the good old days

After being thoroughly disappointed with “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” I thought I’d go back and watch another Doctor Who story featuring the cybernetic villains.  In many ways, the 1982 story “Earthshock” seemed like a homage to the earlier story; somebody on the production team obvious had fond memories of the tomb on Telos.  (At the time “Earthshock” was made, all the episodes of “The Tomb of the Cybermen” were missing, so the writer/producer/whoever can perhaps be forgiven for nostalgically remembering the 1967 serial as quite a bit better than it actually was.)   After the “Earthshock” cybermen realize they are facing the Doctor again in a new regeneration, they review some of their history with the Time Lord, pointing out specially how the second Doctor had confined them to their icy tomb beneath the surface of Telos.  The third episode also ends with an army of cybermen bursting from the thousands of storage cylinders in which they had been hiding, very reminiscent of the famed scene in the tomb.

Of course, “Earthshock” was not all about 1960s nostalgia, and it’s usually remembered much more for the finale of the fourth episode than the third.  For the first time since “The Dalek Master Plan,” one of the Doctor’s companions died.  Adric–who was, after Romana and Susan, likely the smartest companion Doctor Who ever had–is blown to smithereens at the end of the story.  When I first watched this as a child, this was a huge shock, a total departure from the show’s usual tone.  I remember just staring at the screen as the credits rolled–silently, for the only time in the show’s history.  Companions just didn’t die on Doctor Who.  Louise Jameson wanted her character to be killed off (which would have made a lot of sense), but the producers couldn’t bring themselves to do it, and instead had her marry a character she had barely spoken to for six episodes.  Whenever Jo Grant got into danger, the Doctor always rescued her just in time.  The new show is equally squeamish about companions dying, but the Doctor get’s much more angsty when his assistants leave for other reasons.  Companions just didn’t die; yet Adric did.

This was particularly upsetting to me, since Adric was, at the time, my favorite character on the show.  Years later, I learned that he was despised by much of the British fan base.  Young, nerdy, and overachieving, he was the Doctor Who version of Wesley Crusher–a character designed to resemble the core demographic of the show’s audience, who is not embraced by the preteen boys but rather reviled.  (I can sympathize with the young male British fans who hated Adric so.  My usual comment on characters of his type is that I can’t decide which annoys me more:  that producers think a science fiction show will appeal to boys more if there’s a teenage boy in the main case; or that they’re right.  But at age seven, I saw Adric the mathematic genius as a mirror of myself in fifteen years, and I couldn’t get enough of the character.)  After Adric’s departure, the TARDIS crew still had Nyssa, who was just as young and almost as smart as Adric, and also far cooler under pressure.  On the other hand, she never seemed to do much, which I always found a bit disappointing.

The first episode of “Earthshock” spends a bit of time on Adric’s dissatisfaction with his situation.  He whines to the Doctor like a teenager desperate for a parent’s attention.  The sequence is notable for a couple reasons.  Firs, it seemed like the fifth incarnation must be tempermentally unsuited to traveling with a companion who was almost as intelligent as himself; he much prefers to spend quality time with the other companions, to whom he is more manifestly superior.  This ties into the second point, which is that Doctor Who (the character and the show) no longer seems to be at ease with having a male companion.  The writers could handle Adric when Romana was around; at times–especially in “Warriors’ Gate“–Adric seems more like Romana’s companion than the Doctor’s, with her giving him the lectures the Doctor would normally give a (female) companion; but when she left, his character was left hanging.  And finally, if a viewer doesn’t remember (or didn’t see) Tom Baker’s last season as the Doctor, they will have no idea what the Doctor and Adric are actually arguing about–E-Space, Logopolis, the Monitor, the CVE, and Romana.

After the argument, the plot follows the cybermen’s attempts to bomb a military conference taking place on future Earth.  The TARDIS lands in a cave full of dinosaur bones, where the villains have placed a bomb.  The Doctor and some soldiers from Earth have to get by the bomb’s guardians–a pair of very nasty and mysterious-looking androids–to prevent a horrible catastrophe.  Only as the first episode closes do we see who is controlling the androids–the cybermen.  Yet even after dispatching the robots and defusing the bomb, the Doctor thinks there is still danger afoot, and he traces the signals controlling the bomb back to a space freighter speeding in toward Earth.  An army of cybermen are waiting aboard.  They plan to take over the vessel, crash it (laden as it is with antimatter) in Earth, and then mop up the survivors.  The cybermen succeed in the first step, and they lock the ship’s controls on a collision course with Earth.  Adric spends much of the last episode trying to unlock the controls.  But at the last minute, just as he thinks he has completely broken through the control code, a wounded cyberman staggers onto the bridge and shoots the controls, preventing Adric from regaining control.  Everyone else having fled in the TARDIS, the young genius is left alone to await his death, never even knowing if he’d been right.  Meanwhile, the TARDIS has pulled the ship back in time to the K-T boundary, and when it crashes into the planet, the explosion wipes out most of Earth’s terrestrial species, thus ensuring that mammals will come to dominate the planet and creating a stable time loop.  [Well, almost stable, or rather, almost consistent.  The cybermen were supposed to have arisen on Earth's twin planet, Mondas, on which life went on much as it did on Earth, despite having wandered away toward the edge of the solar system on an eccentric orbit.  However, existence on Mondas was always harder than life on Earth.  (On the subject of how hard life would be, should an Earthlike planet veer out of its normal orbit, have you read Wolfbane?  You should.)  So the men built stronger metal bodies for themselves, becoming the cybermen.  But if it took cyberman intervention on Earth for humans to evolve there, how did they ever evolve on Mondas?]

