The Pirate Planet: Ranking - 42

 

The Pirate Planet

(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 30/9/1978-21/10/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: Douglas Adams, director: Pennant Roberts)

Rank: 42

   'What shall we do with the pirate captain? 

He shouts so loud but it’s all distraction

Of true power he's got just a fraction 

Of what he thinks he has as someone’s acting early in the story 

He makes the Doctor walk the gangplank like he's sober

While K9 and a polyphase parrot dance the pasadoble

But just as the Pirate Captain can't get any lower 

He's just the front for someone even less nobler in the middle of the story 

Wahey the key to time rises 

Hidden as objects in lots of disguises 

In a story that’s full of surprises

Until being shrunk makes the pirate ship capsizes later in the story'

  

 

Who else could it be at no #42 in my rankings other than Douglas Adams? Arguably the most famous writer to ever pen a script for the series even now, his grand total of work for the show amounts to just three scripts, two finished stories and a year of re-writes of other people’s work during a stint as script editor, but due to a series of confusing events behind the scenes this is his only on-screen credit as full writer. In time to come Douglas’ fame with ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ will eclipse anything Dr Who had done since the first Dalek story, but here he’s very much the new boy on the block with less TV credits to his name than almost anyone else who had written for the series. At this point he’s five years out of Cambridge and determined to be a writer but struggling, taking part-time jobs to pay the bills while he fishes for any writing gig that would take him on, although to date the biggest catch he’s had is a couple of sketches for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Things are so bad by 1977 that he’s now penniless and has gone back to living with his mother, where he’s busy putting the finishing touches to the first series of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, a script that seems as likely to go nowhere as all his other ideas. Douglas still sends it to the BBC just in case though and additionally sends it to the Dr Who office as a representative of his work, given that Who is still (just about) the closest brand to his own anarchic scifi-literate humour actually being made, even though he’s been turned down by previous production teams twice already (including a timelord-heavy script for Bob Holmes about an ‘aggression-absorbing machine’ that made the Doctor’s kind passive and filled with multiple complex time paradoxes, who said it contradicted almost everything ever made in the series but asked him to keep writing anyway, before stepping down from his post; a lot of it turned up in the third and weakest of the Hitch-hiker’s books ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Fish’). Douglas, despondent depressed and broke, saw it at as a last throw of the dice before giving up on his dream of being a writer – at least for now - and doing something that actually paid the bills. We were that close to losing one of the brightest smartest most creative minds of his generation, the author of officially Britain’s 4^th most beloved book (according to a millennium poll anyway and one I didn’t trust as it was merely a snapshot of ever changing goalposts as they were back in 1999 and because there were no Terrance Dicks Target novelisations in there so it was obviously wrong).

But Douglas’ story is a testament to not giving up even when it feels as if life, the universe and everything is against you. For there was an unexpected miracle. Actually with typical timing there were two. In June 1977 Douglas was asked to record a pilot episode of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s’ for their drama slot. In July 1977 new Who script editor Anthony Read inherits Bob Homes’ old scripts and loves Douglas’ work so much that he asks him to think up a whole new story. In many ways too Douglas gets lucky: Holmes loved comedy as much as the next script editor but he and producer Phillip Hinchcliffe also loved horror and dark realism, neither of which are really Douglas’ forte – by the time Williams and Reads take over they’re under orders to add more comedy in and take the violence out. By August 1977 ‘Hitch-Hiker’s has been okayed for a full series which needs to be delivered asap; almost the same post brought word that the Dr Who team needed finished scripts for ‘The Pirate Planet’ sooner  than asap. ‘Hitch-hikers’ has a deadline to be broadcast in March 1978; at first ‘The Pirate Planet’ is due for broadcast the exact same month. Suddenly, after years of not having very much to do at all except take baths, Douglas is plunged into a writing whirlwind, alternating between writing for his everyman with a dressing gown and a decidedly no-man alien timelord with a scarf, that seems to have put him off for life (anyone whose read anything about Douglas will know his penchant for ignoring deadlines and the ‘whooshing noise they make as they go by’ while he stayed in the bath longer and longer, a world of endless possibilities still in his brain, while he put off the difficult task of singling them out and writing them down. However so inexperienced is Douglas and yet so inventive and fresh his voice that BBC head of serials Graeme MacDonald pays closer attention to his scripts for Who than normal and actively hates it, with this the only time he actively intervened and tried to get a script outright cancelled. His complaints: it was stupidly ambitious, would sail way over budget and its jokey tongue-in-cheek nature made it seem like a parody of all the other Dr Who scripts on so far. MacDonald clearly just didn’t get ‘it’, commenting that ‘the situation is over-familiar with the dominant Captain and the ground proles working in the mines (he clearly didn’t get as far as the episode three twist then!), that ‘there’s no plot development’ (when the cliffhangers all reveal something new about this world), that ‘the situation they are in is not stated until the end of episode two (that’s all part of the great mystery) and that the characters seemed as if they came straight out of ‘Treasure Island’ and would ‘inevitably lead Tom Baker to stop taking himself seriously again (actually no: with everyone else playing daft Tom goes for darker and brooding, becoming the only person in the room to understand the scale of this threat). 

The script was postponed six months to the following year and might well have been dropped altogether had any other script been anywhere near ready. Producer Graham Williams wasn’t fully convinced either. But Douglas got lucky: an unfortunate accident during the all-too-brief off season between seasons meant the producer was off with a broken leg and script editor Anthony Read was solely in charge. He was an early champion of Douglas’ work who understood the humour and how it only enhanced the drama by pointing out the sheer absurdities of life and how there was more real science attached to Douglas’ scripts than almost any other 1970s Who writer. Read truly believed in ‘The Pirate Planet’, saw that Douglas’ parodic elements worked by playing on audience’s expectations of what would usually happen, turning the usual Dr Who template on its head. While Read agreed to cutout two of the more outlandish ideas (the original script had the bridge of the Captain’s ship extending to a mountain that it had crashed into, while Queen Xanxia’s throne was in a separate mausoleum set) he put his neck on the line and his enthusiasm won Williams over. To go over the head of the head of serials was no small thing either: it’s not like either would have been sacked for but it does rather put you in anger if the story you’ve stuck to your guns for turns out to be unpopular or scores lower audience ratings. They really did put a lot of faith in someone who was about as inexperienced as any Dr Who writer had been thus far (only ‘Full Circle’ and ‘Timelash’ to come were ever written by authors with less experience than Douglas).
Douglas rewards them greatly though with a story that feels as if it’s by an accomplished experienced writer with decades under his belt. It’s a story that feels very different to anything Who had ever done before, pulling back episode to episode to reveal that what we and at first the Doctor assumes about this world is a pack of lies, (spoilers) the macho shouty captain so obviously in charge gradually moving from the foreground to the background while his ‘nurse’, who barely says a word in episode one and barely gets noticed, gradually moves to the front revealed to be the power behind the throne. Pirates in space, aliens outside the law wandering around taking other people’s things, seems like such an obvious idea for Dr Who it’s a wonder it hadn’t happened before, the ‘pirates in space’ motif is at one with other plots about ‘Frankenstein in space’ or ‘Dracula in space’ (it might well, in fact, be a deliberate ploy to do Bob Holmes’ own ‘The Space Pirates’ from 1969 properly, as we know Douglas was a genuine Whovian and that as a seventeen year old without much other scifi on TV to see he’d almost certainly have seen it – and like the rest of us probably been dismayed that it ended up a Wild West tale instead, with snarky comments about rubbishy new-fangled solar toasters). That story from 1969 is more symbolic though, with a humanity in the future that are doing what mankind always does when exploring new places where laws don’t apply: in that story space is the new Wild West or the Atlantic ocean, full of riches there for the taking by old frontiersmen until the corporations cotton on. In this story we get an actual pirate, working outside the law to hijack planets, complete with electronic eye-patch, a gangplank that goes into space and best of all a ‘polyphase avitron’, a robotic parrot who gets chased by K9 in a moment of scifi-slapstick (alas the original idea, to have him say ‘pieces of silicate’, was dropped from the rehearsal script – well, I found it funny. I’m even more sad they dropped the immortal line ‘polyphase avitron want a cracker?!’ There was drama when the prop went missing between studio days, only to be found in a skip outside TV centre; I blame K9 who must have been stored nearby). The title alone is an incredible pun: it’s both a planet that’s been over-run with pirates from the future, a planet that acts like a pirate ship careering round in space plundering resources, a planet (poor Calufrax) that’s been ‘pirated’ and taken away and a planet that’s ‘pirate’ in the artificial, illegal sense  and shouldn’t really be there (because it’s really the second segment of the key to time). The fact that no one in this story ever notices or comments on all the pirate things that happens (because these people don’t have pirates or maybe even seas on their planet) only makes it funnier that their history turned out this way (just check the way the Doctor is forced to walk out the ship into the dark emptiness of space on what looks awfully like a plank).

Only there’s another sadder, madder layer beyond this being just a ‘Planet Full Of Pirates’. For a start the spaceship we thought we were on turns out to be a planet, hollowed out and sucked dry of all its resources and minerals, an ‘artificially metricised structure consisting of a substance with a variable atomic weight’ ass I’m sure you already knew. The pirating isn’t stealing riches or resources from unsuspecting space-travellers but taking whole planets and shrinking them down for their ‘energy’, oblivious to the deaths of the people still alive on them (it’s at one with Earth being blown up by the Vogons in Hitch-Hikers, alien bullies who resemble the shouty Captain in more ways than one). The idea of planets that literally materialise around other planets and destroy them that way, pulling up all their resources without any care for what happens to the people left behind, is genuinely unsettling and troubling in a way that actually makes it the single scariest idea in the Williams era, whatever the head of serials thought.

Only beyond that there’s another level which only comes into focus during the last episode (spoilers): despite all the shouting, all the gimmicks and all the bullying the real ‘villain’ isn’t The Pirate Captain at all but his nurse, the quiet sweet self-effacing girl whose been using him as a front to take all the flak of her plan all along. She’s the cruellest of baddies in so many ways, manipulating others and responsible for the deaths of millions of people simply so that she can (spoilers) live a bit longer while looking young – the darker side of the ‘Peter Pan’ motif and an obvious inspiration for the Cassandra in ‘End Of The World’/New Earth’. In the end too another great twist: that what’s treasure to some is trash to others and the pirates aren’t really after the gold and jewels we think they are at all but energy, time, so Xanxia can stay alive for longer. Because time if the final currency, not money, not power. She’s the natural enemy of The Doctor because she resists change and defies karma. She doesn’t evolve, doesn’t change doesn’t regenerate, doesn’t learn.  The great irony is that Xanxia has spent all her precious time zooming round the universe looking for other planets to suck dry, little caring for the way she ends the lives of the people they steal from, so doesn’t do any actual living with her time except look for the next planet to conquer, wasting time despite knowing how precious it is. That’s not silly, that’s profound.

And beyond even that is a very Dr Who allegory about consumerism and capitalism and how greed is sucking our world dry – and not necessarily by the people we shout at on the news either but the power behind the throne we never get to see. Not least because of the contrast with the more connected (communist?) world of the Mentiads, a fascinating race of telepaths we never get to see enough of but who are a great idea: these ‘pirates’ may have material wealth (and the old age it buys them) but they lack the Mentiads’ sense of community and purpose, filling their longer lives with more emptiness and money, wasting the extra time they’ve bought for themselves when the Mentiads are living the live they dream of almost for free (we don’t get to see the mentiads long enough to see how their monetary system works, but this seems like the sort of community where everyone has everyone else’s back). That’s at least three very DW stories from three very different eras going on inside one another (which is no coincidence: fans forget just what a big DrWho fan Douglas was, before his year as script editor wore him out and made him less than enthusiastic about the series in later interviews) each one of which would have been enough to fill other stories. What starts out as a very broad and arch ‘comedy’ story full of caricatures becomes, not unlike ‘Peter Pan’ actually, a tale of greater realism and hidden sadness behind each revelation, as if the usual sort of late 1970s DW script has become ‘pirated’ by a writer intent on smuggling a deeper story inside it. 

