Category: Complete Review
Doctor Who episode 343: Frontier in Space – Episode Six (31/3/1973)
The problems with Episode Five are that once the Doctor has convinced Earth and Draconia that the Master is trying to tip them, Blofeld style, into war there’s nowhere for the story to go until the showdown. If anything, this week the issue is even more pronounced, with about 15 minutes of pure vamping as the Doctor does an agonisingly slow space walk to repair General Williams’ ship, while Jo stages a prison break and sends a message to warn the galaxy only for the Master to reveal he was pranking her. When Hulke has to resort to the Ogron Eater, a monster that looks far more fearsome as a Lovecraftian mural than a billowing duvet on location, just to keep things going another couple of minutes it’s a bit heart sinking.
Doctor Who episode 342: Frontier in Space – Episode Five (24/3/1973)
This episode is ever so slightly thin after the last four weeks. The main issue is that once the Doctor has convinced the Draconian Emperor that he’s telling the truth about the Ogrons, which happens around halfway, there’s nowhere much for the story to go until it ends next week. This results in a second half that is an extended spaceship chase sequence complete with lots of wobbling about action to simulate a battle. Hulke’s script is good enough that it never threatens to become tiresome – the Master’s ongoing reluctance to kill the Doctor, particularly at long range, is nicely done – but it does feel like killing time.
Doctor Who episode 341: Frontier in Space – Episode Four (17/3/1973)
Having done plenty of work to establish the setting, this episode is content to trust that the interplay between the Doctor, Jo and the Master is enough to entertain the audience for 25 minutes. It’s a fairly safe bet, given how well established these characters are, and this is pretty indulgent (we didn’t really need to spend 25 minutes on the way to the Ogron planet) but very entertaining. We don’t really learn very much to advance the story except the intriguing nugget that the Master is working for mysterious ’employers’ who want the Doctor brought to them, and the suggestion that Jo and the Doctor have been travelling the universe for quite some time given Jo’s fretting about a court martial when she gets back, and says, ‘We keep landing up in one terrible situation after the other.’
Doctor Who episode 340: Frontier in Space – Episode Three (10/3/1973)
There’s a criticism of this story that the Doctor and Jo spend most of it about to be locked up, being locked up, or escaping from being locked up. Which feels slightly harsh given that sounds like the description of quite a high proportion of Doctor Who, but especially misplaced so far given each time the Doctor and Jo are incarcerated it helps to advance the story, introduce a new location or set of characters, and enables a space opera to be told on a BBC budget. It’s also interesting how, after their adventures in the miniscope destabilised the political situation on Inter Minor, the Doctor and Jo are acting as catalysts just by being present and telling the truth, as if the world they’ve arrived in has to change to accommodate them.
Doctor Who episode 339: Frontier in Space – Episode Two (3/3/1973)
After an exorbitant recap this turns into a string of capture/escapes which could be tedious except each one brings the Doctor and Jo in touch with different groups, and helps to advance the plot and establish the opposing sides in a way that’s reminiscent of Hulke’s work on The War Games. While the Doctor is captured by the Draconians and threatened with the Mind Probe, Jo remains an Earth captive, subject to the same threat, and the script reinforces the parallel by cutting between the two scenes. This sets up the idea of the Draconians and humans as equal and opposite forces, before the end of episode arrival of the Ogrons confirms the involvement of a third party.
Doctor Who episode 338: Frontier in Space – Episode One (24/2/1973)
This opens with two weary space pilots having a conflab about current affairs and how tough their jobs are, exactly like every other Doctor Who story for the next 16 years. Here, though, it feels like a novelty: it’s so long since we’ve seen anything like it, or had two consecutive serials not set in contemporary Britain. And then they nearly collide with the TARDIS in hyperspace, establishing the new normal so comprehensively it feels quintessential. Possibly as a running joke, it turns out that the TARDIS has landed in yet another storage hold, and Jo’s relatively blasé reaction establishes her increasing familiarity and comfort with space travel, as part of a low-key but admirable effort to give her a bit more character development than most previous companions. I particularly enjoyed her sarcastic ‘fascinating’ when the Doctor is giving a scientific explanation.
Doctor Who episode 337: Carnival of Monsters – Episode Four (17/2/1973)
One of the great Doctor moments is watching the third Doctor stagger out of the miniscope, and then moments later effortlessly brush aside Pletrac’s bureaucratic bluster to bluff his way into a position of authority, wiping the floor with the Inter Minorans with his righteous indignation, then, to top it all off, charming Shirna and inspiring Vorg to do the right thing and save the inhabitants of the scope (including, presumably, the Cybermen and Ogrons). In its way this is as punch the air fantastic as the end of Bad Wolf and I love it to pieces.
Doctor Who episode 336: Carnival of Monsters – Episode Three (10/2/1973)
You could do a reading of Carnival of Monsters as a meta satire on television, with Jo appalled at the idea of being watched for vicarious thrills:
JO: And outside there are people and creatures just looking at us for kicks?
THE DOCTOR: Very probably.
JO: They must be evil and horrible.
THE DOCTOR: No, not necessarily, Jo. Thoughtless, maybe.
If so, though, it’s a reading that suggests TV can change the world – the adventures of the little characters inside this particular idiot’s lantern inspire a political revolution on Inter Minor, as Kalik plots to use what he’s learned from watching to overthrow the government of Zarb.
Doctor Who episode 335: Carnival of Monsters – Episode Two (3/2/1973)
Carnival of Monsters succeeds where The Time Monster failed, by actually having story that progresses week on week, alongside larger-than-life but credible characters. On paper, the plot of the episode seems thin: the Doctor and Jo escape from the SS Bernice into the circuits of the miniscope, emerging in a swamp where they’re menaced by Drashigs. Meanwhile, Vorg and Shirna must convince the paranoid Inter Minorans that they are not Lurman spies smuggling in dangerous alien monsters to bring about the downfall of the government. It’s hardly Gravity’s Rainbow, but each scene feels like it’s advancing the story, and there’s no obvious fat (rather scenes cut to the chase – for example when Vorg turns the aggrometer up we switch straight back to the Doctor squaring up to Andrews).
Doctor Who episode 334: Carnival of Monsters – Episode One (27/1/1973)
I really like that for the Doctor’s first freedom run into time and space that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks didn’t choose to do a returning monster, or play it safe with a trip to a base under siege – both of which would have been entirely understandable especially in the anniversary series. Instead, we get the oddest first episode since Terror of the Autons, with two plots that seem entirely separate: the Doctor and Jo battle a plesiosaurus and an apparent time anomaly in 1926 while two carnival show people arrive on a planet of grey-faced bureaucrats.
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