Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 456: The Hand of Fear, Episode Four

Dear diary,

I’ve been putting off the writing of this entry all day. This is it! One of the big ones! It’s the final appearance of Sarah Jane Smith during her original run in the programme! A huge moment, and one which is filled with emotion and heartbreak. When Elisabeth Sladen died in 2011, Babelcolour uploaded a video tribute to her, and it’s always been my favourite Sarah Jane related video. The tone is perfect - joyous, but tinged with a bittersweet sadness - and the clips of her saying farewell to the Fourth Doctor are really rather moving. I’ve been creeping closer to this episode, just knowing that the actual scene, coming in context after all her other episodes, will be even more emotional.

But then… it wasn’t. Didn’t even seem to move me one jot. I don’t know if I’m broken, but I didn’t find it half as sad as I was expecting to. I mean - yes - it’s very well done, and the way both Baker and Sladen play it is beautiful… but I’m just not sorry to see Sarah leave. Because of her return to the series in 2006, and the years she’s spent in her own spin-off, Sarah has always felt like the companion. The ultimate. The definitive article, you might say. While I’ve really enjoyed her time in the TARDIS up to now, though, I can’t say that I view her as being all that much better than Jo, for example. Or Jamie. Ian and Barbara… She’s a good companion, yes, one of the better ones… but I’m not sure I really understand what all the fuss is about.

And that, I think, is the root of my problem. So much of what makes Sarah Jane so well regarded is the fact that she was the right companion at the right time in the programme’s history. She’s paired with two of the more polar Doctors, and her time with Tom covers one of the most successful periods of the programmes history - both in terms of creativity and general popularity among the public. I think there’s a certain amount of nostalgia to the decision to crown her as the ‘best companion ever’.

All of this sound like I’m taking pot-shots at Sarah Jane in her final moments, but I’m really not. I have loved having her aboard the TARDIS for the last few months, and I’ve really grown to see what so many people love about the character. The issue is that I was just expecting more from her departure. I was expecting to feel more moved by it, and I think I’m a little disappointed that I’m not. Equally, it could be because I know she’ll be back now and again. I know I’ll see her when I watch K9 & Company at the end of Tom’s run, and again during The Five Doctors. I know she’ll pop up fairly regularly during the Tenth Doctor’s era. Maybe it’s not so emotional because I know it’s not the end?

I think I’m also a little miffed by the way the episode unfolds before we even reach the big farewell, too. It plays out like a rehash of Death to the Daleks again - in which the Doctor and Sarah have to overcome a number of puzzles to make their way somewhere inside this alien city. We’ve only recently had a similar scenario pop up in Pyramids of Mars, so it’s little too fresh in the memory for me. We’ve even got the same ‘creature watching a screen turns out to have been dead for millennia’ trick which worked so well when Terry Nation first did it a few seasons ago. It’s not often in this blog that I’m caught praising Terry’s originality!

During The Masque of Mandragora, I mused that I was feeling ready for a change in the programme, and I think that’s contributing to my general weariness here. The programme has had so many strong hits of late that any time an episode doesn’t quite live up to that same standard, I find myself feeling somewhat let down by it. You attune yourself to the average quality of the era you’re in. You’ll notice sometimes (the last season and a half of Pertwee is a good example) that I seem to be levelling out with my scores. Lots of sixes and sevens. That generally means that an era has been of a consistent quality for a while, and so stories then start to gather as extremes when they’re slightly better (or slightly worse) than those around them.

We’ve now got four episode of the Doctor on his lonesome, and then we’re going to be getting a brand new companion. I think this shake-up could be just what I need to shake off my fatigue and get my head back in the game. For now, I’ll say goodbye to this phase of the programme’s history.

Until we meet again, Sarah…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 455: The Hand of Fear, Episode Three

Dear diary,

The pacing of this story is really throwing me. Episode One moves relatively slowly (though that doesn’t mean it’s boring in any way), then Episode Two really races by, with two nuclear threats and lots of people getting possessed by Eldrad. Then we reach Episode Three. I’d assumed Eldrad’s full reveal would be saved for use during a cliffhanger, so when it didn’t arrive yesterday, I wondered what that would mean for the pacing of today’s instalment. I wasn’t expecting to see the fully-formed creature emerge a little way into an episode.

I then also wasn’t expecting us to leave the location of the power station this early, either. I had no idea that we spent time actually on Kastria - I assumed we only saw it during that opening scene of the story. Events at the power station are left a bit suddenly, but we do at least get a nice send off for Professor Watkins wondering who’s going to believe him about all the events we’ve just been through!