The cybermen were less frightening looking in the 1970s-1980s costumes than they had been in the 1960s (or the 2000s), but the sight of so many bursting out of hibernation was impressive, and their lock step marching was suitably threatening.  (Three slightly different camera angles were laid side by side in the frame, giving the impression of three columns of warriors moving in perfect unison.)  Their subordinate androids were even scarier, and the first episode in the cave is arguably the best part of the whole serial.  The human soldiers are haggard, their equipment old-looking and unreliable, and I found myself extremely concerned about these one-shot characters as they faced the deadly robots in the stygian caverns.  The middle of the story is mostly fairly unremarkable fifth Doctor fare; Nyssa is in command of the situation but doesn’t take much action; Tegan is enthusiatic and in the thick of the action but accomplishes little besides putting herself in danger.  But the ending is so shocking and (for me) so moving that I will always remember this as one of Doctor Who’s greatest classics, almost certainly the best of the 1980s era.

“The Three Doctors” is a remarkable Doctor Who story.  The name says why.  The hero’s first three incarnations combine to fight one of the most dangerous forces ever to appear on the show.  And unlike some more recently done galaxy-shattering epics like “Journey’s End,” it is extremely good.

This story is very well plotted.  It begins like many other Doctor Who episodes from the period, setting up a s science fiction mystery plot on Earth.  A gamekeeper recovers a fallen weather balloon carrying a cosmic ray detector and promptly disappears.  (In care you’re wondering, weather balloons really are excellent for doing cosmic ray physics, although these days, the best data come from ground-based Cerenkov telescopes like H.E.S.S. and large area ground detectors like HiRes.)  Investigation of the instruments from the balloon reveal more mysteries when they are brought to the Doctor’s lab.  Then suddenly, a shapeless black antimatter monster appears, along with gel-covered malignant mound creatures, who try to hunt down the doctor.

It turns out that what’s happening is much more serious than earlier alien invasions of Earth.  The Time Lords are under attack as well, and the whole of the universe.  The Time Lords decide that they must break the First Law of Time and send multiple incarnations of the Doctor to the same location to fight this threat.  They have enough energy to send the second Doctor in fully corporeal form, but not quite enough for the first.  After a bit of inter-regenerational humor, the Doctors and several others are teleported away to a desolate world, where their enemy awaits in a strange underground lair.  In the third episode, the enemy is revealed to be Omega, the ancient solar engineer who provided the Time Lords’ original power source.  Thought dead, he was instead trapped in an antimatter world near the singularity of a black hole.  Harnessing the core of the black hole with his mind, he shaped the strangely beautiful gelatinous fortress and its pudding-like inhabitants.  He wants freedom and revenge on the Time Lords, but he can only escape if another Time Lord mind stays behind to maintain his world after his departure.

Omega is a tragic figure in many ways.  He possessed a brilliant mind, but after ages of abandonment, madness consumed him.  He was a prisoner in a pocket universe where he could create anything, but nothing existed except his own creations.  Nothing there was real.  In fact, the turning point of the story comes when the Doctors reveal to Omega that he isn’t real either.  His physical form is long gone, and he exists, like everything else in his domain, only because he believes he exists.  There is no escape for him, not in a conventional sense, but the Doctor’s provide him with a sad substitute for escape.  Having brought a bit of ordinary matter into his antimatter world, they blow the whole place sky high, and Omega perishes along with all his deeds and creations.  (Omega would return in “Arc of Infinity,”  but that villain was a poor imitation of the sad, mad Time Lord of “The Three Doctors.”)