Even so ‘The Pirate Planet’ is, I think its fair to say, the ‘safest’ story Douglas ever wrote in his career, in that it’s the one most recognisable like something someone else would write: its driven by actual plot developments rather than the unfolding randomness of ‘Hitch-Hikers’ or the ‘plots side by side’ nature of his ‘Dirk Gently’ detective books and there are no asides to the camera with narrative devices such as Peter Jones’ book, the ’interruptions’ in the crime novels or the jagged (Jagaroth?) stacked layers of his other two Dr Who stories. You can tell too, I think, that this story started life under Holmes as it shares that era’s predilection for taking famous existing works of literature and converting them into futuristic Dr Who stories. This story, you see, is J M Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ in space. The shouty cybertronic Captain with the electronic replacement arm is Captain Hook. Mr Fibuli, the put-upon long-suffering second mate, is clearly Smee. There’s a planet full of ‘lost boys’, the Mentiads, who learn independence across the story and the ability to think for themselves (quite literally after they develop psycho-kinetic energy and become telepathic). Romana, only in her second story and still a rather shadowy figure who doesn’t fully trust the Doctor yet, is turned into the sceptical Wendy, desperate to believe in fairies but not yet ready to fully commit. And the boy who never grows up? That’s clearly The Doctor whose having a whale of a time running around and causing problems, colliding head on with the ‘rules’ of this world and approaching everything with childlike glee. Unless of course it’s also Xanxia, frozen in place with time dams and looking as if she’s in her early twenties even thoug her real form is hundreds of years old (with actress Vi Dalmar playing the ‘real’ Xanxia uncredited, infamously getting paid the cheeky extra £30 she asked for as ‘danger money’ for being asked to take her false teeth out!)That ought to leave K9 as the crocodile, except that I think that’s supposed to be ‘time’, the thing that stalks everyone on this story ticking down to the point where Xanxia will die as an old woman (and what will happen to her underlings then? They can’t cope without her, however odd that might seem in episode one). For what’s so great about looking forever young anyway if it means you don’t learn anything from the experience of your years? As The Doctor says to Romana, in an apparently totally unconnected scene, ‘good looks are no substitute for a good character’. By the end of this story, so magical is the illusion, that you really do believe in fairies – except that by then the Doctor has shown us that progressive science is really indistinguishable from magic.

For what many reviewers miss with the sheer surrealist nature of this story is how accurate the science is (well, in a Dr Who artistic license sort of a way anyway). Douglas adored science. He read every scientific journal he could afford and immersed himself in the latest data, often incorporating it into his books. That concept about a ‘hollow’ planet? It’s an actual NASA scientific paper, about the peculiar feedback from other planets in our solar system that gravity is only present on the surface of a planet not the core so there  is nothing to stop a planet in space forming around an ‘empty’ core – we don’t need ours to have life on our planet or hold its atoms in place. That linear induction corridor (the bit that looks like a scene from dungeons ‘n’ dragons show ‘Knightmare’ a decade early)? That’s theoretically possible, so I’m told, and once discussed by Einstein. Psycho-kinetic energy? Well the human brain does have a lot of power it never seems to use in everyday life and there’s long been experiments into the idea that humans are really dormant telepaths waiting to be ‘ignited’ by something (Dr Who’s big rival in this era on ITV is ‘The Tomorrow People’ which sets the whole series round this idea, of mankind mutating into our ‘true’ form as telepaths with special powers, a la ‘The Mutants’). That ‘suspended inertia tunnel’ and the black holes held in stasis so that planets are kept alive but small, the size of snooker balls? Well kinda: in theory it would be possible one day if we were ever capable of building something with that much power. That’s what’s so great about Douglas’ writing: while he’s always a natural rulebreaker and rebel when it comes to story structure, interrupting his own words or suddenly jumping between places and times and setting up things at random he always plays to the scientific rules of what can and cannot happen. It’s the reason his stories sound so real and plausible, even at their strangest. Although admittedly the line ‘I’ll never be cruel to an electron in a particle accelerator again’ is just…odd (it makes less scientific sense than anything that actually happens in the story, or indeed any story this year, Black and White Guardians and all). I’m sad they cut what might be one of the most plausible plotlines in the series though: Originally Xanxia was offering longer life to other people – in return for great wealth, which cost so much the aliens then had to recruit other aliens, in a massive pyramid scheme the universe wide that The Doctor then had to untangle (hey Big Finish just a thought…)

Where many fans have problems is what he does to the everyday structure of your average Dr Who template. We think we’re safe in where we’re going: there’s a shouty big tyrant in charge whose clearly the one the Doctor is going to overthrow, complete with sentences that always end in exclamation marks!!! and OTT catch-phrases like ‘by the eye of the sky demon!’ Only he’s a plaything, made up and controlled by the ‘nurse’, a sleight of hand to make people stop looking at her – and while we’ve had it a few times in modern Dr Who that a small and fragile looking female turns out to be the real badass back in 1978 nobody was expecting that twist at all. There’s the mystery of what’s happened to Calufrax and the twist of all the little planets hanging in what’s basically the ship’s airing cupboard, all that immense weight and power and people shrunk to a few centimetres and hanging in mid-air. We also think that these pirates are after literal treasure, before it turns out that’s not what they’re after all, with a twist as early as episode one where the ground of Calufrax is paved with riches and trinkets because there are so many to go around. Not forgetting, of course, the single greatest use of the ‘key to time’ concept – not there in Douglas’ first few drafts of course but added when it got moved to season sixteen -  as it turns out to be not an object (or even a person) but an entire planet. You really get a sense of scale in this story, that the White Guardian really does have super powers never before seen in the series if he can just casually conjure a planet into mid air (so much more impressive than turning a key into some rock or some statue to be discovered in the opening few seconds of an episode, or even the clever but unlikely sixth part that turns out to be a real life princess, which raises all sorts of problems over how her changing metabolic structure whenever she eats something or cuts her hair and fingernails; although how would that have worked if the pirates hadn’t come along to shrink it though? Would it have turned into the second key simply by The Doctor standing on it – and what would have happened to all the people who called it home?) Plus how were they supposed to work that out? You’d think one or other of the Guardians would have left a clue, whether by making the planet look the same colour as the keys or making it half-white and half-black or something. Still really clever though. It makes for a clever twist in the ending too which is more than just the Dr waving his sonic screwdriver at something: Calufrax isn’t really a planet so it can’t be mined in the same way so the machine used to reduce the planets collapses in on itself.  The episode three cliffhanger is particularly inspired, turning that idea of ‘how is the Doctor ever going to get out of danger’ turned into ‘how did the Doctor know what was really going on and why didn’t I see that?’ moment as the Doctor is forced to walk the plank out into open space in a way he possibly can’t survive, before revealing that (spoilers) this whole world is an illusion and he’s really just a hologram, just like the ageing nurse (whose really a Queen). Oh and one more last great twist: in a story filled with impossible technology from our deepest dreams the story is solved by simply hurling a spanner at a control panel in a riot of destruction and violence (something Douglas takes a step further with Duggan in ‘City Of Death’ but works really here too). Every time you think you’ve got a handle on this story and worked out what’s going on Douglas is smarter – and he makes The Doctor smarter too.

This is, alongside ‘The Invasion Of Time’, the single greatest performance Tom Baker ever gave. For the most part he’s his usual flippant self, annoying his captors by not taking their threats seriously and looking impressively unperturbed throughout. Tom revels in the witty intelligent script that makes his Doctor sound like the genius he is and his comic timing is exceptional. This version of the Doctor is more Groucho Marx in space than the alien of the other 4th Dr stories, a smart aleck thumbing his nose at and with a quip to tear down and puncture authority at every occasion even when things look hopeless, not the mute ‘Harpo’ he’s usually pointed as because of the hair (that’s surely the 2^nd Doctor forever on the fringes of everything happening and waiting for the baddies to give themselves away while merrily playing a recorder, while the chick-hunting Chico is surely the 8^th Doctor based on ‘The TV Movie’ or maybe the 10^th, whilst the 5^th Doctor is the more straightforward and faceless Zeppo). However it’s the ‘other’ scenes that really sell this story: as easy as it would be to send up a story where there’s a robotic captain hook yelling his head off (as Graeme MacDonald feared he would) Tom often goes the other way and plays against type. Instead of being another silly person in a silly plot he’s dark and brooding, horrified and outraged at the plan. ‘But what’s it for?’ he pleads with the Captain (when he seems to be in charge) having discovered the planets, piercing through the appearances and red herrings to the true heart of the matter. ‘You wouldn’t know what to do with a planet anyway – beyond shout at it’ is a great 4^th Doctor line too when he thinks The Captain is just being another shouty villain. Tom is back to being scary in this story, as ruthless and relentless as the villains and suddenly in charge of putting things right and saving lives, all signs of flippancy gone. All the more remarkable given that he’d just been in a very serious accident: shortly before filming he’d been teasing a dog with a sausage that had, quite reasonably, turned round and bitten him, badly on the lip. You can really see it in the first episode before the scar’s healed; they write it into the script without drawing attention to it by having The Doctor cover up his face then bump it into the Tardis console then hold it gingerly in his first scene. However the best thing Tom did all year might just have been off-screen; a lot of children attended the filming at the power station, gawping at their hero. Tom got quite fond of one who kept turning up and talking to him enthusiastically between takes before he noticed he was standing shyly at the back and looking scared. ‘What happened?’ the actor asked before hearing that he’d been bullied that morning by a bigger boy at school. Tom then spent his lunch break turning up at the school, finding out who the open-mouthed bully was then warning him off, as he was ‘protected’. That’s the 4th Doctor all over, our hero tackling the bullies in authority and bringing them down to size.   

All of which is to say that even though its ‘safe’ compared to ‘City Of Death’ ‘Shada’ and ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ ‘Pirate Planet’ is still amongst the most colourful, imaginative, complex and ambitious stories Who had ever made up to that point before Douglas’ other two scripts pushed the boat out even more. As a result it’s a little under-rated this story I find, dismissed by people as a sort of minor halfway house between two styles, but this is a concept big enough for its halfway house to still tower over most of the rest of the series, full of clever ideas, unique concepts and a sense of fun mixed with outrage that shows that Douglas ‘got’ Dr Who and it’s audience a lot more than his naysayers ever give him credit for. Like everything Douglas touched there are more ideas here per minute than some six part scripts and where the five other ‘Key To Time’ scripts are slow and leisurely this one throws every idea at the viewer it can think of so that your brain has to run to keep up. Needless to say, given Douglas’ reputation, it’s one of Dr Who’s funniest most laugh out loud scripts, even in palaces you’re not expecting it to be. Even some throwaway lines are so clever: Romana borrowing the Doctor’s trick of offering jelly babies to frightened locals then saying ‘I got them where you get yours…your pocket’, Romana’s interaction with the guard that is ‘strictly prohibited’ and originally ran much longer: ‘I’m from another world’ says Romana ‘There are no other worlds – it’s a forbidden concept’ says the Guard ‘Well, forbidden or not I am anyway’ says Romana reasonably), or The Doctor’s claim that ‘this is an economic miracle – of course it’s wrong!’or the Doctor’s anecdote about meeting Isaac Newton (which both totally contradicts and is so much better than what we got in ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, without a mention of the word ‘mavity’ in sight). ‘The Pirate Planet’ feels, in fact, like what it was: the work of a man who is afraid he will never get a job writing ever again and Douglas fills up every available space with a plot that’s one of Who’s most multi-layered and lines that are some of its most quotable. The story certainly caused quite a stir with the people making it – Tom Baker was an instant fan, pushing for Douglas to take over the role of script editor the following year on the basis of just this one story (a role that never quite suited him; Douglas always had too many ideas to waste time tweaking other people’s and nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to juggle that with turning the first Hitch-Hikers into a book), while Mary Tamm, critical of pretty much all her other scripts, really enjoyed this one too.