To be honest, it was looking like we were heading for the kind of story I’m more familiar with from Dragonfire - the guest villain would want to get back to their home world, only to find that so long has passed, their world is long since dead. There’s certainly shades of that kind of story in here, but at least there’s a home for Eldrad to return to. I’m convinced that there’s more to her story than we’re being told, though. If she’s such a key person in that planet’s evolution, why would they have been so keen to destroy her? The booby trap in the cliff hanger adds another dimension to the culture, too. Did she place it there to deter intruders, or was it designed to keep her at bay should she ever return?

I’m also loving her bargaining with the Doctor. This season is seeing a heightened amount of ‘Time Lord’ being added in to his character, and it’s making for an interesting new thread. During the Pertwee years (and even into Season Twelve and Thirteen), the Doctor was unhappy to be sent on missions for his people, but now he seems to be talking a greater interest in their cause. During The Masque of Mandragora, he claims that it’s ‘part of a Time Lord’s job’ to step in and save the day against the Helix. Here, when Eldrad questions him about his home world, he says again that he has to protect the indigenous population when they’re threatened. Obviously, the next story will see our first proper trip to Gallifrey (as opposed to the brief excursion at the end of The War Games), so maybe they’re trying to thread them in deeper in preparation?

And then there’s all the stuff in the TARDIS. I only touched on the new console room briefly when it first appeared in the last story (to be fair, it does only make a fleeting appearance itself before we’re off to Italy), but now that we get to spend some proper time in here I’m really rather fond of it. As I said the other day, this room has always stuck out as something of an anomaly, but I’m really rather impressed by the set. Something about it feels so right, and it really does suit Tom’s Doctor. We’re given a slightly odd description of it, though. The Doctor explains that when they’re inside the TARDIS, they don’t really exist, so they can’t be harmed. Now, in one of the Matt Smith stories he describes this ‘state of temporal grace’ as being a clever lie - so maybe he’s trying to throw Eldrad off here? - but it is a bit of an odd one!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 454: The Hand of Fear, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I spent much of The Masque of Mandragora banging on about just how brilliant the locations looked, but the same is true of this story - perhaps to an even greater extent. Oldbury Nuclear Power Station, used for the interiors of the Nunton Power Complex, is huge, so it really makes an impact on screen. Way back during The Dalek Invasion of Earth, I was impressed because when Ian and the Doctor found a flight of stairs to go up, the camera followed them… and just kept going! I’d become so used to the size of set the programme could build, and was ready for them to cut away. That same feeling is in place here today, when the Doctor and Dr. Carter rush after Sarah, and then engage in a fight on a gangway. Watching as Carter falls over the edge and plummets to his death below only helps to increase the scale.

It’s also inspiring some rather brilliant direction from Lennie Mayne, in his final work on the series. While the location is vast, and we’re able to get some stunning shots which really highlight how much space they have to play in this week, many of the individual areas of the power station are very cramped, filled high with machinery and equipment. Thus, they’re having to be clever with the placement of the camera when they’re taking many of the close up shots. Mayne has turned this into part of the serial’s style, and you notice that the shots are becoming more and more unusual as we focus on any character who’s been possessed by Eldrad.

Ah yes, Eldrad. I know enough about this story to know that - at some stage - the hand will grow into a crystalline blue woman, but I’m surprised it wasn’t the cliffhanger to this episode. I’m assuming it will come as the next cliffhanger, meaning that she spends less time being part of the plot than I’d expected. Instead, we’re left with the hand to entertain us for these 25 minutes. That’s not a complaint, mind, because it’s very well realised. There’s some shots where the CSO trickery is very evident (and one where you can tell the actor is being hidden away just behind the set), but then there’s other bits, like that first shot of the hand coming to life in the tupperware box, where I really can’t tell how it’s been done. I’m assuming that it’s CSO, the same as elsewhere, but it’s just done far better than I’m used to!

Aside from the effects and the location, I’m really rather fond of the characters we’ve got in this one, too. Just as with Giuliano and Marco in the last story, it feels like we’re being given added depth to the characters here. Many of them are scotched in with the briefest of lines, but it gives us just enough detail to fill in the rest of their story. I wondered, for example, what the relationship might be between Miss Jackson and Professor Watson: there’s enough of a hint between them to suggest that there’s a little bit of a workplace romance going on. And then, when things get dire, he’s sent everyone out of the building… and he phones his wife. It’s a beautiful exchange (where he even briefly speaks to his daughter), and while he never tells her that something serious is happening and that he might not come home that night, he tells her everything she needs to hear for a final conversation.