The design work on this story was extremely good.  From the realistic looking scientific equipment carried by the weather balloon to Omega’s fortress, there was clearly thought put into every prop and set.  I wonder whether, since this was a special story, the BBC was willing to spend more on this serial.  The jelly-like blobs on Omega’s servitors and the same blobs that line many of the walls in his maze-like underground den were beautifully done.  Omega himself is clad in garb similar to that worn by the Time Lords, but dull and gray and topped by a huge mask which is supposed to protect him from the black hole’s dangerous emanations.  The mask is high and imposing, but when I look at it closely, I seen an icon that is just as deeply sad as it is threatening.

The special story was the first one shown in Doctor Who’s tenth season.  Why it was shown first, much closer to the program’s ninth anniversary than its tenth, is something of a mystery.  Perhaps the production staff was afraid that if they waited another six month to make the serial, William Hartnell might no longer be able to participate, on account of his failing health.  Or it might have been driven by story-related factors.  “The Three Doctors” marks the major dividing line of the Jon Pertwee era.  At the end of the fourth episode, as a reward for his service, the Time Lords release the Doctor from his imprisonment on Earth.  (This is also the first episode to delve into the Time Lord power structure.  The two most important leaders of Gallifrey–the president of the council and the chancellor–have their titles given for the first time.  But unlike later episodes like “The Invasion of Time” or “Arc of Infinity,” the appearance of the Time Lords doesn’t debase them by reducing them to petty fools, no wiser than mankind.  Producer Barry Letts also made a point to use the same actors who had already appeared as Time Lords in earlier stories, even though the characters were never explicitly said to be the same from serial to serial.  Again, later producers departed from this practice, relying on regeneration to explain why the same actors never reappeared, even when the same Time Lord character would make repeat appearances.)

The only real weak point in this episode is William Hartnell’s extremely small role.  His failing health may have been an important factor in his departure from Doctor Who during the fourth season, and by late 1972, when “The Three Doctors” was filmed, he was too weak for regular acting work.  In the story, by the time the Time Lords think to deploy the first Doctor to aid his compatriots, they have too little energy to transport him completely, so he spends the entire serial trapped in a time vortex.  This means he can communicate with other characters via view screens (on which he is seen seated in a floating deltahedron) but do little else.  Hartnell’s limited dialogue was filmed in advance, with minimal rehearsal.  It was his last acting work, and he died about two years later.

Perhaps because Hartnell could manage only a cameo appearance, it was first established in this episode that the original Doctor was in some sense the wisest.  The second and third Doctors engage in a lot of competetive banter, but Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton couldn’t interact with Hartnell in the same way.  So when the first Doctor instructs his successors, they obey, and the second Doctor explains that he has the greatest respect for the first’s judement.  In order that Hartnell’s Doctor should have a meaninful impact on the plot, he is given the solutions of two major problems that have other regenerations stumped.  That he has the wisdom to see what his other selves cannot becomes the first Doctor’s most important characteristic.  The first Doctor’s more aged appearance and more serious demeanor no doubt also contributed to his taking of this leadership role when the various Doctors are seen together.  Indeed, in “The Five Doctors,” the first incarnation (now played by a lookalike), is the only one who realizes the truth (that the entire Game of Rassilon is a trap) in time to save the universe again.

It had been many years since the only other time I’d watche “The Three Doctors,” and I’d forgotten how good it really was.  Unlike some Doctor Who stories, this is one that I’ll definitely want to watch again.

In “Pyramids of Mars,” the writers and produces of Doctor Who tried to create a story that was at least as much horror as science fiction.  The results were mixed.  The serial has a share of enjoyable moments, but the overall effect is less than compelling.

For the first episode at least, the story attempts a “curse of the mummy’s tomb” atmosphere.  The story begins with a prologue–the excavation of a royal tomb in Egypt; then the action shifts to 1911 England, with period dress and attempts at period dialogue.  The villains have mummy servitors to do their maleficent bidding.  (The mummy’s are later revealed to be robots swathed in cloth and masquerading as undead monstrosities.  That was a touch that I rather liked.)  However, knowing this was a science fiction show and that there would be aliens involved sooner or later, I found it hard to immerse myself in the Geogian milieu.  I sometimes find myself wishing I could see more of the historical Doctor Who episodes from the early years.  They were an important part of the show for the first four seasons, but they were not as popular as the science fiction serials and were eventually dropped.  (Since The Highlanders, there has been one purely historical story, “Black Orchid,” with the fifth Doctor.)