That’s always surprised me, because while ‘Pirate Planet’ is a great story for the characters Douglas invented, he’s not always the best writer at fitting his words into the mouths of other people. While he nails the 4th Dr’s flippancy he doesn’t understand Romana at all: she mostly stands around moaning and even gives out a most uncharacteristic scream when threatened by the less than scary Mentiads (usually when a character does something uncharacteristic like this I assume its an overhang from an earlier draft and an earlier companion, but in this case that companion would have been Leela who’d have been even less likely to scream). She even gets the rather odd background detail that she got an air shuttle for her 70^th birthday, the way most teens get their first car at seventeen-eighteen. Only where did she fly it given that Gallifrey is enclosed with a dome and you’re not meant to go outside? (I always assumed the 3^rd Doctor’s love of vehicles was because he wasn’t allowed any at home growing up). While Douglas turns the usual capturing and escaping thing on its head by having The Doctor comment to the guards about their rotten jobs and lack of ‘intellectual stimulation’ (in a scene very like one from the first Hitch-Hiker’s series/book) it’s still a story with a lot of the usual tropes of capturing and escaping. For all that Douglas tries to subvert the other usual Dr Who templates (by having an air car instead of Bessie for instance, or a corridor that runs at the Doctor rather than the Doctor running down a corridor) this is still a script that uses the usual Dr Who solutions to the usual Dr Who scriptwriting problems. For all its brilliance there are moments when ‘The Pirate Planet’ simply takes the easy way out.    If Douglas writes well for any of the regulars it’s K9, who gets a decent amount to do this story, getting his own ‘action’ sequences and becoming the Doctor’s sounding board for longer than just the Tardis scenes for once while giving him a ‘robot’ animal of his own to chase is delightfully dotty and helps give him his own sub-plot (as silly as some say it looks, given that in reality it’s a stagehand dressed in blue standing against a blue screen to be CSOd later, moving the prop by hand to make it ‘fly’, it’s still preferable to K9 just being a portable gun). A part cybernetic dog also belongs in a world of cybernetic pirates more than most of the worlds we see in Who.  Some of the dialogue too is trying so hard to be ripe and funny and deliberately OTT to throw us off guard that it just sounds corny: there are at least fifty too many ‘by the sky demons!’ lines while the Mentiads barely get to say anything, being amongst the most thinly drawn and under-developed races seen in Dr Who, a bunch of Uri Geller copies who aren’t even that interesting  (their characterisation amounts to ‘they can do telepathy, nearly, sort of’ and that’s it). The finale, while great on paper (the Doctor encourages the Mentiads to use their new latent telepathic powers to literally ‘throw a spanner into the works’ and blow up the time dam machine and let the planets fly) was never going to work on Dr Who’s budget in a quadzillion Sundays and ends up looking like what it is, the same stagehand in blue holding a spanner against a blue screen edited in (and it looked even worse on broadcast and/or the VHS; rather than have it float in mid-air missing its mark the restoration team add some frames artificially to make it look as it if was actually hitting the machinery, unbilled on the DVD itself so the fans wouldn’t moan). While many fans seem to like it I’ve always found the ‘pirate’ spaceship set a lost opportunity too: it should look like a ship, with an actual steering wheel and cybernetic rigging, not be a boring generic big open space with the usual scifi stuff there (it’s not a patch on the space-ships of ‘Enlightenment’ five years later). The air shuttle CSO is some of the worst seen in the series, clearly a set with some ‘whooshing’ background effects. There are lots of this story that looks simply awful, even when the story itself is really really good.

Nevertheless that’s not much to get wrong, especially given that Douglas’ only TV credit was for the surrealist world of Monty Python before this (though we don’t know which sketches he wrote surely Douglas was behind the ‘city pirate office block’ that runs around plundering other office blocks?!) There are lots of little nuggets sprinkled through the script though, gems of dialogue that make these characters sing. Where lesser writers use comedy as the moments to pad out the plot or keep people watching until the next big explosion, Douglas uses comedy as a way of exploring these characters: The Pirate Captain is threatening because he has no sense of humour and doesn’t know the jokes are on him, something which turns him across four episodes from a tyrant to be feared to a creature to be pitied. Especially as the Nurse has such a strong strait of sardonic humour equal to the Doctor’s – we know, by the end, that he’s met his match and found his nemesis when she starts matching him for wry comments (and a Nurse is a close match for a Doctor after all, a natural nemesis that even a ‘Master’ isn’t). Above all you get the sense that someone has really thought deep and hard about this story, of how Dr Who usually works and how this story should go. No wonder, then, that Douglas Adams stood out a mile even before anyone knew who he was. Een Graeme MacDonald wrote a letter to Williams shame-facedly admitting that he was wrong and that ‘The Pirate Planet’ had been an excellent story from start to finish. Nowadays fans tend to be slightly dismissive of this story – they see the big dramatic acting, come across the pirate costumes, hear the jokes in the dialogue and figure Douglas hasn’t quite ‘got’ Dr Who yet. I’ve been a bit alarmed, over the past thirty years or so, to see this story tumble down the ‘favourite’ stories rankings’. But even if it clearly isn’t perfect the nay-sayers are wrong: this is utterly and totally Dr Who, taking the ordinary from our past and making it extraordinary in an impossible futuristic setting, while underneath it all showing how some things never change: that there will always be greed, always be pirates and how quite often the real villain has just been using someone else as a front. Douglas somehow takes on board the Dr Who brief but pirates it, creating a story that manages to be both in keeping with the series and his own distinctive style. Yes his other scripts ‘City Of Death’ and ‘Shada’ are even better, even more imaginative and complex, but ‘Pirate Planet’ is still pretty darn brilliant.

Alas Douglas died before getting the time to sit down and turn his script into a Target novel, while he refused to do for the pittance offered (not when he had so many of his own high-earning novels to write) and yet who was so protective he wouldn’t allow anyone else to write it while he was alive – it was only in 2017 that a version came out, one of the very last novelisations. That’s one reason I think why this story hasn’t entered the fan psyche the way it should have done (there wasn’t a novel of ‘City Of Death’ either but an ITV strike meant everyone saw that story as there was nothing else on). Alas it’s a rather straightforward rendition of what we see on screen: you suspect that, with all that extra space and character building without actors getting in the way, Douglas’ later prose version of his story would have been a real tour de force or the ages. Douglas admitted too, that he’d got his briefs rather muddled up as he was working on them at the exact same time (that he should have put this story’s impossible visuals like flying cars into the radio scripts rather than try to re-create them for TV and put the talky bits that slowed down Hitch-Hikers into Dr Who; listen out  for a couple of in-jokes he sneaked past the editor: lots of characters get to say ‘don’t panic!’ whilst the planet ‘Bantraginus Five’ is very close to ‘Santraginous Five’, home of one of the five key ingredients of that notoriously banned alcoholic drink, the pan-galactic Gargleblaster. There’s even a line Douglas liked so much he used it in both works and we’re not sure which came first: ‘Standing around all day looking tough must be very wearing on the nerves’. Sadly nobody gets to read any Vardan poetry). You need to remember though that, even if this style of story wasn’t quite inventing the wheel then it was like inventing an atomic engine for the pedal bicycle; it’s not the bicycle manufacturers’ fault that this was as far as TV budgets allowed them to go; no it’s more to their credit that they recognised the existence of an atomic engine at all from where they were standing (Anthony Read, especially, one of the most unsung of all people in the backstage Dr Who world). Even as 100 minutes of a TV series suffering a particularly difficult time in terms of its budget, though, ‘The Pirate Planet’ is something of a hidden treasure, one to be savoured and loved, written by a real frood who clearly knew where his Dr Who towel was.

POSITIVES + The other general fan consensus on this story is that Bruce Purchase, as the Pirate Captain, didn’t get the subtlety in this story and became just another shouty villain. Douglas himself was disappointed with the casting, having asked in the script for the Captain to be much older (something director Pennant Roberts sensibly over-ruled on the grounds that an elderly actor would struggle under all the cybernetic prosthetic and shouting) – but that’s oh so wrong. I would say that Bruce’s bravura performance might be the best thing about this story, because it comes in layers: when we first meet him he’s a Davros type, ranty and confident, so utterly in control and taking up so much space on screen that we barely even notice the other people there. But then, slowly, little bit by little bit, he starts to lose confidence: the Doctor is the first real foe he’s ever fought and across episodes two and three he’s alternating between moments of quieter horrific observation and even louder bluster to cover that up. Ignore what his mouth is saying: the acting is all there in his eyes (well, eye – the poor actor only gets to use one fully). Then in the denouement his world comes crashing about his ears as he finds out that The Nurse has been in charge all along and he’s just a stooge. Note how Bruce Purchase seems to get smaller and smaller as the story goes on too, taking up less and less room on this planet as he sinks back into his chair, subtle acting at odds with his ranting delivery. Most of all, he goes to pieces when Mr Fibuli dies, his only true friend: one of the few constants across Dr Who is the idea of karma and that the villain of the week will get his comeuppance by the end, but here instead of paying with his life The Captain pays with the life of the only person he ever cared for and it shatters his heart into a million pieces. Suddenly he realises that his actions and behaviour have consequences. You totally expect him to have a tantrum, the way the Captain would have when we first met him, but Bruce Purchase goes smaller than ever right at this moment, with a tenderness and stillness that’s all the more moving because we don’t see it coming.

NEGATIVES - Berkeley nuclear power station doubles as the planet’s ‘engine room’ and while it makes a change from being just another set, well, it just looks what it is: a power station. We’ve already had lots of those on Dr Who since ‘The Hand Of Fear’ made them fashionable  and it doesn’t really hack it as a believable engine anything, unless you’re really convinced that the builders on one of the most sophisticated planets in the universe had the same tastes as designers from Britain in the 1950s.

BEST QUOTE: Romana: ‘Well, so much for the paranormal. It’s back to brute force I suppose’.

Previous ‘The Ribos Operation’ next ‘The Stones Of Blood’

 

 

The Stones Of Blood: Ranking - 154

    The Stones Of Blood

(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 28/10/1978-18/11/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: David Fisher, director: Darrol Blake)

Rank: 154

'I know you've been watching a lot of news reports about invasions of aliens so I thought I would get you away from the television and out here camping in a field far away from anything. What? No those aren't Zarbi, they're just normal ants. That sound in the sky? It's not a Slitheen spaceship, it's a plane. The spider in your sleeping bag? That doesn't have enough eyes to be the Racnoss it's just a spider. No come on now, don't be silly, that can't be a werewolf howling - they only seem to be in Scotland for some reason. Honest, there's nothing here in this field except us. some bugs and some ancient standing stones that have been here for centuries...Wait...Aagh!...'

 

 

More antics with the ‘key to time’ as the Doctor investigates ‘The Stones of Blood’. Which sounds like a medical procedure, but don’t worry it isn’t. Instead it’s one of those witchy stories full of supernatural gothic horror and all the things Graham Williams was under strict instructions not to do by a BBC nervous of Mary Whitehouse. Yet it’s a bit different to the Hinchcliffe blood ‘n’ gore era and the title’s actually a joke: there’s no blood on screen...because the standing stones drink it all stone dry! Yes, they find human plasma a tasty treat but don’t like leaving a mess so this story has about the most composed de-composed chewed up bodies you’ll ever see as the Ogri don’t like leaving a drop. Wait, did I say standing stones? I meant...walking stones of course. Only Dr Who would come up with a horror story about blood that doesn’t show blood and standing stones that walk. But then, Dr Who can do anything in this period when it’s still pretty much at the cusp of its popularity and brimming with confidence that this show has an audience that will just go with everything (well, maybe not fifty mile squids as it turns out but that’s a problem for a future story). It really is amazingly popular given that the show has been running for fifteen years now: that’s twelve longer than the original Star Trek and longer than the runs of ‘Next Generation’ and ‘Deep Space Nine’ combined. This is, as it happens, the show’s 100^th story and originally came with a ‘birthday party’ celebrating the fact before producer Graham Williams worried it was a self-indulgence too far (yes we’re on 335 now, give or take the whole Trial Of A Timelord/Capaldi 3 parters/Matt Smith 5 parter debate so a hundred doesn’t seem so impressive, but very few series ever got this far back in 1978). Even without the cut scene everyone is in a party mood and there was a fun atmosphere on set with none of the problems that hit practically every other story of this vintage. Shock horror, this might be the only colour story of the ‘classic’ era that wrapped early for both the studio and location shooting (it’s witchcraft I tell you!)