In The Writer’s Tale, during the planning of The Waters of Mars, Russell T Davies speaks a lot about how important the ‘messages from home’ are for the crew of Bowie Base One. He talks of the way they ground the story in reality, while at the same time helping to reaffirm just how remote the situation is. It has the same effect here, and it helps Watson to be ever more real. I do wonder if the dram is undercut somewhat by having the complex evacuated, then bringing the staff back in, only to evacuate it again: It’s difficult to take the threat seriously a second time (indeed, there was once a day at work when the fire alarm went off three times. By the end, we were genuinely unsure wether to bother going back inside again). But that one phone call, a brief scene of calm in an episode where a lot is happening, means that I care about Watson. I worry that he may end up becoming collateral damage before the story is out - and I feel sorry for his wife and daughter. Now that’s an example of good writing in a Doctor Who episode.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 453: The Hand of Fear, Episode One

Dear diary,

By the time The Hand of Fear was released on DVD in 2006, I was regularly picking the stories up on release day as I passed by Woolworths. As if I didn’t already know from any number of guidebooks about the series, this particular release bore a sticker on the front, proclaiming it as ‘Sarah Jane’s final classic story’. Now that I’ve reached it in the context of the marathon, it’s as though things have come around a bit… quick. Sarah Jane has been companion for longer than most companions (even - just - edging out Jo Grant’s three seasons), but her time in the TARDIS has felt rather short.

I think it’s because of the change in teams throughout her time. She spends her first season alongside Jon Pertwee, and while they worked brilliantly together, they didn’t share the same rapport that she and Tom Baker would later build up. That said, in her second season, I often felt that she was overshadowed by the presence of Harry in the TARDIS. It’s only really through the stories of Season Thirteen that she’s become the wonderful companion that I know and enjoy.

But what on Earth have they dressed her in for her final appearance?!?! Of course, I’ve always known of the ‘Andy Pandy’ costume from this story (although I had no idea that it was described as such in the episode itself!), but it’s not until you actually encounter it watching through like this that you realise just how out of place it really is. Lis Sladen talks in her autobiography of making Sarah’s dress sense more and more ‘out there’ the longer she travelled in the TARDIS (and she makes the same point in the commentary for this episode), but this is, I think, the first time I’ve ever noticed it so much. Oh, sure, there’s been a few questionable clothing choices over the past few seasons, but this is batting things into a whole other league.

Thankfully, it’s not holding Sladen back, and she’s turning in a hell of a performance for her final story. She’s always been rather good with her ‘possessed’ acting, and it’s nice to see her really giving it her all in her final story. She gives a wonderful ‘far off’ look when trying to be disconnected from events, and I’m completely sold by it. Seeing a companion taken over like this isn’t new by any stretch (a similar thing even happened to Sarah in the last story!), but I’m loving the performance here. It sets this possession out above the rest, and that’s always nice.

I’ve never noticed before just how contemporary-Earth-centric these early Tom Baker years are. I’d always thought of the programme in the 1970s as being almost entirely Earth-bound for Jon Pertwee’s tenure, before barely touching down here again once Baker stepped into the role. It’s actually proved to be far more delineated than that, with every season from about 1972 onwards featuring at least a couple of stories set in the ‘present’. Since the Fourth Doctor took over, we’ve had Robot, Terror of the Zygons, The Android Invasion, The Seeds of Doom and now this one - almost half of his stories have taken place in this period of history. Sarah’s departure will change that, and we’ll start seeing less adventures placed here through the rest of Baker’s run. Maybe losing his human companion cuts another tie to the planet? After all, we won’t have another one until Tegan shows up, and that’s a long way off from now.

That said, this has a different feel to all the other stories set in this period over the last few years. For the first time since The Sea Devils, the Doctor has touched down on modern-day Earth in a story which won’t feature UNIT, and unlike The Seeds of Doom, he’s not been called in as such, but he’s simply arrived here while trying to give Sarah a trip home. It’s ironic, then, that the TARDIS should touch down in that most Doctor Who of locations - a quarry. There was a time, back around Season Three when quarries had first started to become shorthand for ‘alien world’, that I mused on how well they worked. It’s still true, now, but the language of the programme means that I watch the Doctor and Sarah Jane walk through this landscape, and my mind instantly sets it on some aline world. It’s only once we’re out of here and off to the hospital that things start to feel as though we’re really down to Earth. I’m also surprised just how often quarries do appear as themselves in Doctor Who. It was clever when they first tried it during The Ambassadors of Death, but we’ve only recently seen one at the end of last season!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

With the passing of Ray Cusick last year, it only felt right that I should speak a little bit in the Diary about him and his contribution to the story of Doctor Who. Sadly, given the recent passing of Christopher Barry, it’s becoming a more regular occurrence than I’d like.

