‘New horizons, of course.’ With the Pilgrimage fast approaching its end, I’ve started to look beyond Doctor Who at films or TV episodes that are Doctor Who adjacent – that have some sort of significant creative overlap, inspired or were influenced by Doctor Who. Sideways in time, if you like. And where better to start than The Quatermass Experiment, in particular with an episode that aired 70 years ago today?

Persons Reported Missing is the second and last extant instalment of the six-part TV serial. The story so far: Professor Bernard Quatermass’s British Rocket Group has successfully sent three men into space, but some sort of accident has occurred in orbit, and the rocket has crash landed in Wimbledon with only one occupant. So far, so The Ambassadors of Death. The focus of this episode is on the surviving astronaut, Victor Caroon, who’s in some sort of a fugue state unable to explain what happened to his colleagues. While the authorities investigate, and journalists sniff around for a story, Quatermass desperately seeks a scientific explanation.

There are some details which clearly stuck in the minds of later Doctor Who writers – either from watching this broadcast or the 1955 Hammer film adaptation. These include the idea that Caroon has absorbed the consciousness and physical details of the missing astronauts (his fingerprints are a mixture of two men’s, and he identifies himself as Dr Ludwig – very much like Noah announcing, ‘I am Dune’ in The Ark in Space). The concept of a confused space traveller coming down to Earth and rushed into hospital while pressmen circle outside is very much like Spearhead from Space. More generally, Quatermass is a scientist tetchily co-existing with the authorities (here, the police rather than the military), with a young female assistant and a brilliant mind.

But I think the bigger influence of The Quatermass Experiment is less in the details than the tone. Often, it’s specifically the Derrick Sherwin UNIT stories that are compared to Quatermass, however the kicker for me is the moment when Paul Whitsun-Jones’s reporter stares into the middle distance to ponder, ‘Just beyond the air begins a new wilderness, pitch dark both day and night, empty and cold.’ There are corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things, it seems. This is cosmic horror, M.R. James mapped onto the stars, with Quatermass himself troubled by what his curiosity might unleash: ‘I’ve always been afraid of something that we couldn’t deal with.’ This, and the mix of universal terror with cosy domestics (a chat about putting the bacon on) seem to me the essence of Doctor Who from at least 1966, when an adventure in space and time became a horror serial about defending humankind against the monstrous.

Next Time: X – The Unknown