Category: Episode by Episode
Doctor Who episode 472: Underworld – Part Three (21/1/1978)
This rumbles on without much energy or conviction, with endless scenes of people wandering about, or K9 apparently floating across the rocky cave floor. The cliffhanger reprise features a shot of the Doctor fiddling with the sonic screwdriver that seems to go on forever and sets the scene for a sluggishly-paced episode where Alan Lake’s gurning, Welsh fury and Louise Jameson are the only people that look like they’re trying (the scene where Idas asks if he can travel with the Doctor and Leela is so stumblingly done it looks like improv). By all accounts this was a fairly unhappy serial to record. It’s barely much happier to watch.
Doctor Who episode 471: Underworld – Part Two (14/1/1978)
‘Welcome to the underworld.’ It’s a thankless task having to follow Robert Holmes with another script about a downtrodden slave class rising up against their masters. The difference with The Sun Makers is that we’ve been led to care about Cordo, whereas the ‘Trogs’ here are introduced in a scene that’s worse than the villagers in Planet of the Spiders, as the rebel leader implores, with no conviction, ‘May the sky fall on your families.’ Plus we also meet a lot of guards who dress like Darth Vader if they’d kept Dave Prowse’s voice, waffling on about sacrifices to the Oracle. It’s a lot to take in when we’ve barely got to know the R1C crew (who sort of fade into the background now), and the result is an episode that doesn’t seem to have much of a through line, just a bunch of stuff that’s thrown at us.
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.
Next Time... 