The problem is, though, that this show has been running so long that nobody seems to quite know what it is anymore. Writer David Fisher makes his debut here and he’s been trying to be a part of one of his favourite shows since he first became a writer, sending in a sort-of first version of this story to David Whittaker at the end of Dr Who’s first year (it was about children discovering a spaceship under Stonehenge; CBBC’s excellent ‘Silverpoint’, the best new drama in years children’s or adult’s, shows how good it could have been – especially in Who’s first year with all the extra layers of mystery and unpredictability). When an old friend Anthony Read got the script editor’s job he got in contact (they’d worked together on the series ‘This Man Craig’, which was basically a Scottish version of ‘Please Sir!’) Read was only too happy to have a writer he trusted and, what’s more, liked the idea of standing stones coming to life (he’d done his national service in a camp where his office overlooked Stonehenge). However Fisher still knew the series best from the days of the 1960s when it was weird and spooky, while being enough of a fan to know that things have moved on to frightening and spooky under Phillip Hinchcliffe. He wasn’t to know that new producer Graham Williams has been ordered by the BBC to tone the horror down to stop Mary Whitehouse having nightmares. So ‘The Stones Of Blood’ ends up being one of those stories that keeps shifting by degrees. There are scenes when it’s (fittingly) blood-curdling, perhaps the last time Dr Who is properly behind-the-sofa scary until either ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ (with more bloodsuckers) or ‘The Empty Child’ depending on your disposition and/or fear of gas masks. There are other scenes that are laugh-out-loud comedy, as Romana shows up her ignorance of ‘The Doctor’s favourite planet’ Earth and the timelords banter with a delightfully dotty professor and get a bit lost. Part of it is pure ‘Wicker Man’ horror, with a village full of strangers and druids and people acting weird that taps into very English pagan primal fears (with scenes that alternate between being as thoughtful and erudite as the best of ‘The Daemons’ and other parts as clumsy as ‘K9 and Company’). There are others that are pure science-fiction, with a lady who turns out to be a silver alien with a square-shaped spaceship parked in hyperspace (some of the science is smart and some of it is dumb). Episode three is pure courtroom drama (most fans’ least favourite episode of the serial, it’s so static it makes you wonder how people sit through whole seasons of this stuff. See ‘Trial Of A Timelord’). Sometimes it’s a high stakes action drama, at others a convoluted scifi plot, at other times a character piece. This is a story of twists and turns where you can never guess what’s coming next – which would normally be a good thing, except that each of these twists and turns somehow ends up being more feeble than the next. Even the dialogue varies from moments of real wit and brilliance to being crass (the exposition about the Black and White Guardians an the key to time – inserted so that they could repeat this as a standalone story if need be, though they never did – is particularly poor, Romana literally saying ‘yes I know’ to most of The Doctor’s points. Because she was there and knows as much as he does). It feels like everyone of those other ninety-nine first Dr Who stories stuck in a blender and yet still manages to come out as something we’ve never had before, becoming a story about a friendship (some might even say ‘relationship’) between two spinsters.

It all centres around those stones though, which despite myths and legends of being the home of witches, a fairy-ring to another world or living beings who have been petrified (there’s even a legend that you can hear the heartbeat of one still beating after thousands of years) because this is Dr Who turn out to not only be alive but be a gateway to hyperspace and a hiding place for an alien criminal mastermind. Standing stones that move are totally the sort of thing Dr Who should be doing. Something ancient that can’t be explained and are somehow very English (a few other countries have them too, but not as many and not as big) they’re perfect as a subject to be ‘explained’ the ‘Dr Who way’ and it’s amazing they hadn’t been used in the series before this. That might be because nobody expected they would ever get permission to go to the real thing but, while Stonehenge is the most famous and fiercely guarded (though they let Dr Who have one hurried bit of filming there for ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’ thirty odd years later) it’s not the only set of Stones in England. Though the story is set in Cornwall with hints that this is the Boscawen-Un stone circle (which has a real legend about witchcraft that casts a spell over people so they can’t count the amount of stones accurately and get a different number each time), ‘The Stones Of Blood’ was filmed at the Rollright Stones site in Oxfordshire, three miles North of Chipping Norton, are the perfect alternative, suggested by director Darrol Blake who’d visited them on holiday. Unlike Stonehenge which was a bureaucratic nightmare, they belonged to private hands who were only too happy to let the production team on site for a fee (and who made money from the sort of school parties who watched the show anyway: indeed one coachload arrived during filming and were given the job of counting the stones, getting into trouble with their teacher who hadn’t realised ‘fake’ polystyrene ones had been added by the Dr Who crew in the night!) Dating back to the Bronze Age, roughly 2500 BC, they’re an impressive sight, full of mystery and wonder without the need to anything and with a very Dr Who sounding myth of their own, that they were an army turned to stone for attacking a witch. It’s a site reasonably close to TV centre, had a quarry only a couple of miles away for the first episode cliffhanger scenes of Romana being lured to her doom and the people there were so excited to have Dr Who in town they even closed off the A34 that ran past it to keep the traffic noises to a minimum. We don’t just get a couple of establishing shots of them either: we’re right in the thick of the action, with an atmospheric night shoot that makes this one of Who’s spookiest stories. Even the fake ones are impressive, clearly lightweight compared to the real thing but which still look good when standing still and with a light inside the three props so that they glow (a subtle effect, but a very atmospheric one in the dark). It’s a measure of how mixed this story is, though, that it then calls on them to move – and with all the love in the world, a bunch of polystyrene menhirs being pulled on a trolley isn’t going to scare anyone (the original plan was that they morphed into Humans when they needed to move but, in another summary of those ninety-nine earlier stories, they ran out of budget). The ‘De Vries’ mansion is another lovely bit of location filming, looking like a posh stately home of the sort Mick Jagger would own (see ‘Image Of the Fendahl/Seeds Of Doom’) even though it’s actually a business studies training college. Legend has it a number of drunken students, on finding the Tardis prop outside, decided to be ‘helpful’ and move it to the nearest quarry two miles away figuring that’s where it was meant to be (actually they’d filmed those bits already!)  

The cast, too, start off really interesting and then somehow descend into the usual Who stereotypes. The rather wacky Human Vivien starts off being reserved and cynical, a believable recluse of the sort that we don’t often have in Who. But there are so many pointers towards her being an alien who knows more than she’s letting on that the audience gets to the punchline too early (I mean, ET is less alien than she is in human form by episode two). She has an interesting background as a criminal who’s been in hiding on Earth for 4000 years but we never fully find out why; her biggest crime seems to be locking up the Megara, the balls of light who are pedantic policemen and lawyers, a bit like the Judoon without the bodies, but they must have had a reason for pursuing her. There are hints that she’s working for The Black Guardian, given that she holds the third part of the key to time close to her chest (quite literally: it’s the Seal of Diplos pendant she keeps round her neck) and acts as if she knows someone might be coming for it one day, while The Doctor gets a cryptic message from The White Guardian telling him to ‘beware’ (given that this scene got cut down to a single line they didn’t bother hiring Cyril Luckham again but instead got Gerald Cross, one of the ‘justice machines’, to read in for him). However the script doesn’t lean in to that to make her a threat and after two episodes of stern looks and cynical asides the script decides to paint her silver and stick her in space. Her back story also makes less sense the longer the story goes on: she’s not hidden herself very well (there are those whacking great stones after all – and are all ancient monuments on Earth guarding rogue criminals? In which case I dread to think what alien is behind the pyramids. Assuming that it wasn’t an earlier infestation of The Monks from ‘The Pyramid At The End Of The World’). It also seems ridiculous that someone can live for that many years without growing older and yet nobody ever seems to notice (at least when they try this again in ‘Shada’ Professor Chronitis is hiding in a Cambridge college with students passing through and other lecturers who are all close to dying themselves). It’s a great and very fun ideas, but somehow it’s not fully thought through. Stone me!

Similar happens to Professor Rumford. Beatrix Lehman is one of the biggest name actresses to ever appear in Dr Who and she did it not for the usual big star reasons (cash flow problems caused by the taxman or because their children loved the show) but because she was potty about dogs and really wanted to meet K9 (Fisher does indeed give them many scenes together). She starts off being wonderfully dotty, opening up to The Doctor and Romana straight away as if they’re old friends and reacting to everything extraordinary that happens as if it’s another ordinary day (the reverse of what we usually get in Who). There’s even a Russell T Davies level of characterisation as she’s described off-screen in a way that sets up her entire character: Vivian mentions her taking a truncheon with her to a lecture hall as she was afraid of being mugged, only to get arrested for carrying an offensive weapon instead! Tom Baker for one adored her (he seriously pushed for having a character like her as a companion, just so her could work with her again) and the scenes where the two are sparring eccentricities is delightful. There are times when the script is hinting that she too might be an alien, but it’s a distraction to keep our eyes off Vivian and only semi-successful. By episode four sorry to say she’s just getting in the way and slowing down the plot so she can make cute comments and bring the story back down to Earth, something that gets less and less likely every time she opens her mouth (the story ends with the revelation that her best friend that she’s known years is really an alien who’s died and that the stones she’s been researching her whole life are really a gateway to another world; her response is to chunter that with three of the Ogri gone she’ll have to start her research all over again). It’s a waste of an actress of Lehman’s calibre (she was once so big that Christopher Isherwood dedicated one of his plays that became ‘Cabaret’ to her) and a sad way to end her TV career (she died roughly nine months after the broadcast of episode one; Tom was said to be devastated).

 Even so, the fact that we have two strong female characters – three if you count Romana, who is particularly well catered for in this story – is a colossal step forward. There are so many Who stories that are all male with the exception of the companion and it was a deliberate move, Read noting that Fisher was always good at writing strong female characters and asking for more to counteract the more butch stories of sword fights and squid baiting in the rest of the season. It isn’t that Fisher ignores male characters so much as switches things round, so that the girls take centre stage and the boys are up in space for the second half, relegated to ‘voices off’. There’s even a hint, as large as you could get away with in 1978 that Vivian and Rumford are Dr Who’s first lesbian couple (although ambiguous enough that they could just be good friends who enjoy sleepovers if the kiddywinkles ask). It doesn’t stop with the characters though: this is the most ‘feminine’ story of ‘classic’ Who, beaten only by ‘Survival’ at the last turn in the original series. Unlike other Who stories dealing with magic this one is specifically about witchcraft and the sort of mystical powers that have always been traditionally given to women in folk tales. This is a story solved not by laser battles but thinking and intuition, from The Doctor outwitting the Magara in space to Romana and Rumford working out what’s going on down below from a magazine and an early home computer. It’s a story driven not by a masculine monster who wants to invade your town and eat you but a villainess shunned for being ‘other’, for not playing the societal games plaid out for her. Some reviewers also point out that ‘The Stones Of Blood’ takes place under a full moon and involves bloodletting once a month, in tune with female bodily cycles. While ‘Survival’ is a bit more subtle and better written (It is actually by a woman, after all) nevertheless this is a strong and pioneering bit of writing that avoids all the usual clichés of doing a ‘female’ story: the leads aren’t young, pretty and concerned only with the blokes for a start. In fact they’re two independent female characters (again three if you count Romana) who have their own independent careers and are perfectly happy about living alone. This is 1978 remember: it’s amazing the character parts weren’t all blonde bimbos modelling for Miss World.  I really hoped we were going to get more of this sort thing when Jodie Whittaker became the first female Doctor; instead the closest we get is her being dunked as a witch in the decidedly masculine ‘Witchfinders’, a story that’s disappointingly a lot less ‘witchy’ than this one.

Mary Tamm, too, is really enjoying herself. With The Doctor removed to a sub-plot she gets to do Doctory things for the first time really, on the front foot and actually solving things rather than having to ask what’s going on all the time. In fact Romana has a great time ganging up on The Doctor and seems to have more faith in her two new companions than him for much of the story (she genuinely thinks it was The Doctor luring her to her death at the end of part one when Vivien throws her voice). She also gets three outfits in just four episode, which is a record for any companion who isn’t possessed and/or a robot duplicate (including an entire scene that had to be re-recorded when someone noticed that she was in the wrong one!) Professor Rumford has to point out how unpractical her footwear of high heels is, a nice character moment that shows both how clueless Romana is still about this adventuring lark and how oblivious The Doctor is to other people’s wardrobes. As for The Doctor it’s good to see him so far out of his comfort zone for once. Most of the things he tries this story, solving things in the usual way, don’t quite come off. He stumbles into the plot and hints big hints that he knows what’s going on, only for the story to go somewhere else and prove him wrong at most turns. He nearly comes a cropper when he tries to outsmart the Megara once too often by arguing that he’s as good as dead already as they turn off the Oxygen supply. He’s trying to put his own (and in those days when Jodie Whittaker wasn’t yet born purely ‘masculine’) stamp on proceedings and this story doesn’t work like that. You might have expected Tom Baker to throw a fit, given that this Doctor isn’t as heroic as usual but he really ups his game this story and is on top form, sparking off everyone in the room with him (and Beatrix most of all). It’s one of his greatest performances in fact as he manages to remain his usual flippant self with just enough panic that things are going wrong under the surface. When Tom was on form he really was the best at this role and he lights up the camera in pretty much every scene. K9 too is better served than usual, becoming the comedy interlude again rather than a mere gun and the Tom Baker/John Leeson interplay is at its finest too (this is the story with the famous anecdote about Tom doing the Times Crossword with John in his usual van, delighting onlookers that The Doctor really was talking to K9!)