When the TARDIS veers off course in the first episode, the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith blunder into a muderous plot to free the Egyptian god Sutekh the Destroyer from where he has been imprisoned by his brother Horus.  Both these divinities were actually powerful aliens of the Osiran race, whose unusual heads were depicted in the pharohs’ murals.  (Thanks to Doctor Who’s semi-negative continuity, the fract that Osirans were responsible for building civilization on the banks of the Nile could be conveniently forgotten in “City of Death.”)  Apparently, Sutekh is the greatest threat that will ever face the Earth, even with all the alien invasions of the 1970s. (Incidentally, this story is one of the few to give a precise date for UNIT’s home era; Sarah states that she wants to go home to 1980.) Yet there’s no real attempt to explain why Sutekh is such a profound danger to the Earth–or in fact the entire universe. The Doctor claims that nobody could possibly stop him.  (”Not even your lot?” Sarah asks him, and the Doctor confirms that even the Time Lords would be powerless against Sutekh, should he break free from his confinement.  So much for Time Lord power.)  What happened to the 740 other Osirans who overcame the Destroyer in the first place is never addressed either.  Yet the prison they constructed is sufficiently fragile that a handful of mechanical heavies, a couple hypnotized Earthlings, and what mental powers Sutekh can project outside the cell where he sits bound to his throne, can potentially bust it open.

The plot to release Sutekh involves gaining access to a facility Horus placed on Mars, which is controlling and maintaining the dark god’s prison remotely.  While the robots try to assemble a weapon to obliterate the Martian control point, the Doctor and his companion interact with some of the locals who haven’t been hynotized by the Destroyer, trying to prevent the scheme from succeeding.  They are cut off from most of 1911 civilization by a force field, which allows for a nice scene where the heroes mess with the force field controls, which take the form of canopic jars.  Between their competing efforts, neither side wins a compelling victory, and both sides end up travelling to Mars, there to preserve or destroy the chains Horus had wrought.

The part on Mars is definitely the best section of the episode.  The set design is markedly improved compared with the rest of the episode, which was apparently produced mostly with stock Victorian costumes and sets.  The puzzle-filled maze that the Doctor and Sarah must make their way through is reminiscent of the city of the Exxilons from “Death to the Daleks” (which is my all-time favorite Doctor Who story).  I wasn’t the only one to notice the similarity; Sarah Jane remarked on it as well.  (Although in “Death to the Daleks,” there was at least a vague explanation of why getting to the center of the empty Exxilon city required overcoming various puzzles of logic and mental stamina; here the conceit seems rather out of place.  Why would the superintelligent Osirans make it possible to free their greatest criminal merely by solving some brain-teasers.)  The climactic scene, where Sutekh, just after breaking free, is trapped in a time tunnel, sending him slowly away toward the end of time, is also handled well.  Combined with a simple special effect, Tom Baker gives an effective performance as the Doctor turns the tables on his adversary, leaving Sutekh first confused, then frothing with pathetic fury.

However, the acting by the guest stars is unexceptional, and neither Sarah Jane nor the Doctor have any other moments that stand out.  At one point, the Doctor must face Sutekh’s immense psychic powers, and the evil Osiran torments the poor feeble Time Lord.  This moment is presumably supposed to show off the enormity of Sutekh’s eldritch might, but since Tom Baker’s Doctor sometimes seems to verge on the all-powerful (and does more than just verge on being all-knowing), the scene just looks forced.  (There are similar scenes that do work in other fourth Doctor stories–for example, the Doctor’s interrogation by Davros and the Daleks in “Destiny of the Daleks“; but there the Doctor shows quite a bit more resistance, and the Daleks are also his well-established arch-enemy, not a rubber-masked monster of the week like Sutekh.)  The scenes on Mars alone make this story worth seeing, but as an attempt to merge science fiction with gothic horror, it’s only marginally successful.

We watched “The Tomb of the Cybermen” last night.  This was one of the few extant Doctor Who stories that I had simply never seen before.  It was missing when I was a kid, and I hadn’t watched the show enough since this serial was rediscovered to have caught it on television.  I was excited about seeing it, since it is one of the very small number of complete stories featuring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor.  (In fact, it is the only complete story from Troughton’s entire first two seasons on the show!)  It’s the earliest complete story with cybermen, and it introduces their athropoid minions the cybermats  My Doctor Who Techical Manual has some beautful production photographs of entombed cybermen, so I was expecting a graphical treat with this serial.

