Category: Episode by Episode
Doctor Who episode 300: The Dæmons – Episode Two (29/5/1971)
If the first episode established tone and mood, this episode starts to throw in various random bits of weirdness that continue to build the sense of the uncanny at the expense of actually doing much to advance the plot. By the end of it, the Doctor and the Brigadier know the Master is involved, somehow, but they haven’t actually met him, and his plan remains fairly obscure. There are an animated gargoyle, a 30-foot devil, a model spaceship that weighs 740 tons and a heat barrier surrounding Devil’s End, but, other than the fact that they all seem to be centred on the barrow, we have a lot of jigsaw pieces without the box.
Doctor Who episode 299: The Dæmons – Episode One (22/5/1971)
This opens like one a BBC ghost story, with thunder, lightning and driving rain; leering gargoyles and startled animals, and a man struck down by fright by something offscreen. The tone is quite different from the hyperactive storytelling of Terror of the Autons and The Claws of Axos; this takes its time to create a sense of place and atmosphere, banking, rightly, on the audience enjoying the dichotomy of the Doctor’s unshakeable rationalism with the modish interest in ghostly curses, ‘unspeakable rites’ and ‘all that magic bit’.
Doctor Who episode 298: Colony in Space – Episode Six (15/5/1971)
Malcolm Hulke’s take on the Master is absolutely fascinating. Earlier in the season he’s been both a Bond villain and a dark version of the Doctor, but Hulke gives him a motivation of his own. With the Doomsday Weapon in his grasp, the Master offers the Doctor a half share in the Universe, and he really means it. ‘You could end war, suffering, disease. We could save the Universe… Bring good and peace to every world in the galaxy.’ While he’s clearly a Satanic character – his mantra seems to be better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, and he continually tries to tempt the Doctor – he isn’t just a force of random evil. He’s the classic Sauron/Palpatine/Daenerys type, desiring order, but believing only he can deliver it. Steven Moffat picks up on this characterisation when writing Missy, another incarnation who offers the Doctor absolute power.
Doctor Who episode 297: Colony in Space – Episode Five (8/5/1971)
Structurally, Malcolm Hulke is trying to pull off the same trick with Colony in Space that he and Terrance Dicks managed brilliantly in The War Games: materially advance the plot each week, gradually peeling back the layers, and keeping things interesting through a series of reversals. The problem is that The War Games was melodramatic, with vivid characters, locations and fairly momentous revelations. Whereas Colony in Space has characters like David and Robert, a muddy quarry and some caves, and a very serious moral about corporate exploitation.
Doctor Who episode 296: Colony in Space – Episode Four (1/5/1971)
We’ve known from literally the start of this serial that the Master was going to show up at some point, the mystery was when and where. If you don’t know what’s coming, the cliffhanger of the last episode might suggest that he’s been lurking in the “Primitive” city, waiting for Jo to be brought before him. But, in fact, he’s disguised himself as the Adjudicator. Surprise!
Doctor Who episode 295: Colony in Space – Episode Three (24/4/1971)
The structure of the serial is good. Like Hulke’s The War Games, there’s a logical progression and escalation, with the first episode introducing the colonists and their situation, the second focusing on IMC and their objectives, with this episode bringing both sides together. In principle, having set up two groups of people with opposite aims, this should be where the sparks fly. In practice, it’s a bit damp.
Doctor Who episode 293: Colony in Space – Episode One (10/4/1971)
Writing partners Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke were famously not enamoured with producer Derrick Sherwin’s decision to exile the Doctor to Earth, and a big part of the success of Season Seven comes down to their attempts to push the boundaries beyond simple alien invasions or mad scientists. With Sherwin gone, Season Eight has felt like a snowballing attempt to revert to an earlier, less restricted concept of Doctor Who. In that sense, Colony in Space feels like the upshot of what Dicks and Hulke have been aiming to achieve.
Doctor Who episode 292: The Claws of Axos – Episode Four (3/4/1971)
While it’s very easy to spot patterns that aren’t there, I think there’s a definite sense of Season Eight leading up to this episode, and the next story. We hadn’t seen the TARDIS since Spearhead from Space, but it reappeared in Terror of the Autons, we got our first glimpse inside it since The War Games in the previous episode, and here, 39 episodes into his era, Jon Pertwee gets to pilot the Police Box for the first time. Fair enough, it’s only for a short trip, but at last the show is breaking out of the shackles of the exile format.
Doctor Who episode 291: The Claws of Axos – Episode Three (27/3/1971)
It’s Pertwee’s face in the titles but to all intents and purposes the Master is the lead in this episode. He gets to do all the Doctorish things including, astonishingly, being the first character in the colour era we follow into the TARDIS. He potters round the console, tutting, flicking switches and tinkering in a way we haven’t seen since Troughton. He even gets standard third Doctor dialogue, snapping at the cautious Sir George, ‘Risk the cables, man. Risk everything you’ve got.’ At the cliffhanger it’s the Master who, with no obvious relish, tells the Brigadier if they’re to save the world they’ll have to sacrifice the Doctor and Jo – and waits on the Brigadier’s response before he acts. He’s a villain, but with Delgado and Dicks characterising him, he’s so much more than that.
Doctor Who episode 290: The Claws of Axos – Episode Two (20/3/1971)
I’m really enjoying the amount of “showrunning” effort going into the series since Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks have been running things. Season 8 has started to forge a distinct aesthetic that’s giving it the same sense of cohesion as Seasons 14 and 18. It’s also introducing some ongoing character threads that go beyond “the Master is the villain in every story”. This episode picks up on the Doctor’s eagerness to steal the Master’s dematerialisation circuit in Terror of the Autons, and his annoyance at being stuck on Earth with the Brigadier while the Master goes into space and time at the end of The Mind of Evil. The Doctor is suspicious of Axos – but he’s also excited that it might be the key to getting his own TARDIS working again.
Next Time... 