I heard today that another one of those stalwarts from the early years - Derek Martinus - had passed away. Last month, I commented on the way that Christopher Barry had helmed to many important stories in the early years of the programme, and it has to be said that Martinus is the other side of that same coin. Between them, these two men directed the first three ‘post regeneration’ stories, and Martinus was also responsible for seeing out William Hartnell - taking the directorial helm of the first ever regeneration inThe Tenth Planet.

What strikes me, looking at the list of stories Derek Martinus had a hand in, is what an exciting period it’s been for them over the last few years. Galaxy 4 has seen an episode returned to the archives The Tenth Planet and The Ice Warriors have seen their missing episodes animated for DVD release (and Mission to the Unknown has been the subject of an unofficial ‘fan’ recon), while Spearhead From Space has been spectacularly cleaned up and released in High Definition on Blu Ray. I hope Derek got the chance to see this version of the story - and enjoy it in all it’s detail. Indeed, the only story he directed which hasn’t seen anything exciting or new happen with it lately is The Evil of the Daleks… but never say never, eh?

I’ve said it before, and I have the sad feeling that I’ll have to say it a few more times before this marathon experiment is over, but when you’re talking about a TV series that’s run for (over!) 50 Years, you’re going to find more and more of the key people connected to it passing on. We seem to be losing some especially big names at the moment, and I think Derek Martinus has to be hailed as one of the most important directors to ever work on the programme. It’s sad that I’ve no more of his episodes to come throughout the rest of the run on The 50 Year Diary, but I’m sure I’ll be popping in one of those fantastic adventures again before too long, once I’ve made my way to the end.

Day 452: The Masque of Mandragora, Episode Four

Dear diary,

I’m not sure what it is, but something about this story has completely failed to connect with me. I’ve spent three days banging on about how gorgeous the locations are, how great the sets look, and how lovely the costumes are, but I’m just sort of… watching the story, instead of connecting with it.

The one thing it has done for me is make a bit more sense of K9 and Company. No, no, I assure you I’m not entirely mad. I’ve always thought it strange that they should choose a cult of robed figures in masks for the adversaries in that tale, because they had no relation to the adventures Sarah had taken during her time aboard the TARDIS, but now I realise that she did encounter this kind of thing in Doctor Who. If anything, I’m a little saddened that they didn’t take the opportunity to bring back the Mandragora Helix for that story – there’s the perfect set up given in this episode, when the Doctor announces that the helix should be ready for another attempt on Earth at the end of the Twentieth Century. There was briefly a plan to bring it back during the second season of The Sarah Jane Adventures, but ultimately the story moved into a different direction.

I fear that I’m going to end up boring you a bit today, because I’m about to praise all the things that I’ve already drawn attention to in the story. Most noticeably, I want to comment on the style given to Sarah for the Masque Ball in this episode. She looks absolutely stunning - and it’s nice to see her given the opportunity to dress up and enjoy herself (even if she is worried for the Doctor throughout the party). It’s also quite nice to see the Doctor having a bit of a laugh throughout. The situation is dire, he’s not sure how to get out of it… but he’s still got time to put on his lion’s head mask and have a joke with Sarah. With the series seeming to grow darker and darker, it’s nice to see a few moments of light relief.

Otherwise… I’m really not sure what to make of this one. Speaking to various people this week, it looks like this may be something of a ‘marmite’ story – people seem to either really love it, or find it just a bit… ephemeral. I think, for me, it may just be burn out. I’ve been loving the pairing of the Doctor and Sarah Jane, but they’ve been together for a long time now, and maybe the time has come for a change of pace. The next story could be coming along at just the right time, then…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 451: The Masque of Mandragora, Episode Three

Dear diary,

It’s somewhat strange that it’s taken this long – fourteen seasons! – before anyone has brought up the question of how everyone the TARDIS travellers meet seem to speak fairly perfect English! It’s been the case right from the very start of the programme (the Tribe of Gum didn’t have brilliant sentence structure, but they were otherwise perfect BBC English), yet no one has ever thought to bring it up before. The Doctor’s assertion that it’s a ‘Time Lord gift’ which he shares with his companions doesn’t quite chime with the 21st century programme’s version of this skill (where it’s a function of the TARDIS), but I suppose you could argue that the Doctor shares it via his ship.