The plot sounds more complicted than it actually is.  The Cybermen begin the story entombed in a frozen honeycomb of cells beneath the remains of one of their outposts on the planet Telos.  A group of explorers from Earth have just uncovered the entrance when the TARDIS arrives.  The explorers attempt to force open the titanic double doors (flanked by nine-foot reliefs of cybermen), only to lose of their number to the first of numerous booby traps.  The Doctor helps the archeologists get past the trap and into the base’s control room.  He figures out that in order to work the controls, they must solve several abstract logical puzzles.  Against the Doctor’s urging, Dr. Eric Kleig, one of the archeologists (who is in open conflict with the man who is supposed to be the leader of the expedition), opens the shaft down into the tomb antechamber.  The Doctor, his male companion Jamie, and most of the team descend into the frigid chambers below, and Kleig’s female accomplice promptly seals them inside (after drugging Victoria, the Doctor’s second companion, who is brand new and extremely ineffectual).  Kleig reveals that his plan is to wake the cybermen (which he does) and make a deal with them.  However, the cybermen (predictably enough) are not interested, and they reveal that the reason they had protected their tomb with logic puzzles was to ensure that only the most intelligent interlopers would make it inside.  The interlopers are then to have their brains operated on to remove fear and robotic enhancements added to their bodies; they are to become the next race of cybermen.  However, the present group of intruders does manage to escape and to reseal the cybermen underground, although they leave behind Toberman, the strongest member of the team, who promptly gets partially fitted with cybernetic enhancements and some kind of mind control device.  Unfortunately, Kleig is unwilling to give up his treachery and lets the Cyber Controller, leader of the Telos cybermen, out.  The man-mountain Toberman accompanies the cybernetic warlord, but it seems that Toberman is not yet completely in the thrall of the cybermen.  With his innate strength and new robotic arm, he overpowers Cyber Controller in several one-on-one engagements, giving the Doctor and his allies time to seal the complex up again, so the cybermen might never escape.

Of course, they did eventually escape.  This was the second Doctor’s second cyberman story already, and he had two more coming.  Counting “The Tenth Planet,” William Hartnell’s final appearance, there were five stories with cybermen in seasons four through six!  They were obviously pretty popular.

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with this story.  When I was a kid, “Tomb of the Cybermen” was one of the most famous missing classics.  It was recovered in 1992, when a TV station in Hong Kong discovered a copy they had rented from the BBC in the early 1970s, and was released on DVD with great fanfare.  I’m not sure what was supposed to be so special about this episode.  The tomb itself, five stories high, filled with living cybermen in suspended animation, who wake and shear through the protective bubbles that have contained them, is as impressive as my Techincal Manual made it look.  But the rest of the visual design is pretty uninspired.  The regular cybermen appear threatening, but Controller’s costume can only be desribed as ridiculous.  He has a pointed dome atop his metal helmet, which was supposed to look like it contained a glowing brain.  When Cyber Controller returned in “Attack of the Cybermen” (played by the same actor, Michael Kilgarrf), the costumers dispensed with the brain look and simply gave the controller an extra-large pointed helmet.  However, when the new race of cybermen in “The Age of Steel” created their new Controller, they went back to the retro exposed cerebrum.

Moreover, most of the action takes place in a very small number of rooms, in what really ought to be a much larger complex.  I realize the budget was small, but in some episodes, the production team was able to create a much greater impression of space.  And after halfway through the first episode, there aren’t even any more outside shots of Telos (until “Attack of the Cybermen,” which did its shooting in the same quarry).

Finally, Patrick Troughton was the first Doctor that I ever met, and he was an amazing character in person.  He took off his pants on stage!  (It turned out he had “accidentally” worn his Doctor Who costume pants underneath them, but he really made people in the audience think that he was about to strip down to his underdrawers.)  There are very few Troughton episodes extent, but in those that I’ve seen (such as “The Mind Robber“), the second Doctor possesses a crazy energy; and in “The Three Doctors,” the first Doctor characterizes his immediate replacement as a “clown.”  Yet there was very little of that in this story.  There are occasionally flashes of the the second Doctor’s distinctive persona, but the only real moment when the Doctor’s character really seemed to be interesting comes near the end.  The Doctor takes a moment to indulge Klieg’s megalomaniacal fantasies, sending the villain into an ecstatic fit, before the Doctor pronounces that he’s now eliminated any lingering doubts that Klieg is an utter madman.

As I’ve said, this episode was rather a disappointment.  The cybermen were not very threatening, and were overpowered by nothing more than main force.  They weren’t even the most important villains; that was Kleig and his faction.  There were certainly moments; I watched the scene of the tomb unfreezing and the cybermen stirring in their cells over and over.  Some of the special effects were quite innovative.  They used static electric discharges, overlain on film of action scenes, to portray the cybermen’s energy weapons.  Even better, I thought, was the similar use of oscilloscope traces to represent mind control waves.  Yet this is never going to be among my favorite Doctor Who stories, and I’d like to think it wasn’t the second Doctor’s best work either.

The Daleks was the second Doctor Who serial and the one that cemented the show as a cultural phenomenon in Britain.  It introduced the Doctor’s longest running and most persistent enemies, the half alive, half robotic conical metal monsters, the daleks.  Although they eventually rose to become the most sinister race in all of creation, the daleks started out small.  In their debut, the daleks were relatively few in number, not that imposing physically, and confined to their ancient city on their home planet Skaro, which they share with the Thals.  Three times during the story, the dalek machines were proven to be extremely vulnerable to electrical interruptions.  And in many ways, I think this original conception of the daleks was among the most effective of their portrayals.

