Category: Episode by Episode
Doctor Who episode 402: Terror of the Zygons – Part One (30/8/1975)
‘Wullie, can you no send over a few haggis?’ D’ye ken if we’re in Scotland? I love how Robert Banks Stewart, a Scottish writer, embraces the cliches, reminding everybody that his namesake Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is of Scottish heritage. Also, how token Sassenach Sarah, who initially treats this all as a bit of colourful regional fluff, is constantly shown up for being so patronising, culminating in a lovely moment when she puts on a Scotch accent to answer the phone and has the smile wiped off her face when she learns Harry has been shot.
Doctor Who episode 401: Revenge of the Cybermen – Part Four (10/5/1975)
The big problem with serials that don’t have a strong central idea or story, that are ‘just a bunch of stuff that happened’, is that they’re entirely dependent on that stuff being consistently well done to distract from the absence of anything more substantial. This is a case in point. Some of the individual set pieces aren’t bad, but a lot of them aren’t good, and none of them adds up to anything approaching a coherent story.
Doctor Who episode 400: Revenge of the Cybermen – Part Three (3/5/1975)
The trouble with Revenge of the Cybermen is it’s not entirely clear what’s at stake or why we should care. The base under siege promised in Part One never materialised – by the end of Part Three Nerva has been abandoned to the Cybermen. The CyberLeader talks of building an invincible new CyberArmy (presumably armed with CyberBombs) but the Doctor kicks the legs out from under this idea, mocking it and the Cybermen so effectively that it’s hard for us to see them as a credible threat (possibly Tom Baker letting his boredom with the script come through too clearly). Then there are the two equally dull factions of Vogans, whose squabbles are so presented in such an abstract way that it’s impossible to choose between them. Their dialogue is atrocious. Even Kevin Stoney can’t save lines like line, ‘Has Vorus in the madness of his vanity brought down the vengeance of the Cybermen upon us again?’
Doctor Who episode 399: Revenge of the Cybermen – Part Two (26/4/1975)
The Star Trek comparisons continue as the solution to Sarah Jane’s poisoning is to teleport her down to Voga, eliminating the venom from her bloodstream in the process. It’s a dramatic, pacy way to top an episode that never recaptures the urgency of these opening minutes.
Doctor Who episode 398: Revenge of the Cybermen – Part One (19/4/1975)
When I think of 1970s British SF TV (Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, spacey Tomorrow People) this is exactly the kind of production I picture: clearly inspired by Star Trek, but made on videotape rather than film, with lots of greyish spacecraft interiors interspersed with occasional film sequences and aliens declaiming grandiloquently at each other. The Pertwee years didn’t have much quite like Revenge of the Cybermen, partly as a result of the Earthbound format and partly because the space stories were often Bob Baker and Dave Martin weirdness. But I think the Tom Baker years are going to look and feel increasingly like this.
Doctor Who episode 397: Genesis of the Daleks – Part Six (12/4/1975)
The nub of the episode, and the entire serial, comes down to the question of whether the Doctor has the right to wipe out the Daleks in their infancy. ‘You can’t change history! Not one line,’ he once said. Later, he modified that to the more ambiguous ‘I dare not change the course of history.’ He’s still struggling with that ambiguity, the idea that ‘some things could be better with the Daleks’, that ‘we’re all too small to realise [history’s] final pattern.’ On top of this, there’s a moral concern that by committing genocide the Doctor not only changes his own history, but his very nature – ‘I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.’
Doctor Who episode 396: Genesis of the Daleks – Part Five (5/4/1975)
The centrepiece of the episode, and the story, is the Doctor’s one-to-one with Davros, in which the Doctor compares the Daleks to a deadly virus inimical to all life, and Davros shows his true colours by ranting about the absolute power the Daleks will grant him. The analogy makes is clear that Davros’s only interest is power for its own sake, not with any purpose of doing good. He’d see all life but the Daleks wiped out. This would, clearly, have the side effect of creating peace, but only because there would be no-one left to disagree. It’s echoed in the later scene when Davros talks sneeringly of “democracy” as the ‘creed of cowards’ and states ‘Achievement comes through absolute power, and power through strength.’
Doctor Who episode 395: Genesis of the Daleks – Part Four (29/3/1975)
Viewed as a sci-fi historical, the Time Ring fulfils the same function as the inaccessible TARDIS in those early Hartnell adventures: the Doctor and friends have to go back into the Kaled bunker, whether they like it or not. After all, this is the one time when the Doctor could legitimately walk away, claiming that he took on Time and Time won. Instead, he’s plunged back into the nightmare of Dalek history, forced to relive every encounter so that Davros, turning the tables on the Doctor, can change the future.
Doctor Who episode 394: Genesis of the Daleks – Part Three (22/3/1975)
There hasn’t been a serial that unfolds with such grim inevitability since The Massacre. Even though the Kaled Council listens politely (more politely, to be sure, than the usual reception the Doctor gets when he claims to be a time-travelling alien from the future) to the Doctor’s Cassandra-like warnings, they refuse to take the definitive actions required to stop the Daleks, and so seal their own fate. They fatally underestimate Davros’s commitment to their cause – as was made clear in the previous episode, he has long ago abandoned hope for his former people. He now commits the ultimate betrayal, colluding in the genocide of the Kaleds so that the Daleks can emerge triumphant.
Doctor Who episode 393: Genesis of the Daleks – Part Two (15/3/1975)
I enjoy Genesis of the Daleks most when I think of it as a twist on the John Lucarotti historical, except rather than being trapped in unremittingly brutal and horrible events in Earth’s history, the Doctor and friends are trapped in Doctor Who’s own past. The Thals and Kaleds might as well be Protestants and Catholics; Davros could be Tlotoxl to Ronson’s Autloc, and there’s even a cave of 500 eyes (all belonging to one of Davros’s previous experiments). Uniquely for a non-historical, the audience already broadly know this is going to end in tragedy (I guess there’s a question mark over whether the Doctor will wipe the Daleks from history, but it never seems a very likely outcome), so, apart from the obvious excitement of seeing how the show’s biggest stars came to be, the real interest is in how the Doctor will escape.
Next Time... 