one of the tougher, no-nonsense of Dr Who
companions but the parallel world Liz needs to be tougher still, yet the moment
she starts believing ‘our’ Doctor sees her soften back to the version we know
and love. Caroline John nails the tricky middle ground without batting an
eyelash in what’s easily her best performance of the four stories (it’s a real
shame Liz never gets a leaving scene, a combination of Letts feeling the
character wasn’t quite working and John finding out she was pregnant and not
fighting the decision as hard as she might have done). Benton is perhaps the
most changed and yet the least changed of all: he’s the same dependable soldier
even if he’s working for the ‘wrong’ side now. John Levene is word-perfect too,
never more so when he turns into a primord, the only time we see any of our
UNIT regulars ever turned into a ‘monster’ (and a bit of a parallel world in
itself, given that Levene got the part of Benton as a ‘thankyou’ on the back of
playing several monsters in the 2nd Dr era).
Usually in Dr Who stories
that like to break up the monotony and try something a bit different has the
Doctor start acting a bit odd (think William Hartnell playing the evil ‘Abbott
of Amboise’ in ‘The Massacre’, Patrick Troughton as the evil dictator Salamander
in ‘The Enemy Of The World’ or Tom Baker as
a nastier Doctor in ‘The Invasion Of Time’), but here Jon Pertwee has the
hardest job of all, being our one link between the two worlds, but he’s never
better than in this story either, especially the story’s second half where he’s
the lone voice of sanity in a world that’s gone mad. Usually the Doctor is the
unknowing other, the alien who can see things Humans can’t, but in this story he’s
us, desperately railing at authority figures that won’t listen and trying to do
the right thing when it hurts. Of all the Doctors Pertwee played him the most ‘straight’,
as a dashing hero who could always be relied on to do the right thing (a
surprise to many after his casting, given that he was known for his many
characters and comedy voices – he was hired partly because it was thought,
after Troughton, that it might be nice if the Doctor got his guitar out and did
some singing from time to time).Too many 3rd Doctor stories make him
out to be the establishment but here he’s the ultimate rebel, speaking the
truth even when it gets you killed. The 3rd Doctor’s greatest
strength is the way he can cut through human hang-ups to the heart of the
matter without paying any attention to human institutions or hierarchies and
this story needs him and is written for him in a way few others are: it’s hard
to imagine ‘Inferno’ working as well with the more distant 4th, the more
manipulative 7th or the grumpier 12th Doctors, for
instance. He’s also clever, as intelligent as we ever see him (so many writers
forget that, especially in this era where The Master is the evil genius),
effortlessly solving in ten minutes what Stahlman and his team have worried
over for months without success. Too often lesser writers just make the 3rd
Doctor a sort of interesting complex bully, but here he’s brave and courageous
and bright and brilliant and charismatic and everything you want the Doctor to
be.
You get the sense,
though, that the writer is even more interested in the new cast of characters
he’s carved out for himself and there’s a lot of time given over to the
incidental cast this week who are all equally strong: there’s a ‘snog marry,
primord’ subplot going on between Dr Who regular Derek Newark’s Greg and Sheila
Dunn’s Petra, who find an odd yet believable relationship in between clashing
over the government’s drilling programme and for whom everything could go very
wrong or very right with every throw of this story’s loaded dice. It’s a very
believable romance in difficult circumstances as romances amongst the
incidental cast in Dr Who stories go, although you do wonder how they’re going
to stay together without the threat of imminent destruction to keep their
relationship ‘exciting’. Greg starts off as testosterone city, a man’s man who
likes throwing his weight around, but his passion is no match for Stahlman’s
rigidness and he learns across the course of this story more than the vast
majority of supporting characters, growing into a more rounded character who
learns to discern and listen to the smartest person in the room not the
loudest. In other words he’s proof of how a man can start off like a primitive primords
(he was a caveman last time we saw him in Who after all) but who can learn,
adapt and grow. Given how much the Doctyor already knows about Project Inferno
when we arrive he’s our eyes and ears for the first few episodes as the plot
gets explained to him; unusual indeed for Dr Who to do this with a complete
stranger we’ve never met before and yet it works: Newark gets intellect as well
as his more brutal animalistic side. Greg’s Petra might be just the assistant who
spends a lot of the story looking for protection and wondering who to trust but
she’s tough when she needs to be and you’ll be cheering on her parallel world
self as she realises she’s tougher than she thought she was and stands up to
the bullies around her (now this is how they should have written Liz Shaw).Olaf
Pooley gets a lot of stick from fans for his reserved portrayal of Professor
Stahlman(n) (the production team added an ‘n’ to the parallel world Professor
by accident when making the name tags, but for all we know this military regime
have banned names with single ‘N’s!) but I really like it – this is a subtler
scientist than the mad ones we usually get in Dr Who, one whose used to cold
hard logic but has a stuuborn streak that stops him from being more than just a
Cybermen clone. It’s a part that would have been too much played full so he
needs to be underplayed and you feel it all the more when the threat the Doctor’s
been warning him about for years starts turning even him green and hairy and
you really feel him head for a nervous breakdown, at war with himself and fate
as much as the Doctor. Even the barely seen bureaucrats are a more interesting bunch than usual and
the jovial Keith Gold is the one politician in the entire ‘classic’ series that’s
halfway likeable (Christopher Benjamin playing him like a contemporary Henry
Jago from ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’, not quite of the real world but in a Human batty
sort of way).