Source: Skaro

Since the topic of this review is the daleks, I think I should share my general opinions of them as Doctor Who’s arch-nemesis race.  In general, I like the daleks.  I have pewter dalek salt and pepper shakers for special occasions; cleanser and I had daleks in formalware on our wedding cake.  As villains, they are sinister, effective, and unique.  However, there is a lot of variation in the quality of the stories in which they appear, and the most recent dalek stories have been uniformly bad.

Source: http://www.onedigitallife.com

I don’t like the daleks in the new series.  It seems the produces aren’t satisfied with using the daleks as daleks.  They instead have to have flying daleks who can stop bullets like characters from The Matrix, dalek cults, different varieties of dalek-human hybrids, an insane dalek prophet, and vast dalek armadas which threaten the whole of the universe but can be conveniently annihilated by pressing the right button. Of course, there were good and bad dalek episodes in the classic series.  In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Ian manages to foil the daleks’ plan to blow up the Earth’s core and fly the whole planet back to Skaro with some lumber he finds lying around.  The role of the home planet Skaro was also a major point of inconsistency.  In Planet of the Daleks, the titular villains have assembled on the planet Spiridon an invasion force one hundred thousand strong to take over the galaxy, yet there are still Thals on Skaro with sufficient infrastructure of their own to send a commando force to disrupt the daleks’ plans.  On the other hand, Day of the Daleks has an excellent and well-thought-out time travel plot, and Death to the Daleks is my all-time favorite Doctor Who story (although more for the city of the Exxilons than the daleks themselves).  And who can forget the special weapons dalek in Remembrance of the Daleks.

Source: http://promus-kaa.deviantart.com/

In their first appearance (which properly should be titled “The Mutants”), the daleks inhabit a ancient city, vastly too large for them, on an otherwise desolate planet.  After an adventure on prehistoric Earth, the Doctor, his granddaughter Susan, and the school teachers Ian and Barbara land unexpectedly in the dead jungles near the city.   The Doctor connives to force the group to explore the dalek city, where they are eventually captured by the inhabitants.  During their captivity, the heroes learn some of Skaro’s history.  Much of the world was decimated by a brief nuclear war between two intelligent races, the warrior Thals, and the Dals.  The Dals mutated into hideous monstrosities and retreated into armored metal shells.  These silvery hulks were necessary to keep the mutants alive, but they drove them mad with anger and claustrophobia.  The once-humane Dals became the daleks, devoid of any emotions save rage and the atavistic desire to preserve their race’s supremacy.

Source: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/

Eventually, the time travellers escape and come into contact with the remaining Thals, who have travelled to the region because of a crop failure in their own surviving enclave.  The Thals have forsworn battle, and they are easily gulled by the daleks into a trap, where many of them, including their leader, murdered.  The surviving Thals escape, but hidebound by their pacifism, are unwilling to retaliate in any way.  Meanwhile, the daleks, having discovered that radiation is harmful to the Thals but necessary for their own mutant metabolism, plan to explode another nuclear weapon, to gain them final mastery over their world.

Source: http://www.torchwood.org/

Ian eventually convinces the Thals to accompany him on an infiltration mission.  They will sneak into the city through the swamp, mountains, and caves that protect its water supply.  The terrain is rather scary and alien, probably looking better in black and white than it would have in color.  Meanwhile, the Doctor and Susan take out the city’s defensive sensors, before being recaptured.  The story ends with a desperate melee between the Gallifreyans, humans, and Thals on one side and the dalek leaders on the other to control the core of the city.  Thanks largely to luck, the control panel for the entire metropolis is smashed, the daleks lose power, and the countdown for the neutron bomb is stopped.  The travellers can leave in peace, confident that they have destroyed the last debased, corrupted residues of the once-noble Dal people.  (Obviously things turn out differently, but no real explanation is every given for how the daleks avoid the rather certain doom that this story originally meted out to them.)

Source: http://www.planetjune.com/

This story is really excellent, better than I remembered.  The design of the sets and props was excellent.  Obviously, the most important props were the daleks themselves.  They were very unconventional robot monsters in their day, yet at the same time also much more reasonable-looking than humanoid androids.  The distinctive dalek voices and their Hitlerian vocabulary are really a crucial part of their villainous effictiveness.  The huge, empty city, with its pale walls, low arched doorways, and many elevators was alien and subtly frightening.  The jungles and swamps outside were a bit less impressive, but they worked well enough, and the set designers did an excellent job of concealing the small size of the stages on which they were shooting.  And the caves looked more real (thanks to not having a perfectly flat floor) than most that appear on television shows.