As for the script, it works well when it’s having fun with stones but loses its way when it’s up in hyperspace and like the Ogri ultimately bites off more than it can chew. It just does too much for a four-parter, without room for any background detail (you think you’re going to get backstory for Cessair and Diplos as a planet, but it never comes). I still don’t know how we ended up going from witchcraft and paganism to legalise in a spaceship: it’s like the writer started it stoned and ended it stone cold sober. This story throws so much into the mix that there’s no stone unturned as it were – and no turn un-stoned by the fandom, given that each revelation makes the story seem dafter and dafter. The first episode is easily the best when it’s being atmospheric and ambiguous, before it has to tie itself down to an actual plot. There are hints at something older going on here, that we’re seeing the playing out of an ancient legend. ‘Battlefield’ was the one to come out and call The Doctor ‘Merlin’ but this is the Dr Who story that first dealt with Arthurian legends. Vivien Le Fay is surely based on Morgana Fay, the villainess of the tales of Camelot who once turned Arthur into stone (Merlin turned him back and then lured her off a cliff to her doom, much as Le Fay tries with Romana here). Then there’s the clue that Cessair is referred to as a ‘Cailleach’ – a druid name that literally means ‘old woman’ but also means ‘witch’ (though admittedly in Welsh/Irish/Scottish Celtic lore rather than Southern England. Maybe she decided she didn’t like the weather and got her stones to walk with her South?) Cessair itself is from an Irish myth about an early coloniser of that sceptered isle after the Biblical flood. Not forgetting the ‘Maegera’ as they’re called in Ancient Greek myths, the three furies that traditionally punished people for crimes that were preventable (usually infidelity but good luck getting that into a Dr Who script in 1978!)

This story works best when it’s hinting that the stones are part of some ancient legend, that they’ve been overseeing humanity since the dawn of civilisation and that the Ravens are passing on knowledge to an ancient powerful being. It all goes downhill when we learn that Cessair of Diplos is in hiding, that she’s just randomly parked her spaceship, that the ancient Stones are more guard dogs than anything and that the ravens are (most likely) natural. The conversation about hyperspace is particularly confusing: it’s the first time Who cashes in on the success and friendship of former script editor Douglas Adams (after he cashes in on Who in Hitch-Hikers a few times), with a mention of hyperspace. Only here it’s a different dimension separate from the laws of relativity rather than an unlikely place where whales turn into petunias – yet somehow just as illogical. Given this is the only Who story that ever mentions hyperspace you’d think they’d make more of it, but here’s it’s a background detail not the focus of the plot. While it’s nice to see some old friends in Cessair’s spaceship, a sort of hijacked prison van (basically costumes that were at the top of the props cupboard, a dead Wirrn from ‘The Ark In Space’ the dusty remains of a Kraal from ‘The Android Invasion’ and, in a cut scene, a ‘Sea Devil’). These only point to a more interesting story about her escape, which never comes (if this was modern Who they’d do it as a flashback but that just wasn’t a style really back then), while things are solved way too easily, the fact that seal (the third key to time) is also a teleport device is just as bad and unoriginal a solution as pointing K( at something and shooting it. This wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story to fail to make the most of a good idea and fall apart badly in the last episode (and it certainly won’t be the last), but it’s one of the worst culprits in the sense that what was being promised seemed so good. It would help, too, if the revelations when they came seemed like the big moments they are, but the script rather tosses them out in passing. Oh yeah by the way, I’m an alien. Oh yeah, I’m on the run. Oh yeah, the stones are actually alive and can kill people. Now let’s banter again for five minutes.   

The Megara fall between the two extremes: the idea of petty bureaucrats who are more fussed about The Doctor unknowingly breaking the law by undoing a seal and rescuing them than the villain who locked them up in the first place is priceless, exactly the sort of target Dr Who loved aiming for. The fact that they’re aliens who don’t see the bigger picture and are what we would normally say unimaginative and ‘Earth bound’ is all the funnier. The trouble is we then have to have elongated speeches about legalese which even Dr Who can’t make interesting. They’re a one-joke alien race that outstay their welcome rather, as if Fisher can’t work out what to do with them. Their design, too, is clearly a side effect of the cheaper budgets this year and like many a Williams monster look woefully cheap (see The Vardans and Nimon in particular). This lot don’t even have full costumes, not even a bit of baking foil: they’re round sparkly fairy lights worked by puppeteers dressed in black against the balck background – amazingly they don’t show (the director had worked on ‘Rainbow’ amongst stints on Who’s biggest rivals ‘Quatermass’ ‘The Tomorrow People’ and ‘Doomwatch’ and hired his old friends – it’s also where he first met John Leeson inside the Bungle suit). The voices were added afterwards to hit the beats of each blinking light and you can tell: they don’t match up or feel part of the action at all (actually the actors were making up lines at random so their voices would blink in time, according to visitors in the studio gallery: ‘Abracadabra, don’t go to sleep Doctor, I hope I don’t burst this microphone with all this popping, pop pop POP!’ The Judoon are one-note monsters too but at least they’re used against other villains as a more comic foil – we only get to see them negotiate with The Doctor at length, which makes for pone of the longest and least fun scenes in Dr Who you’ll ever see.

Even so it’s not a bad little story this one. The location shoot is brilliant and the night shoot atmospheric. There are lots of little moments I really love, from the ravens sat out on the Tardis to the cleverly paced scene where The Doctor finally learns who Cessair is intercut with Romana meeting up with Vivian not realising the danger she’s in, to the double pun of Vivian’s revelation she used to be a ‘brown owl’ (Romana, not yet used to Earth and English customs, doesn’t know it’s like the scouts for young children, although given that Vivian is really an alien who can transform herself maybe that is what she meant after all?) The Ogri are a really worthy addition to the Who pantheon of monsters (especially when they’re standing still) and I long for them to come back in the modern series so we can see more of them (hopefully they’ll have found a way to make them move without looking silly by now too). We don’t have that many ‘country’ Who stories given how city-bound so many are and this story does a better job than most at picking up on the traditional English folk-telling angle, of cut off villages with their own set of rules and regulations. If we’d just had a bit more mystery and a lot more background into the Cessair of Diplos rather than having her transform from colourful and interesting to grey and boring this story could yet have worked a treat. Certainly a lot of fans do like them, one of the Graeme MacDonald, head of serials at the BBC, who thought it the best in years (though asking to tone down the goat sacrifice ‘which could cause a lot of concern for children, adults – and me’). Then again he hated ‘The Pirate Planet’, a story that really is brimming with invention and makes the most of its quadzillion ideas, something this story never quite does. ‘Stones’ is ultimately a bit of a hodgepodge, with bits that work brilliantly alongside other bits that don’t belong.  Like pretty much all the key to time season (except maybe the ‘Armageddon Factor’ finale) there’s a great little story in here somewhere with a lot of promise and parts of it are first-rate; it’s just that getting a brilliant coherent whole out of it is like, well, getting blood out of an Ogri. This 100^th story is not unlike the 200^th story in fact (‘Planet Of the Dead’), a story with so much promise that never gets used. Not stone cold brilliant then, but you’d have to have a stony heart not to enjoy any of it.

POSITIVES + The big horror scene in the opening, a rare case of Dr Who killing off innocent bystanders who are recognisable normal people rather than mad professors or comedy yokels, is really well done, with the night shoot lighting, the music, the sound effects and the very real sense of panic from the actors (one of whom is DJ Pete Murray’s son Jimmy) all judged to perfection. It’s all very creepy and unexpected and makes you think this story is going to be scarier and more horrifying than it turns out to be. All the more impressive given that it was a last minute bit of desperation when it was realised that nobody had worked out how the Ogri kill people and the idea of killing people by falling on top and crushing them (as they do with K9) was vetoed for being too silly.

NEGATIVES - Aww, they took out what would surely have been the best scene, the Doctor’s 751^st birthday, a nod of the scarf to the fact that this was the show’s 15th anniversary (a record for a scifi series back then; its still mighty rare now) and the 100^th story. The director got talking to Tom and Mary about the big event and decided they ought to do something so they dropped in to see Anthony Read who agreed to cook up a little scene. One which is said to have horrified Fisher who felt it detracted from this story and outraged producer Williams who felt it self-indulgent and led to too many awkward questions about Gallifreyan birthdays and where little timelords came from. The scene would have been this: sometime after talking about the key to time at the start The Doctor would wander into a room where he was surprised to see K9 on top of a table laid out with a fine party spread, singing ‘Happy Birthday To You’ tunelessly. Romana walks in, reminds The Doctor it’s his birthday and goes to where she’d hidden his present (where else? The Tardis fridge!) It’s a scarf, identical to the one he’s wearing, which The Doctor loves declaring it ‘just what I needed’. The production team even went to the lengths of baking a special cake, which was eaten by cast and crew at the story wrap party instead.  A lot of fans breath a sigh of relief, but I’m rather sad it got cut: one indulgent joke every fifteen years isn’t many after all) and personally I think it sounds rather sweet (the scene I mean, not the cake).

BEST QUOTE: Rumford: ‘Are you from outer space?’ Dr: ‘No, I’m more what you’d call from inner time’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Seaside Rendezvous’, five page comic strip from the ‘1991 Summer Holiday Special’ edition of Dr Who Magazine, features the 7^th Doctor and Ace taking in the sun on an English seaside before the unexpected re-appearance of the Ogri. Weirdly they form out of the sand not into the usual standing stones but a sort of blobby human figure. The Doctor fills in a bit of back story at speed (‘Vile things, Ogri. Even when they’re worn down to sand. They feed by absorption of amino acids you see. Globulin is the closest thing to their normal food on Earth’). Things are solved surprisingly easily, not by Ace  - despite her attempts to fight the creature and cursing the Doctor for saying she wouldn’t need her nitro 9 on holiday - but by a passing fire engine with their hoses! One of the weirder DWM comic strips.

‘Vengeance Of The Stones (2013), the 3^rd Doctor entry in Big Finish’s multi-Doctor 50^th anniversary set ‘Destiny Of the Doctor’, recounts once and for all (again) how Captain Mike Yates joined UNIT. He happens to be the junior lieutenant officer on duty in North-East Scotland when The Brigadier and the 3^rd Doctor wander off investigating ancient stones in the North of Scotland (similar to ‘The Stones Of Blood’ but less creepy and more moral, in the style of most 3^rd Dr stories). Yates is captured by the Armidians (sounds painful!), a race who came for Earth’s natural resources but were attacked by the natives before they could finish the Stones and have been seeking revenge ever since. The Brig, impressed at the young man’s calm head in a crisis and knowing he won’t have to explain alien threats, enlists him as his new UNIT captain at the end of a story that’s good but predictable.

Previous ‘The Pirate Planet’ next ‘The Androids Of Tara’

 

The Ribos Operation: Ranking - 156

   The Ribos Operation

(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 2-23/9/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: Robert Holmes, director: George Spenton-Foster) 

Rank: 156

'Pssst. Wanna buy a phone box cheap? One careless owner, a quadzillion and four miles on the clock (plus a few billennia). Very spacious - on the inside anyway - vintage model. It just fell off the back of a lorry. Literally - I went back to the start of 'Evil Of The Daleks' to get it. Whaddaya mean you don't need it you've got the internet nowadays? I shall feed you to the shrivenzale personally with an attitude like that! p.s. I might not be around tomorrow for my usual bargains. I'm popping down to 'Cash My Jethryk'.  p.p.s If the British Royal family crown jewels have gone missing it was nothing to do with me!' 

Congratulations! We made it to the halfway point in our journey across time and space (at least in the original reviews which were done in ranking order!) Which also means that its (approximately) halfway between Christmas and new Doctor Who! Fantastic! So here we are in the middle of the list and while that should mean everything is distinctly average, we left the ok stories behind a long time ago and are now deep in ‘really really good but flawed in some way’ territory. That’s perfect for ‘The Ribos Operation’ where the best description is ‘lots and lots of promise that’s never quite fulfilled’, or perhaps ‘a very talented writer who hates the new commission but is having lots of fun all the same’. It is, in a way, a ‘con job’ from a writer who wants to tell a very different story to the one he’s being asked to tell and smuggle it in right under everyone’s noses, only Bob Holmes is such a skilful writer that he gets away with it. The result is a story that’s not quite one thing nor the other – a serious tale of Dr Who’s first ever powerful Gods trying to restore balance in a universe full of grave peril that only the Doctor can fix and a silly comedy laugh-a-minute tale about a superstitious planet that’s stagnated because everyone turns to religion over science. The two don’t quite cancel each other out, but it’s safe to say that everyone working on this story is pulling in slightly different directions so that what we have as an end product is a form of compromise,  brilliant in parts rather than a whole.