The primords are,
perhaps, the one aspect of this story that isn’t quite up there with the rest:
we’re so used in the 3rd Dr era to seeing the Doctor come up across a suave,
sophisticated baddy from The Master on down who can talk their way out of
trouble that seeing the Doctor square off against a grunting squeaking werewolf
doesn’t have the same gravitas somehow. There have been better makeup jobs in Dr
Who too, including a second werewolf in ‘The
Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ eighteen years later that’s far subtler. It’s
not bad either though, especially as the primords don’t tend to be stationary
long enough for you to stare at the false teeth and hair and even that makes a
refreshing change: we know the Doctor can outwit even the cleverest enemy but
the most brutal and basest sort? We don’t know if he will win this time. He
very nearly doesn’t. The last episode feels like one of the closest fights we
ever have between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the series and the one before that is
the closest the Doctor ever comes to ‘losing’ without being forced into a
regeneration, unable to save an entire parallel world from its own fate. Its
only the fact that ‘our’ world is a (relatively) kinder, more humane one where
people listen to each other that the Doctor manages to stop the threat at all,
with enough time to show Stahlman(n) as he really is. Not many Dr Who stories
have the ambition of going through with their threat to blow up the world – the
sort of trick a series can only really pull off once - so it really makes you
sit up when the show does the unthinkable in episode six. It would have been
one hell of a way to go out had this been the very last story: a last desperate
warning of what not to become by a series that always had one finger on the
pulse of what our world was turning into.
But of course the series
doesn’t end here: this story and the three before it were all too good. There’s
a special gravitas about season seven, a certain adultness (not a ‘New Adventures’
or ‘Torchwood’ adultness of sex and violence either, but more a cerebral
adultness) not many other Dr Who adventures can match. As an ending it would
have been brilliant; as the launchpad for a whole new series to come, bright
and colourful and more compact though, its better still, pointing the way to
the fun of season eight too. This is a story that isn’t afraid to show us our
shadow side and consequence of our actions and is prepared to blow up a
parallel world to get us to listen: Dr Who as a warning, which is a long way
from the imagination of the Hartnell stories and the terror of the Troughtons. In
the end it’s a direction the show won’t really follow: their confidence high
and their future secure the Letts/Dicks/Pertwee era starts looking around for
more long-term ideas and recurring suave baddies rather than the sharp (but not
exactly short) shock of ‘Inferno’. Which is a real shame: good as The Master stories
to come are, cute as Jo Grant is, cosy as UNIT become, there’s something about
the tough uncompromising-ness of this story that makes it stand out. Maybe they
just felt that this story was so good they just couldn’t top it’s grim passion
and brutal intelligence? The result is a story that’s one of those rare beasts
in Dr Who: a story that manages to balance being sophisticated and talky but
never boring, full of big broad monsters and action sequences, tense and urgent
but with enough room for character and detail, a cast that’s working overtime
and clearly having fun doing it, where every decision pretty much goes right
and nothing really goes wrong. Above and beyond all that though (or perhaps
below, given the setting for the story) is the very Dr Who theme that in order
to evolve and grow we have to be kind, that in the wrong environment even the
best of us can become ‘wrong’ and a reminder that it only takes a slight nudge
in the wrong direction to turn us all into brain-dead violent primords (for
some of us it doesn’t even take that much let’s face it). We need a voice of
sanity in an insane world and ‘Inferno’ is that voice at its clearest and most
erudite, the Doctor’s way the only way any of us are ever going to survive. In
a parallel world out there somewhere all DW stories are as effortlessly
brilliant as this one, a near-perfect story which is pretty hot stuff, right
down to its core. ‘Inferno’ is a story that stays with you long after the
credits stop rolling, the warnings of this world just a fracking drill or a
primord away. Maybe we’re closer than we think and we need to listen to
this story’s warnings of a screaming Earth, now more than ever.