Source: http://www.treklens.com/

The special effects were modest but generally well handled.  The daleks’ disabling weapons caused the scene to shift into negative, which makes for a disturbing effect.  (It’s even creepier in later stories, when it’s in color.)  The split screen shots worked well, especially the ones used to represent elevators.  There were a few missteps, like using an obvious closeup of an ordinary caterpillar to represent a supposedly terrifying swamp monster, but they were limited in number.  They didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the story, which I will definitely watch again when my kids are a few years older.

Spearhead From Space was a major milestone in the history of Doctor Who, for many different reasons.  It was the first story shown in color.  (That, more than anything, must tell you something about how low the show’s budget was in the early days.  They couldn’t afford to shoot in color until 1970!)  It also marked the advent of Jon Pertwee as the Doctor — the third Doctor.  Now, Jon Pertwee is my favorite Doctor, and I’ve always felt that his era on the show never quite got the respect and attention it deserved.  Prior to taking the role of the Doctor, Pertwee was known mostly as a comedian, and initially he injected a lot of humor into his stories.  In this case, the newly regenerated hero makes a ridiculous escape from the hospital where he’s been taken — hiding by taking a shower (in a changing room labeled “Doctors Only”); stealing a senior physician’s puffy shirt, cape, and classic car; and driving straight into the top secret installation where the TARDIS has been hidden.  There’s less comedy as Pertwee’s tenure on the show wears on, but the way he played the Doctor — arrogant but affable and given to silly martial arts stunts — makes the character a lot of fun to watch.

The beginning of the seventh season also marked a major change in the plot.  The Doctor would spend the next two years (more or less) confined to Earth, until the time lords released him to wander the universe again in The Three Doctors.  To occupy himself and help him in his attempts to repair the TARDIS, he accepted a job as scientific advisor to the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.

U.N.I.T.’s other leading scientist, recruited in this same episode, was Liz Shaw.  She was tough, witty, and brilliant, and her replacement by the anemic Jo Grant after only one season was a real mistake.  Since the beginning of the show, the Doctor had always had a male companion — the show’s man of action.  Jon Pertwee envisioned the Doctor as a flashy superhero; his skill at Venusian aikido made male companions of the Ian Chesterton mold unnecessary.  So Liz inaugurated the long tradition of the Doctor having a lone female companion.  However, the U.N.I.T. soldiers, primarily the Brigadier (although Sargeant Benson was my personal favorite) provided regular male characters for the running plot.

While I liked all the protagonists in this story, I can’t say quite the same thing about the villains.  Spearhead From Space introduced the Autons — evil plastic robots bent on conquering the Earth by replacing its leaders with duplicates — and the Nestenes, the race of group creatures who created the Autons.  For reasons that I cannot fathom, the Autons have proven to be very popular villains (despite only three appearances in thirty seasons) — so popular in fact that they were used in the very first episode of the twenty-first century Doctor Who revival, Rose.  This naturally invites comparison between the third and ninth Doctor’s premiers, and had Rose been the first new Doctor Who episode I actually saw, I would have had serious doubts about the competence of whoever was running the new show.

The problem with the Autons is not with how they act; there’s nothing wrong with the concept or even the script.  It’s that they look ridiculous!  (My father cannot watch Spearhead From Space or the season eight serial Terror of the Autons without breaking into laughter.)  They look like people with plastic faces and hands that can split open to reveal BB guns.  Having one walk onscreen at the end of a suspenseful scene in the dark English woods inspires neither terror nor horror, but bathos.  Now, there was a time when the mere notion of a humanoid robot — human in size and shape, but with a mockery of proper human features — was considered to be intrinsically terrifying.  (The uncanny valley must have been a lot wider back then.)  Evil robots were a cliche.  Leigh Brackett (pronounced “[.,.]“) could introduce a pair of androids and rely on her readers to assume they were evil.  In Jack WIlliamson’s novella After World’s End, it was supposed to be a shocking twist that robots didn’t have to be evil if they were beautiful enough!  (In fairness, After World’s End is an excellent story, worth reading just for its description of unevolved biological organisms.)  Maybe British culture was still at this point in 1970, but I just don’t think the portrayal or robots this way works any more.

The Autons get a lot more screen time, but the Nestenes really are weird and disturbing.  The core of the Nestene consciousness arrives on earth in a hail of small artificial metors (conveniently landing near to where the TARDIS does at nearly the same time).  The Autons are being produced in a nearby factory, which was set up by an earlier wave of alien arrivals, but they need the central consciousness to control their operations once their plan to conquer the world by replacing its leaders gets underway.  Fortunately for humans, the plans are delayed by a poacher who finds that one crucial meteorite.  Unfortunately, the Nestene core is eventually recovered, and there is a truly creepy scene in which it is transferred to a breeding tank.  The thing that appear in the tank looks utterly alien and wrong.  It’s probably just some sheets of plastic, oddly lit and blown with a slight current of air, but it manages to look quite alive, yet amazingly unnatural.  Before watching this episode, I wondered whether it would still look as queer to me now as it did when I was in elementary school.  Well, it did, and I wasn’t the only person watching who had that reaction.  The effect worked. The gigantic computer-generated blob in Rose seemed tawdry in comparison.

