Category: Doctor Who
Doctor Who episode 470: Underworld – Part One (7/1/1978)
Something that I’d never really noticed until this pilgrimage was the gradual snowballing of Time Lord continuity well before the 1980s. They didn’t exist before 1969 and were largely noises off during the Pertwee years (barring the reveal of Omega’s feat of stellar engineering). But under Robert Holmes their planet got a name, we’ve learned more about their grubby history and moribund society. Underworld, fittingly, positions itself as another important reveal of Time Lord mythology: the reason why they’re strict non-interventionists (except where Earth, Uxaerius, Peladon, Solos, Skaro or Karn are concerned).
Doctor Who episode 469: The Sun Makers – Part Four (17/12/1977)
‘We’ve started a revolution, Leela!’ This feels like an Andrew Cartmel story 10 years early, with the Doctor bringing down a planetary dictatorship overnight, and a final confrontation with the deposed tyrant weeping on his throne as his power collapses around him. Even some of the lines sounds like they come from a McCoy story: ‘I won’t kill you, just close you down’. For all that this was inspired by Robert Holmes’ annoyance at HMRC, there’s a fairly radical message. ‘Don’t you think commercial imperialism is as bad as military conquest?’ snaps the Doctor, off-handedly condemning the British Empire and the USA. ‘We have tried war, but the use of economic power is far more effective,’ replies the Collector (who, it turns out, is actually a fungus – something that grows fat off the back of other life forms). And once that economic power is broken, the Collector, and the Company, go down the toilet – literally.
Doctor Who episode 468: The Sun Makers – Part Three (10/12/1977)
Leela’s execution by steaming as presented in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation always filled me with horror as a child and went a long way to making this one of my favourite Doctor Who books. For all this is largely a comedy, Robert Holmes doesn’t skimp on the scares, and when it comes down to it, Tom Baker doesn’t undercut them by playing for laughs. The moment when he realises Leela is to be killed in a particularly gruesome way, there are no one-liners or mucking about: he looks stressed out, if anything, snapping at K9 to get on with it, and forgetting any other distraction as he single-mindedly focuses on a rescue plan. None of this feels remotely silly.
Doctor Who episode 467: The Sun Makers – Part Two (3/12/1977)
I enjoy how the story is driven by the Doctor and Leela’s attempts to get back to each other, which incidentally start to cause the society of Pluto to begin to unravel. In the Doctor’s case, an attempt to get ransom money for Leela ends up with him captured and incarcerated in the infamous Correction Centre. However, Hade’s conviction that the Doctor is part of a conspiracy means the Doctor is spared from brain surgery, resulting in my favourite scene of the episode: the Doctor and Hade circling round each other as they politely humour each other.
Doctor Who episode 466: The Sun Makers – Part One (26/11/1977)
I unreservedly love the opening episode of a story that evidently should have been called Death and Taxes. Amazingly, it’s the first ‘normal’ Robert Holmes script in years (rather than an emergency rewrite of someone else’s story, or the special exemption for the experimental The Deadly Assassin). Predictably, it’s both very horrible and very funny.
Doctor Who episode 465: Image of the Fendahl – Part Four (19/11/1977)
‘How do you kill death?’ The same way you kill an intelligent super-virus or a Rutan, it seems: blow it up. I’m hoping Anthony Read turns out to be better at workshopping endings than Robert Holmes is. The Fendahl turns out to be Wanda Ventham painted gold and doing callisthenics, and some giant slugs that are as susceptible to salt as the common-or-garden variety. How tarsome.
Doctor Who episode 464: Image of the Fendahl – Part Three (12/11/1977)
‘I was frightened in childhood by a mythological horror,’ the Doctor confesses at one point. References to his childhood are few and far between – Pertwee’s Doctor occasionally mentions his youth, when he visited the hermit on the mountain, but I think it’s largely in the Williams years that we start to hear about Time Lord children (or Time Tots), and get a glimpse of the scared little boy that Moffat riffs on in The Girl in the Fireplace and Listen.
Doctor Who episode 463: Image of the Fendahl – Part Two (5/11/1977)
OK: it’s Quatermass and the Pit.
Doctor Who episode 462: Image of the Fendahl – Part One (29/10/1977)
This has the style of The Time Monster done right – bantering scientists; advanced equipment in a country house; ancient glowing artefacts wreaking supernatural havoc on hapless passers-by; the whiff of something unethical that needs covering up, and Pertwee-years yokels. It resurrects an interest in the origins of humankind, and has some attractive folk horror overtones.
Doctor Who episode 461: The Invisible Enemy – Part Four (22/10/1977)
Most of the silly bits are knowingly ridiculous: the jokes about the embiggened Nucleus being another ranting megalomaniac, and the fact that – after repeatedly dismissing the idea the Doctor solves everything by blowing up Titan – are definitely deliberate. There’s an amusing bit of business when the Doctor opens a door on Titan and has to shut it again quick sharp because a man with a gun is standing right outside, and ‘I only hope he’s TARDIS trained’ is a funnier punchline than most of the “they all laugh at Spock” endings from Star Trek (a low bar, to be fair). Only the Nucleus claiming to be ‘mighty and invulnerable’ when it can barely move without assistance is obviously a gap between the imagination of the script and the budget-conscious logic of the production (CORRECTION: the script says the Nucleus is cumbersome and immobile, which instantly makes me like the story 10% more. Thanks to Revenge of the Swarm’s Jonathan Morris for pointing this out).
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