You see, the grand vision for the story doesn’t belong to the writer but the producer. Graham Williams wanted to plant his own stamp on the series and had the idea to make it more than just a collection of stories, to have it closer to what American science fiction was starting to do, with one long running story (this is the era of ‘Space 1999’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and the ‘gee I really hope we get home and find our ancestors on this next planet. Oops no that one’s full of killer Cylon robots’ storyline). His idea was to give the season more of a sense of urgency, to have each story bringing The Doctor and his new assistant closer to their goal before time ran out rather than just hopping about between planets. The trouble was British audiences didn’t watch scifi and certainly not Dr Who in the same way the Americans did (at least, not yet). It was a show a lot of the audience dropped in and out of, depending what they were doing, and to follow a longer storyline meant they’d be lost. One of the series’ unique selling points, too, was that it was a series about the unexpected, with a format elastic enough to cover everything, that people turned into for variety’s sake. So Williams got together with script editor Anthony Read to hash out a plan that would be the best of both worlds and between them came up with the idea of an immortal God who would send The Doctor on a quest, a sort of mad dance across the universe for hidden relics, arriving on a different planet each story where they would have different standalone adventures that still added up to an overall bigger picture. So far so good – even though that concept is itself not that original (Williams and Read, not yet up to speed with Dr Who lore, appear not to have known about first season story ‘The Keys Of Marinus’, of which this is just an extended version with the prize now freedom of the universe rather than freedom of getting the Tardis back).

Only The Doctor, by now fed up of working for the timelords, was too much of an anti-authoritarian to take orders readily from just anyone so they devised the idea of having two Gods overseeing the universe in immortal balance. Only for some unexplained reason in this particular era the balance is starting to unravel and The White Guardian hires The Doctor to discover the scattered remnants of something called ‘the key to time’ that, once locked into place, will put things right. The Doctor knows of these Gods from his childhood days reading myths and legends (it figures he’d have read everything in the Gallifreyan library) and is oddly subservient, reluctantly agreeing to the job even though what he really wanted was a holiday, with The White Guardian treated as a sort of English public school headmaster (even more so than the actual English public school headmaster of ‘Mawdryn Undead’). He seems really nice but with an edge, the new testament idea of God without the beard (so what will the black guardian, unseen for another five stories possibly be like? Well, a hammer horror villain with a raven on his head since you ask, but that’s a disappointment for another day). The interesting but unworkable original idea for them is that one can’t exist without the other because you can’t have true ‘good’ or true ‘evil’, so sometimes the White good guardian will have the upper hand, but he can do the wrong things and let the Black ‘bad’ guardian win for a bit, only for him to secretly have a part of him that’s good and saves everyone just in the nick of time. It’s an interesting idea, one that builds on Taoist principles about how the Earth is in a perpetual state of balance and forever moving in cycles between the two (think of the famous ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ black and white image where both are wrapped round each other with a dot of the opposite colour) and given how much of Dr Who is based on Buddhist principles it’s worth a go swapping it for a similar but different idea for a season. Only there’s no easy way to do that sort of subtlety on screen (the original idea was that the two Guardians would turn out to be…one and the same, a hint utterly ignored by future producer John Nathan-Turner when he brings them back for season twenty in 1983 and finally has them on screen at the same time), or at least not like this. Drama series like Dr Who needs friction for the plot to move, even if it comes from misunderstandings rather than absolute evil. We need someone to be ‘bad’ and by the time The Black Guardian does turn up Bob Baker and Dave Martin have ignored all ideas of him having any good in him at all, while The White Guardian’s ‘badness’ is reduced to the mild empty threat here (he’s passive-aggressive where the Black Guardian is aggressive-passive, getting other people to do his dirty work for him). 

The thing is, though, that if they’re fallible these two Guardians can’t work as proper true ‘Gods’. The other thing is that having a concept of Gods at all is such a fundamental change to how the series works that it undoes everything that’s come before it, a sort of early version of the hated ‘Timeless Children’ arc (though it was never received that badly). So far this series has been science fiction with a foot in either camp, with a plausible amount of science that makes each story possible if imaginative rather than impossible (give or take the odd trip to the Land of Fiction, revived dinosaurs or Giant Robots anyway). Adding Gods into the mix, though, is the start of a slippery slope that runs to this day: What place do Gods have in a series that’s very much rooted itself to science? Why do they need someone else’s help when they’re the all-powerful beings of the universe who ought to be fighting over control of the universe themselves? Why does the White Guardian even have a tracer prop – if he’s all powerful and all-knowing shouldn’t he have coordinates already? You can’t be omniscient and get someone to do your dirty work for you, that just doesn’t fit. And how come something as physical as the key to time exists to solve a dilemma this existential? It’s a nice idea that never quite come off, even though Read clearly has great fun writing for the Guardians  (that’s his scene at the beginning, with the White Guardian lounging in a chair sipping cocktails while telling The Doctor what trouble they’ll be in if he refuses – actually a rather good little scene so it’s a shame that this is the only one Read writes for Who rather than re-writes; this is notably the only time The Doctor has ever called anyone ‘sir’ willingly, without sarcasm).

Someone who’s clearly not convinced, though, is previous script editor Bob Holmes, brought in as a safe reliable pair of hands to get the season started (and who even in this era has already written more Dr Who stories than anyone). Just notice how much the mood changes the instant The Doctor goes back inside the Tardis and starts playing around. You see, Holmes has spent his writing career attacking authority figures and he’s not about to stop now just because he’s been asked to. Holmes was a committed atheist: not someone who had fallen out with a particular religion but someone who thought they were all stupid, that there was nothing out there but Humans (and possibly other aliens) all trying to bumble along without really knowing what they were doing. He patently thinks the idea of two Gods keeping the universe in a Taoist balance (one almost good, the other almost evil) is ridiculous. He started his Dr Who career with ‘The Krotons’, a story that pokes fun at the idea of immortal beings and which use their special powers of intelligence to keep the local population stupid so they don’t ask awkward questions; moves on to ‘The Deadly Assassin’, a story that makes The Doctor’s own race of vaguely Godlike timelords out to be a bunch of flawed scheming frauds ;and later on in this same series he’ll have a superstitious people worshipping a giant green squid in ‘The Power Of Kroll’ to show what he thinks of religion. In Holmes stories outer space is just the things that are already happening down here, just with noisier guns (see the ‘miniscope’ of ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ or the ‘Sontarons are just Medieval brutes’ setting of ‘The Time Warrior’). So to hand an idea like this one about powerful immortal beings to Holmes and giving him free range for what the actual story consists of is just asking for trouble.

Holmes decides to take the series back to the Middle Ages, giving us a planet that’s on the brink of a Renaissance. Only Holmes, famously, was far happier being an imaginative writer rather than a research one, so instead of re-creating the Medieval era with pinpoint accuracy he chooses the bits he likes – a lot of them from Medieval Russia. The people here believe in religion and don’t yet know what science is, with twin Gods of fire and ice that chase each other’s tails across the skies (the closest he can get to the Black and White Guardians) while the world is filled with mystics, ‘seekers’ and astrologers. They also have divine right of Kings on this world, only the person that their ‘God’ has picked is one of the worst people they could have picked – a boorish oaf who would rather be fighting a war than helping his people get peace and is happily leaning on memories of old days in battle rather than doing anything about the suffering going on around him now. Ribos (a possible anagram of ‘Boris’, a traditional Russian name: nowadays its natural to think of ‘Boris’ and ‘con job’ in the same sentence, but at this point he’s a fourteen-year-old schoolboy nobody’s heard of. Lucky things) doesn’t even believe in other planets and thinks the stars in the sky are ice crystals. The only character who really knows what’s going on, Binro, is labelled a heretic and stuck down a mine-prison, labelled an idiot even though he’s the smartest person on the planet. You see, says Holmes without actually coming out and saying it, this is why The Doctor shouldn’t be subservient to Gods – because without people like The Doctor we’d have never learned science and thought ourselves of this way of thinking, we’d have been left at the mercy of every invading alien race there is.

So Ribos becomes a story of ‘snake oil in space’, the planet easy pickings for a couple of conmen who aren’t bright by any means but know just enough science to trick the locals and get by, a story about sleight of hand on a cosmic scale (so of course The Doctor name-drops 19^th century magician John Nevil Maskelyne just to keep up, best known for a book of explaining how card sharks cheat: he’s basically telling these two ‘I’ve clocked your number’ and seeing how bright they are if they know him; to be fair most of the TV audience don’t either). Garron and Unstoffe are what fans like to fondly call a ‘typical Holmesian double act’ and spend much of the story together, as part of their scam to sell the local King a planet. They’re the sort of people that on Earth in the 1930s would have been selling public bridges to naive simpletons, or maybe selling timeshares in the 1970s or health drink pyramid schemes in the 21st century, the only difference being that they’re selling planets that aren’t theirs in return for crown jewels. Holmes, typically, just exaggerates things in an outer space setting for the Dr Who equivalent but we all know spivs and chancers like them. Oh and for anyone wondering when The Doctor was going to get sick and have, say, his middle appendix removed or something the way did when I first saw this story aged seven, an ‘operation’ is slang for a ‘con job’. Garron, especially, is a great character who’s sayings would make a great book of quotes one day: on dying ‘I always said it was the last thing I wanted to do’. ‘Who wants everything? I’ll settle for 99%!’ plus my favourite ‘I did have a struggle with my conscience…Fortunately I won!’ Everyone else sees him as the crook he is, but he’s explained it all away by seeing his thievery as a real job and one he takes pride in, a sort of ‘Robin Hood’ who ‘evens up the economy’ by spreading the wealth around – even if it gets no further than his own pockets. Rather like the Aztecs in Mexico where Gold was so plentiful it was an everyday metal, Ribos has a large supply of jethryk which turns out to be the most expensive and valuable mineral in the universe. Only, inevitably, part of the key to time has been disguised as a lump of it, cue a story of Garron and The Doctor out-duping each other and their Graffe ruler (‘Graf’ means ‘count’ in German) across the course of this story. Unstoffe too is a strong character who goes from conman’s assistant to rebel and Binro supporter naturally across four episodes as he learns to think for himself (he’s the only character who actually develops across this story) and is another bit of Dr Who stunt guest casting that worked out surprisingly well, played with just the right complexity by Nigel Plaskit, a man best known for being sidekick to another rogue of children’s TV, Hartley Hare. In a story filled with such big characters he’s impressively muted and thoughtful, going from straight man to the only straight thinker on the planet. Usually in stories like this you’re meant to sympathise with the poor victim while loathing the con-artists but Holmes has too much fun with them and subverts the tradition on its head by having the ‘mark’ boorish and unlikeable and the conmen clever and funny.

The thing is though, hilarious as Garron is and as fun as his put-downs of his poor hapless assistant Unstoffe are (we’re back in ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’ territory and Jago and Litefoot, where the bright one that should be in charge is playing second fiddle to their more extroverted flamboyant partner) this sort of knock-around fun doesn’t belong in a story where The Doctor has only just been given the most important quest he’s ever been on. The viewers are led to believe they’ll be quaking in their boots by the end of this story, that we’ll see some sign of the universe imploding – instead we see a bunch of fools outsmart a bunch of dimwits. It’s not actor Iain Cuthbertson’s fault, who gives a tour de force performance as Garron, because that’s the part as written, but everyone around him starts having fun to match him and keep up with his guffaws. Tom Baker, always up for a joke, decides he’d quite like to be in on the laughs too and soon everyone is doing what nay-sayers of this series call ‘Dr Who acting’: not to say that anyone acts badly or under-performs (the way they do in, say, ‘The Time Monster’ or indeed parts of ‘The Keys Of Marinus’) so much as they’re enjoying a day out, not taking the threat in this story seriously in the slightest. So what we end up with is a compromise, a typical Dr Who runaround over small scale conmen and one dimensional Kings of the sort we’ve seen before straight after we’ve been promised a cosmic fight in the Heavens between two Gods (you don’t even see the Black Guardian till the finale, another way they mucked up: if they’d done it more like ‘Knightmare’, with a similar mixture of ‘white’ dressed goody Merlin – prolific Who guest star John Woodnutt – being spied on and chased by ’black’ dressed  baddy Lord Fear in an endless game of cat and mouse) it would have felt much more like a coherent series arc. Instead viewers got bored. This is, after all, a very talky story where people fight with wits rather than guns or swords.

