Category: Episode by Episode
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.
Doctor Who episode 333: The Three Doctors – Episode Four (20/1/1973)
The theme of this episode, and I suppose the moral of the story, is freedom. Omega believes he’s been abandoned in exile by his fellow Time Lords, and wants the Doctor to take on the burden of maintaining the anti-matter universe, and when this proves impossible threatens to destroy everything in a massive fit of pique. Meanwhile, the Doctor, who actually has been exiled, is willing to sacrifice himself to save the universe and is therefore given back the freedom Omega craved. It’s a nice little fable of the deserving character winning the prize.
Doctor Who episode 332: The Three Doctors – Episode Three (13/1/1973)
Fittingly, this episode focuses on the power of myth and the lasting influence of heroes from the past. Omega is a kind of Gallifreyan Moses, the ‘solar engineer’ (I love the idea of someone who can create suns, no wonder he has a God complex) whose sacrifice gave his ‘brother Time Lords’ (no mention of Tecteun or the Shobogans here) their time and space travel. But while he’s been revered and remembered by Gallifrey, his continued existence, as a force of will, has left him jealous and resentful at his imagined betrayal and abandonment. I like the idea, the sense that the past can come back to haunt the present, especially in an anniversary story. In a sense, Omega is fulfilling the same role as the War Doctor in The Day of the Doctor: the guilty secret underpinning the show’s current incarnation. Only by acknowledging the past can we move on from it.
Doctor Who episode 331: The Three Doctors – Episode Two (6/1/1973)
The first few minutes of the episode feel like a proper Troughton comeback, as he takes centre stage to battle the anti-matter blobs at UNIT HQ. It’s a lovely showcase of his character, as he pokes at the creature then runs back into the TARDIS when it reacts. He forms a surprisingly effective double act with John Levene, with Benton clearly taking on the unavailable Frazer Hines’ role (you can practically hear Jamie saying the lines when the Doctor leaves Benton in charge of an electronic gizmo). Later, when the Brigadier is stubbornly refusing to take him at his word, there’s a flash of his old wolfish grin, and a sort of pained exasperation (and later, outrage when the Brigadier presents him as the third Doctor’s assistant). And he gets another great scene where he apparently wrecks the Brigadier’s radio before cleverly turning it into a better version, like the scatty genius of The Krotons. He doesn’t play this exactly like he did in the 1960s, acting a lot of scenes with a vaguely amused superiority that, possibly, suggests that he knows he can’t actually be too badly hurt because he has to live to be the third Doctor, but this is probably the episode that gives us the best idea of what a Season Seven Troughton might have looked like.
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