Of course, the Doctor and Liz triumph over the Nestene just in time, with the help of a bit of gadgetry.  I enjoyed the episode, which was much as I remembered it:  an engaging new Doctor and a companion I really liked, a serviceable mystery plot, unintentionally and unfortuately ridiculous evil robots, and one very simple yet very effective alien special effect.

I’m kicking off my series of reviews of “Classic Nerd Television” with my thoughts on the Doctor Who story City of Death.  (If you don’t want to hear any spoilers, maybe you should read no further.  I consider this fair warning for all my future reviews as well.  Caveat lector.)

This particular Doctor Who story has two main plot threads, one of which is a group of criminals trying to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.  Coincidentally, we were watching it on August 21, 2008, the ninety-seventh anniversary of the actual theft of the Mona Lisa.

As a child, I saw almost all the Doctor Who serials that had survived the BBC tape wipings of the 1970s.  However, a great many of them I only got to watch once.  If my father decided that a given story wasn’t a “classic,” he would record over it the next week.  We watched City of Death once as a family, then taped over it with Nightmare of Eden.  So I had a very rough idea what the story was about — an alien broken into twelve pieces and scattered across time by the explosion that first created life on Earth, trying to steal the Mona Lisa to raise money for time travel research, so he could travel back and prevent the explosion — but I had forgotten everything else in the intervening twenty years.

What I found most striking about the story was the closeness of the relationship between the Doctor and Romana.  Perhaps it was the Parisian atmosphere, but it was difficult not to see a current of romance between the two time lords.  Of course, the fact that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward were falling in love at the time may have had something to do with it.  Doctor Who being what it is, there was never anything explicit; they just sort of acted like a couple, whether they were bickering or out having fun.  I don’t remember the pair’s intimacy being so apparent at any other point in the series, except perhaps in Logopolis, when the Doctor looks in on Romana’s now-empty room — which is remarkable, since the Doctor usually seemed to forget about his former companions almost instantaneously.

The alien, Scaroth, looked silly — played by Julian Glover, shortly after his appearance as the frighteningly cold General Veers, in a one-eyed green rubber mask.  To disguise himself as a human, the villain wore a second rubber mask with human features.  I couldn’t quite get over the oddness of the fact that when Scaroth was wearing his disguise, his head was smaller than with it off, since Scaroth with a mask was really Glover without one and vice versa.  Also inexplicable was the fact that some (or all) of the versions of Scaroth, which were scattered over millions of years of Earth history, had masks with identical features!  On the other hand, I really enjoyed a scene where one character, guided by the Doctor’s hints, locates an Egyptian papyrus where a one-eyed green monster is depicted alongside the pharaohs and gods.

Scaroth’s spaceship, unlike the “man” himself, was totally awesome.  A huge olive green sphere with three articulated legs, various ports, and a spinning ring around its equator.  It just looked more natural — the product of a coherent alien technology — and seemed to operate more fluidly than most of the products of the BBC model shop.

Later in the story, there’s a cameo by John Cleese, which I recall my father found quite hilarious.  Nothing Cleese says is really that amazingly funny.  It’s more just the incongruity of suddenly seeing Basil Fawlty propounding pompously on the TARDIS as a new piece of installation art at the Louvre that makes the scene.  (And at least it’s definitely him; no wondering whether that guy in The Face of Evil is actually Eric Idle in a secret cameo.)

Apart from Clese, the acting is good but not outstanding.  Ward turns in the best performance, with a particularly nuanced presentation of her relationship with the Doctor.  K-9, on the other hand, is completely absent.  Glover is more effective when his character seems to be just a sinister human gangster, rather than a megalomaniacal alien warlord.  And Tom Chadbon provides some additional humor as Duggan, a thuggish P.I. who tags along with the protagonists, sometimes being an asset and sometimes a liability.  A decision not to show Leonardo da Vinci on screen was probably wise.  Douglas Adams or one of the other ghost writers for the episode must have been an admirer of Leonardo.  There’s a nice touch when the Doctor drops in on the great painter, but the latter is out, so the Doctor leaves a note for him in mirror writing.

Unlike, say, The Pirate Planet, I’m unlikely to watch this story again before I my kids are old enough to enjoy it.  However, it was a nice piece of light entertainment with which to occupy an evening.