Nobody seems to be playing for laughs more than the new assistant Romana, who is played with a perpetual wry smile by Mary Tamm throughout, as if she knows the punchline to a really funny joke that you don’t. Even when screaming at the end of the first cliffhanger she never quite loses that sense that it’s all a game. Though her character will come together in time (especially when she regenerates into Lalla Ward the following year), Holmes doesn’t quite know what to do with her yet other than make her glamorous in contrast to the Doctor’s eccentric style (just look at the way she’s introduced, quite unlike any other companion: The Doctor, kneeling next to K(, sees her as the camera pans from her ankles up in a sexy white dress that makes her more like a playboy bunny than the usual ‘childlike orphan’ assistant). Romana is a tad over-written in her first appearance, the script relying too heavily on Mary Tamm’s 1940s Hollywood looks and love of glamorous costumes (though Elisabthe Sladen was suggesting costumes by the end this is the first time we’ve had an actress actively work with the wardrobe department to choose their look for each individual story; oddly, despite his acted ogling, it was Baker who insisted she tone her costumes down in future stories which were all meant to be the same style but in different shades) to be anything more than a film star diva. She is, you see, another Graham Williams invention where you can see where he was going but handed to the wrong writer to flesh out. In the producer’s head Romana was the Doctor’s equal-but-opposite, booksmart but not streetsmart and a stickler for the rules who struggles to cope in real life events that he can bluff his way out of. There is the very telling comment that she’s just graduated from the Gallifreyan academy with a triple A while he scraped through with a 51% pass on his second attempt (so that’s why he kidnapped two schoolteachers when we first met him, he was getting his own back! Though it makes you wonder how poor Susan’s marks must have been for him to insist she stays on at school, even a backward one on Earth. Or maybe she loved learning and he didn’t approve?)

In William’s head, too, he wanted a companion to be as opposite as Leela as possible, so instead of a primal savage running on instincts he made her an ‘ice maiden’ who comes from a place of thought and never betrays her emotions – the original intention was that Romana is never flustered, never calls for help and never ever screams, something blown as early as the end of the first episode. It’s also a neat twist on the master-pupil relationship the 4th Doctor had with Leela, but they’re much closer in ability now that she is a timelord too as if he’s now teaching a level higher or gone to tutor the head girl rather than help out the promising student who’s fallen to the bottom of the class through no fault of her own (sadly they cut one of the story’s best lines, as Romana says the timelord warned her that The Doctor ‘is an eccentric some of the time and iconoclastic all of the time’, as good a summary of this particular regeneration as any and particularly relevant to this story, all about the importance of coming to your own conclusions and breaking outdated belief systems like religion; the line got dropped to hedge their bets on how much Romana knew about her ‘quest’ in case later writers wanted to use it but they didn’t, not really). Romana’s a really good idea that, again, was given to the ‘wrong’ writer to flesh out. As we’ve seen, Holmes is no good at writing authority figures unless poking fun at them. He isn’t interested in a haughty maiden so instead he turns her into The Doctor’s annoying younger sister, always there to point out his mistakes and laugh at everything he says except the jokes he thinks are funny. Mary Tamm is really good at the part Holmes has written for her to play and at times their double act is the best thing about this story – but she doesn’t fit the idea Williams was aiming for and at other times their double act threatens to swamp this story as they have so much fun out-doing each other even more of the inherent threat of the key to time arc is lost (talking of swamps Holmes will have worked out how to write for Romana by the time of ‘The Power Of Kroll’, a story that gets her first regeneration right better than anyone except perhaps Douglas Adams, but the other writers took their cue from this story as it was the first). The real problem is that, by putting two intellectual giants together, the story has nowhere for the regulars to go except look down on everyone they meet, which becomes wearing however much fu they’re having. You can’t be scared in the Romana stories because with two of them convinced they can outwit everyone they should never be able to get in trouble. Mary Tamm, by her own admission, was here for the giggles and the career promotion anyway and never really ‘got’ Dr Who (she was, by chance, drama classmates and had remained good friend with Louise Jamieson, who advised her against the part but gave her lots of tips about how to cope, especially with Tom, who she was told to stand up to – he, clearly, is having a whale of a time having a glamorous blonde on his arm in a way her predecessor would never have tolerated, even if Mary did stand out by being the only interviewee to refuse to sit on the actor’s knee to read out a ‘love scene’ during auditions, something she worried might have cost her job but only made the production team want her more as someone they thought might stand up to Tom).

As for the lead actor he’s on manic form, making the most of the sillier-than-usual atmosphere by throwing out gags left right and centre, some of which work but a lot of which fall flat. While he gets the better of the banter with Romana you can tell he’s frothing at the but when Garron gets all the best lines and he was reportedly in another of his bad moods (he didn’t want a new assistant and The Doctor’s angry refusal is ‘real’ as much as acting, something he slowly overcomes when he finds out that Mary was a happier drinking companion and social butterfly than Louise ever was). If he seems a bit flat in places, too, that’s because he had an ‘accident at work’, even if in true eccentric Tom Baker style it’s the sort of accident almost no one has. Paul Seed, playing the Graffe, brought along his dog to rehearsals and was showing off a party trick of ‘look at him take this sausage out of my open mouth!’ Tom wanted to have a go too but the Jack Russell wasn’t used to doing the trick for strangers and instead bit him on the lip. Make up cover it up as best they can but that was painful added to the gaping wound (you can see it most in silhouette when The Doctor is walking out into the light of the White Guardian).  

Ribos is an intriguing combination of Earth past and scifi future, one that’s 1920s Russia-esque where it seems to be permanently cold and the Royals are out of touch, holding on to power through their ice-covered fingertips. The Russian link is intriguing, especially at the near-peak of the cold war. Though he was more subtle in the script, the costume and set designers pick up on the local currency of ‘opeks’, so close to the Russian equivalent ‘Kopeks’ and go all out with Tsar costumes and funny hats. In the context of the times its easy to see this as a bit of gentle war propaganda , that Garon (a born capitalist if ever there was one) gets one over on this bunch of weak-kneed superstitious peasants who all worship their King blindly and are communists in all but name. Except that Garon is just as fooled by The Doctor. So is Holmes’ point that we should be thinking for ourselves and that both sides are equally brainwashed? (That would certainly be more in line with his other stories, ‘The Sun Makers’ especially). One thing that doesn’t seem quite ‘right’ though, whether through artistic license or Holmes being adamant in not doing any research: this isn’t yet Communist Russia, it’s Tsarist Russia, which is quite a different thing as the planet still blindly supports a monarch who is making their life worse. This is Russia in 1917 not the Middle Ages, at the point when Lenin comes to power and (however briefly) makes the country more equal and free. So is Holmes’ point really about monarchism versus a science-based Republic? In which case he’s actually laughing at ‘us’, the English, again. Which makes the fact The White Guardian is treated as a very English sort of old school empirical headmaster either clashing or even funnier depending how you look at it. A shame, though, that such a potentially serious point gets lost in all the comedy.

It’s hard to be cross with a story that makes you laugh this hard this often. Even if this isn’t the story you’re expecting and even if it doesn’t hang together all the way through there are moments when this story shines brilliantly. Most of this script are people down the intellectual food chain conning the one below them without them realising in what’s perhaps the best Holmesian topsy turvy world of them all, where the clever people are locked up in the dungeons and the idiots reign supreme. The Graffe really is ever so easy to fool, but he thinks of himself as an enlightened clever man. Garron thinks of himself as the perfect crook, but he’s no match for The Doctor. And it’s  a stalemate between The Doctor and Romana: sometimes she gets into trouble through her naivite, but equally his need to do things his way, through original means, makes things far more complicated then they need to be.  This is a script where everyone punctures each other’s pomposity and everyone, thick or clever, is Shrivenzale food in the end anyway Some of these scenes are hilarious. And yet the very best scenes are the deeply serious ones that come out and take you by surprise, for like Donald Cotton’s scripts for ‘The Gunfighters’ and ‘The Myth Makers’ this isn’t a comedy where bad things can’t happen but a tragedy flipped on its head, made all the worse because of the farce that is unnecessary incompetence. The best scenes of all are the ones between Unstoffe and Binro when the story takes time out to discuss the story’s deeper themes, about whether it’s best to stay cosy and safe but ignorant or be clever and discover the truth but get into trouble for it. You see, the hierarchy of the world (and in Dr Who the universe) isn’t what it should be, with the clever people in charge – usually it’s the thick people who shout the loudest who have control of the armies because people are frightened of intelligence and electing people smarter than them. So we go through the same cycles, of being afraid to change or update our knowledge, making the same mistakes over and over again. In that respect it’s very much a jokey re-write of ‘The Krotons’, where intellect is power: Holmes, for whom the education system was his biggest bee in his bonnet, still comes firmly down in the Doctor’s favour with original thought however). It’s in those moments where ‘The Ribos Operation’ truly shines, when the jokes stop coming long enough for Homes to drop the façade and tell us what he really wants to say. The fact that he’s doing this in a story that introduces Gods to the Whoniverse and tells us that there are more authority figures still is all part of the joke (I understand they wanted to start the series with a safe pair of hands but, honestly, the solution is obvious: keep Holmes back for the pomposity  puncturing season  finale and have the Gods turn out to be fallible and more in keeping with past stories).  

Everyone is superstitious and gullible, whether by order or design or through a need to keep your head on your shoulders. One interesting character is ‘The Seeker’ – like Cassandra in ‘The Myth Makers she’s a seer who’s eerily accurate and everyone trusts automatically while they shy away from scientists and facts. Holmes has an interesting take on the character: like Cassandra she’s essentially right but gets treated in Who terms as if she’s ‘wrong’ throughout and backing the wrong horse. It’s as if she has the correct information but doesn’t have the intellect to use it properly: for instance she knows that Unstoffe is hiding in the catacombs with the jefryk: she’s bang on the money, but it’s to her detriment that she doesn’t realise that he can move and so when the guards go there and find them empty she gets it in the neck anyway. Equally she thinks that her vision that everyone in the room will die but one will keep her safe, but it ends up leading to her death when the Graffe is afraid it means he will die and make sure she dies ahead of him (actually it’s The Doctor who survives anyway).All these characters try and use their superstition for power and deserve to be in prison for it, whereas the irony is that Binro was trying to use his science for the benefit of everyone, to let Ribos prosper through his understanding. This is a world that all makes perfect sense taken as a whole, given our own superstitious past even though to us modern(ish) audiences it doesn’t make any sense at all – the sort of complicated convoluted juggling Holmes made his own. Lots of fans miss the one great irony at the bottom of all this though: Holmes encourages us to laugh at the superstitious locals by having us root for Binro. Only, given the macguffin about the Guardians, he’s ‘wrong’ and the locals are ‘right’.  Because we’ve now been asked to buy the idea of all-powerful Gods anyway. The joke is on us. Or perhaps on the producer for introducing this contradiction Holmes clearly doesn’t approve of. How much you get out of ‘The Ribos Operation’ is directly correlated to how successfully Holmes makes you believe both things at once: ‘Ribos’ is a Schrödinger story that asks to both belief and disbelieve in Gods and both believe and disbelieve the science, depending which scene we’re in.

One thing that helps sell the illusion, though, is that everything looks so good on screen. There’s an aesthetic that runs through this story that makes it feel like a real ‘world’ where everything connects for once, partly through Holmes’ script (which gives us more backstory for Ribos than most – apparently every planet has a ‘Medieval phase’ while this one has stayed backward partly because of its lengthy elliptical orbit, making seasons last 32 years so the people here really aren’t used to change) but also through the costume and set design that feels as if they are working together for once. This is a world so vast and so naturally unliveable that everyone huddles throughout the story, surviving rather than thriving and with no major sense of community beyond the subservient armies as everyone feels cut off from their neighbours and the universe. The theme throughout is ‘white’ – white guardian, a white planet (that’s covered in snow for long periods – the first time we’ve had any since ‘The Tenth Planet’ so no wonder the 9^th and 10^th Doctors get so excited about it later), even Romana is dressed in white furs. Was the original idea to move slowly to black, the colour scheme of ‘The Armageddon Factor’? If so it doesn’t really come off, though ‘The Pirate Planet’ is a sort of metallic silver, ‘The Stones Of Blood’ a sort of scarlet red and ‘The Power Of Kroll’ a sort of bright green. Even though you have to make certain adjustments for the fact that this is a story made on the cheap in a TV studio in 1978 (Holmes was asked to keep the budget down so some would be left in the pot for later, with the promise that his second story in the season could have location filming if he kept to studio sets for this one – a side effect of things being so behind in this era that BBC studios were easier to book at short noticed than contracted third-party film sets) ‘Ribos’ looks better than a lot of stories in this era and somehow the clash of 1930s Russian costumes and scifi garb makes for a more interesting less uniform world rather than one of clashing ideas.  All this despite – typically for this era – another union strike and a row over whether lighting the ornamental torches was a set, a props, a lighting or an electrician duty. The original plan too had been to make everything look ‘bigger’ through chromakey (especially the Shrivenzale) but after wasting hours arguing about lighting nobody wanted to lose more time aruing about who should erect the ‘green screens’ needed for such shots so it got dropped. You don’t really need it, that said.  