POSITIVES + I don’t
often have room to mention Dr Who’s regular 1970s stunt team HAVOC but they
work overtime in this story so it seems only fair to mention them here. There
are lots of their best scenes in this story, particularly during the location work
at Kent’s Kingsworth Industrial Estate, all high roofs and balconies and gas
pipes (though you’ll be pleased to know in their ‘day job’ the company dealt
with lighting and water utilities and storage rather than drilling and
‘Stahlman’s Gas’). Stuntman Roy Scammell performed the then-biggest stunt fall
ever seen on British TV at the time when he falls fifty feet from a roof as a
primord (ironically Scammell also plays the UNIT soldier who fired the deadly
shot at himself!) Another stuntman, Alan Chuntz, received the worst on-set
injury in Dr Who when he accidentally ‘rolled’ the wrong way and got run over
by Pertwee in Bessie during a low-risk scene (he got a gash in the leg and had
to go to hospital): though the stuntman’s mistake the accident really affected
the star and his scenes for the rest of the day were cancelled so he could come
to terms with the shock. Not that you’d know it from Pertwee’s performance when
he did return, which is as mesmerising as ever (he knew Chuntz and his family
well and sent a bundle of presses to his house to say sorry as well as visiting
in hospital; for his part Chuntz didn’t want his friend to worry and knew it
would affect him so turned up to filming long before he should have done, just
to make him feel better about the accident. This production team really were a
family back in 1970).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There are
four conflicting versions of why Liz Shaw leaves UNIT off-screen (in the gap
between ‘Inferno’ and ‘Terror Of The Autons’), from three different media (some
of them even have Mike Yates’ first days overlapping with her last). The
earliest of these, ‘Country Of The Blind’, is a short story by from the 1993 Dr
Who Yearbook by Paul Cornell in which new recruit Mike’s first task is to
decorate the Doctor’s laboratory (while the Doctor’s still working – he’s not a
happy bunny). Liz has had an offer from Queen Mary, the new research institute
at CERN – The Doctor, of course, isn’t listening and instead goes into a
long-winded anecdote about another Queen Mary. She’s had enough of wasting her
brain on soldiers and while she’s loathe to leave the Doctor and all his knowledge
his rather offhanded assumption that she’d reject any offer to be his mere
assistant makes up her mind. She slips
away without him noticing, just as the Brigadier walks in with a new case about
fairies weirdly enough (possibly the ones in Torchwood!) – the Doctor starts to
shoo him away then realises just how lonely he is. A nice bit of character, if
not much plot.
‘The Scales Of Injustice’
(1996) is the 24th novel in the ‘Missing Adventures’ range. Written
by Gary Russell it sees the return of The Silurians with a foreshadowing of
‘Terror Of The Autons’ in the use of micro-plastics. This is quite a harrowing story,
far darker than the ‘cosy’ UNIT stories on TV with the Brigadier distracted by
funding cuts and a disintegrating marriage and Liz emotionally pushed to her
limits when she discovers a bunch of rogue Silurians (and their pet Myrka!)
have been carrying out experiments on a little boy she knows. The Doctor puts
everything right in time as he always does but it’s a close run thing and Liz
is horrified to learn of a collusion between the Silurians and her government
that runs quite the way up the chain of command. Distraught she feels she can
never work for them again and walks out on The Doctor after an argument too far
– upset himself he can’t quite bring himself to say a proper goodbye. A tough
read, but worth it.
‘The Blue Tooth’, meanwhile,
is a Big Finish audio adventure from the first series of their ‘Companion
Chronicles’ range (2007), written by Nigel Fairs. The 3rd Doctor
never encountered The Cybermen on TV but he does here in one of the best
stories in the range, read with aplomb by Caroline John herself. The blue-tooth
technology we have now all comes from the Cybermen and was reverse-engineered
from UNIT! Liz hears about a string of murders of scientists from Cambridge and
goes to check on her university friend Jean. Finding her missing and a dead cat
in her garden she calls in UNIT, the Doctor tying it into his own
investigations. Between them they work out that the only link between the dead
bodies is the university dentist. Liz goes undercover with new recruit Mike
Yates but the baddies are onto her and knock her out in the waiting room. Saved
in the nick of time by the Doctor they discover that the Cyber-plan is to
insert blue metal into Human’s heads to control them. That makes it all sound a
bit silly but in context this is one of the more tense Big Finish episodes with
cybermats aplenty and it’s good to hear the Cybermen up against the most
unruffled yet emotional of all Doctors. By the end Liz is in quite a state,
questioning her future and her allegiance to UNIT. Highly recommended.
Previous ‘The
Ambassadors Of Death’
next ‘Terror Of The Autons’
No comments:
Post a Comment