‘Ribos’ is a nice idea, then, with some lovely scenes and some classic lines. It’s lovely to look, very funny to listen to and plenty enjoyable, but it’s also quite hollow: you get to see lots of people being clever but the only person you ever feel an emotional connection to Is Binro (and he doesn’t turn up till episode three). Mostly it’s a story of people outsmarting each other and as such is a hard episode to love, as if Holmes is giggling over his typewriter going ‘I can’t put that, can I?!’ and nobody quite knowing how to stop him or sure if they should. It’s as part of the series arc it really doesn’t work: the ‘wrong’ writer was asked to write the first of this new arc and he undermines it straight away, to the point where people have long stopped caring about the key to time by the point we return to it, all sense of urgency gone after four episodes of fun and games. Of the two times classic Dr Who tried this, the key to time works a lot better than ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ ever did, but it still doesn’t feel quite ‘right’ somehow. The 4^th Doctor, especially, is a wanderer who is free to go anywhere and we watch him enjoy his freedom while often enjoying him bringing that sense of freedom to others. To those of us stuck in a routine and daily grind, longing for such freedoms ourselves, it’s a form of escapism. Having The Doctor running errands like a schoolboy feels wrong somehow, while the lack of threat means the story arc is something that quickly fades into the background anyway. Equally, though, its all done with such panache and with so many good jokes that it’s a hard story to hate. Everything here is played to perfection, a ‘romp’ that’s silly and fun and frivolous and makes you laugh like few other stories. Plus the big beating heart at the centre of this story is a good one, asking many deep questions about faith, both that of the Guardians above and that of Binro below. The fact that it’s all done with the atmosphere of a bawdy pantomime makes it all the more confusing though. Which in its own way is kind of Dr Who-y too. In other words, ‘Ribos’ is a story that comes right down in the middle, like the two Taoist Guardians at the heart of it all not all good but certainly not all bad either.

POSITIVES + One of the best scenes of Who that never gets talked about, certainly in this era, is the one where Unstoffe kindly tells a dying Binro that he believes him – that he’s right, that the sun doesn’t revolve around Ribos and there are other inhabited planets out there, and he knows because he comes from one of them. Binro’s dying relief, that ‘I was right!’ after so many years of sticking to his convictions despite everyone assuming he was wrong, is powerful stuff and one of the most moving scenes of all. Binro is just an innocent pawn in all of this, but like the rest of the story it’s about power so the state can’t possibly allow people to believe about other planets: that might mean that other planets have their own Gods who rule by divine right of different Kings and then people would question the Graffe and then where would we be?  On its own this scene is moving enough; in the middle of a laugh out loud comedy it really cuts through the rest of the story and the surprising thing is that it’s not the Doctor passing on the message but a conversation between the only two people taking this planet (and life) seriously. It’s surely the inspiration for showing Vincent Van Gogh how famous he became after his death in a far more famous DW scene (see ‘Vincent and The Doctor’, which by a quirk of space and time just happened to be the story reviewed next to this one).

NEGATIVES - The Key To Time is a poor season all round for monsters (the most realistic and least silly being a giant squid several miles high) and the Shrivenzale particularly feels like a last minute addition who’s there purely because Dr Who stories always have monsters and they nearly forgot to put one in. Ribos’ equivalent of a corgi, running around the Royal headquarters and sort-of guarding the crown jewels, it’s a large green stupid lumbering reptile leeching off the state (insert joke about Prince Andrew here). Not what I would choose as my first pick as guard animal, given that the legitimate people who need them can’t get near the crown jewels either, but as it happens rather useful for keeping out stray criminals and timelords after the key to time as well. Especially looking like that: it beats The Myrka as Who’s first ‘pantomime horse’ by six years, with two stuntmen in the suit communicating when to walk and talk by, umm, walkie talkie (newboy Nick Williamson is in the front and old hand Stuart Fell is at the back; neither enjoyed the experience much) and it moves much how you’d expect that set up to look. I still want one as a pet mind, even if in practice it would probably eat me or stand on me with its big clod-hopping feet. If I don’t stand on it with my clod-hopping feet first that is.

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘You want me to volunteer, is that it? And if I don’t?’ The White Guardian: ‘Nothing’. Dr:  ‘You mean, nothing will happen to me?’ The White Guardian: ‘Nothing will happen to you. Ever’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Big Finish have really taken to the ‘Key To Time’ idea and it crops up in several of their audio adventures, some of which have already been covered during more specific stories. Here’s where I’ve bunged the general sequels though, starting with a trilogy of 5^th Doctor stories (2009), numbers #117-119 in the main range, cleverly titled the ‘Key2Time’ range. ‘The Judgement Of Isskar’ starts with The Doctor searching for Peri (she’s been moping and taking some time out for herself since her Egyptian pharaoh friend Erimem left at the end of ‘The Bride Of Peladon’) but is most surprised to instead come across a planet where time stands still. He meets a baby and even more surprised when he meets her grown-up self who enlists his help as her ‘companion’ in regaining the key to time. She ends up taking the name ‘Amy’ after asking the Doctor to list all the names he can think of in chronological order (this is two years before he has a companion named Amy on TV; what’s wrong with Alana then eh?!) Her tracer takes the Tardis to Mars, but the Doctor’s having one of those days where things are always weird, because there’s only one Ice Warrior and he has a touch of amnesia and doesn’t remember what he is or what his race are called. It seems that The Tardis has landed in the Ice Warrior’s pre-history, when they were a peaceful race known as the Valdigians. It all gets complicated fast, in case you hadn’t already guessed, but the plot involves another person sent after the key to time who turns out to be Amy’s sister, Zara (her favourite name from the Doctor’s chronological list starting at the end of the alphabet!) The pair are interesting characters, played with panache by Ciara Johnson and Laura Doddington who both start out a blank slate and gradually morph into The Doctor as they both learn from him (a little like Romana, but then again she was quite a strong character when they first met and only gradually learned his way was sometimes best!) Only the twist is that they both pick up something slightly different from The Doctor, with Amy inheriting what are traditionally thought of as his better traits and Zara his worst. The plot itself doesn’t quite hang together though: sadly the origins of the Ice Warriors, something I’d been dying to see (well, hear) all these years rather left me, well, cold and the key to time itself is even less interesting and hard to follow than it was as a concept the first time around. So far the Guardians only turn up in flashback.

‘The Destroyer Of Delights’ fares a little better, mostly because David Troughton makes a surprise appearance as the Black Guardian (and playing him in just the sarcastic way he did Dr Bob Buzzard in ‘A Very Peculiar Practice’ opposite Peter Davison’s Dr Stephen Daker rather than his usual Who roles!) Their banter is the highlight of a sillier than expected story where the next segment of the key to time seems to have disappeared, with no trace of it anywhere. Unexpectedly the Tardis finds itself in 9^th century Sudan where t’Tardis ends up embroiled in the fight over the legate of the Caliph. Only things aren’t what they seem as (spoilers) the caliph turns out to be The White Guardian (as played by Jason Watkins) and Ali Baba The Black Guardian. Where Jonathan Clements’ script excels is the idea, only hinted at in the original, that the two Guardians can’t exist without the other and that there’s a little good in even the worst of people and a little bad in even the most good. Otherwise its business as usual, as Amy gets captured and turned into a slave to a prince, while the Doctor is intrigued to hear of an actual genie granting wishes who  - this being Dr Who - turns out to be from an alien race named a Djinn (of course he does!)

 ‘The Chaos Pool’ wraps everything up with what seems like needless speed, with a final showdown set in the title place, somewhere even The Guardians can’t go. There’s a new group of aliens, the Teuthodians, who are Tractator-like slugs (only from the beginning of time not the end), fighting a war against an unseen race from the end of time. How does that work? I’m not quite sure. I’m also not quite sure how the big twist at the end of the story works: mega huge spoilers so look away now…Romana’s back! Only she seems a bit odd because…she’s Princess Astra from ‘The Armageddon Factor’. She can’t possibly be the final segment of the key to time again can she? Well, as it turns out no because it’s…Romana who was created to be the final segment all the time! It’s a great twist, a bold move for such a beloved character and at the time the fact they actually brought Lalla Ward back to Big Finish for the first time in a Dr Who story rather than a ‘Gallifrey’ spin-off (playing both parts) was quite the coup! (She’s done a few since). It’s a confusing yet poetic ending, as both Guardians and Amy and Zara have to put their growing differences aside to save the universe, with The Doctor and Romana somewhere in the middle, everyone realising that you can’t have good without evil or vice versa. It’s a worthy end but might have had a better pay-off had this series run for longer with the themes spread out a bit more as they do feel quite rushed at times. Still, this was arguably Big Finish’s most ambitious story to date and it’s a brave stab at doing something colossal that ever so nearly comes off.   

 ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ is also set during the ‘Key2Time’ season and also came out in 2009, even though there are two big differences: one is that it’s in the ‘companion chronicles’ range rather than the main one (and so ‘read out’ by a single performer rather than performed by a main cast) and the other is that it features another Doctor, the 7^th! This is primarily Ace’s story and is set during the brief moment Zara has been put in prison for her crimes: Ace is her cellmate! Of course the Whoniverse’s favourite tomboy was always going to get on like a house on fire with a character who reflects all her best friend The Doctor’s worst qualities – in fact setting alight to things is quite high up the list of what they want to do when they both escape. Only there’s something about her new friend that strikes Ace as not being quite right: she takes things too far and Ace has learned, after years at The Doctor’s side, to be better than that. The planet they’re on, Erratoon, is a bit too much like Perivale for Ace’s liking: sleepy and peaceful and far too well behaved. No wonder she got so bored she ended up in prison. The only question is will this pair trust each other enough to bide their time in a cell together or rat out each other’s secrets? A brave stab at doing something different, this would have been a great release if the two back stories had lined up a bit more, but instead it’s told one then the other, rather than side by side, with neither story feeling that substantial and both over before they really begin, with not enough to link the two. The few times we do hear Sophie Aldred and Laura Doddington interact are great though and there’s definitely room for a spin-off featuring the pair sometime. 

A two-parter from the ‘Fourth Doctor Adventures’ suggests that The Black Guardian still got his revenge on The Doctor, Romana and K9 after all, despite their randometer. ‘The Pursuit Of History’ and ‘Casualties Of Time’ (2016) are rather hard to explain without the intricacies of not only this story but several previous ones to set up but we’ll have a bash. Basically the 4^th Doctor and Romana keep coming across a character named Cuthbert, played with menacing relish by David Warner (see ‘Cold War’), a rich businessman who seemed to own most of the planets the pair landed on. Alas Mary Tamm died before that series arc could be finished but a few years later it was finally revived and given the (modified) intended ending, with Lalla Ward’s Romana the companion instead. Cuthbert (and this is a mega-huge series-ruining spoiler right here, so be warned) is really…a trap set by The Black Guardian, again played with menacing relish by David Troughton. The moments when the two Davids are squaring off against Tom Baker are exceptional – the moments when the plot is slowly clicking into place before that are rather ponderous and tedious, alas.

‘The Key To Key To Time’ (2022) is maybe a spin-off too far, the finale of the box set ‘Destiny’ which features Colin Baker not as The Doctor per se but as ‘The Warrior’,  a sort of parallel universe re-telling of the time wars but with Sixie in the ‘War Doctor’ mode, a spin-off of the ‘Unbound’ series of other Doctors who might have been. It doesn’t quite work: great as Colin is playing a straight baddie he doesn’t have quite the gravitas of John Hurt (or Paul McGann come to that). The plot is a bit of a mess too: the Black and White Guardians were conspicuous by their absence in the ‘original’ time war given how much it must disrupt the balance of the universe, but here The White Guardian is all over it, offering the Warrior a way out that seemingly undoes everything the three stories have been leading up to in one great duex et machine Russell T would be proud of (Whitey also adds the detail that the universe has been around so long that everything will eventually become disguised as the key to time…including this book, so there, treat it kindly!) More interesting is the sub-plot of Davros being alive and well and at the head of the Dalek army, ruthless as ever with Terry Molloy at his best in the role. Even so, overall personally I’d give this one a miss. 

It’s worth mentioning the fairytale ‘Snow White And The Seven Keys To Doomsday’ from the 2012 Dr Who annual too, which tells the origins of the key to time, created by a Gallifreyan named Snowana cast out of Gallifrey, originally built as a deadly weapon until she contained it within a forcefield that trapped her alongside them. Though short, it’s a really good read, the second best thing in a ‘modern’ Dr Who annual after the origins of ‘Blink’. More on this tale under the episode that actually mentions this book and lots of other fairytales, ‘Night Terrors’.

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