It’s also somewhat unusual that Sarah only thinks to bring it up once she’s under some kind of hypnotic control. Then again, I suppose that you may not initially think to ask the question when you’re out and about among the stars. When the TARDIS rocks up on Exxilon, or Metebilis III, or Skaro, you’re too busy being caught up in all the wonder (and all the running!) to wonder how you can understand all these different alien species. Arrive in Italy, only a few centuries before your own time, however, and it’s a more glaring anomaly.

I’m sorry to say that this story still just isn’t grabbing me in the way that I’d like it to. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I’m finding myself far more distracted by all the trappings of the sets, the locations, and the costumes, and I’m not being swept along with the story at all. That said, I really am distracted by all the of dressings in this story – I seem to be discussing it every day, but there really is some great work on display. After today’s episode, I watched a bit of the ‘making of’ special feature on the DVD, and was blown away by just how much work designer Barry Newbury puts in when he’s given a Doctor Who serial to work on. It was true of the Brain of Morbius, when he talks of giving thought to a whole new style of architecture for this alien world, and it’s just as evident here, when he talks of looking at paintings of the period and picking out specific details to use in his sets.

The effect of the temple being restored is also very well done. It’s a variant of the ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ trick, as far as I can tell, which has been used in theatre for decades, and was at its first peak during the Victorian period. It creates a lovely effect, and brings to life another beautiful set in the form of the temple itself, which is another example of great design. Because the effect is based on such an old technique, it’s simply being presented here as a matter of course, thrown into the background of the shots with Tom Baker. As such, it comes across as even more effective – they’re not drawing attention to it, it’s just something that’s happening.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 450: The Masque of Mandragora, Episode Two

Dear diary,

The best thing about this story really is the locations and sets. I’ve said it before more than once (and don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll say it again plenty of times, too!), but the BBC really do excel themselves when it comes to producing the period stories. Today, I’m fascinated to learn that the ruined temple we see in this episode was provided by the BBC in the form of expanded polystyrene (and, supposedly, the people of Portmerion were so keen on it they asked if it could stay!), because it looks so perfect. Admittedly, I had thought that it was lucky to find such a perfect location right where they needed it, but I never for a second suspected it was anything other than real.

I’m also very impressed to discover that the orange grove from yesterday’s episode was all rigged up by the production team, too, with the fruit attached to the trees via wires. I mean, I was surprised enough that they’d found the location, but I never suspected! Maybe I’m simply foolish?

But then, Portmerion itself is proving pretty perfect, even without the BBC props department helping out. The chase early in today’s episode gives us plenty of opportunity to look around, and after that I just couldn’t help myself - I had to take a look at the ‘Now and Then’ feature on the DVD. Portmerion is best known as the location for The Prisoner, so it’s not completely unknown to audiences of archive telly. While I do own that series on DVD, I’ve still not found the time to get round to watching it, and I’m only a few episodes in.

Therefore, I’m most impressed by just how… European the setting is - You could take a pretty good guess as to where we’re supposed to be this week, even if the Doctor didn’t keep reminding us. Certainly, watching this story is making me want to visit the place (it’s only a few hours up the road - worth a trip!), and that doesn’t often happen with the series.

Something else that doesn’t often happen is me commenting on the musical scores for stories. To be perfectly honest… I’m not usually all that aware of them. Maybe that’s just me being ignorant, but it’s rare that they really stand out for me. That’s a good thing, though! The music isn’t supposed to be big and blaring and in-your-face, it’s supposed to be there to underpin the scenes and help add to the mood and atmosphere. Today, it simply can’t be ignored, though. Sarah’s tied to an alter. Cultists in robes gather around her, chanting and preparing her for sacrifice. She’s even been changed into the traditional white robes for the occasion. The tension is building, she’s going to be killed any minute…

But Dudley Simpson has chosen to score the scene with - what I’ve described in my notes as being - ‘comedy parp-parp music’. I just can’t take it seriously. Simpson has been providing scores to the programme since as far back as Planet of Giants, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as put off by the music as I am in this story. It’s perhaps worrying, because this marks the start of an unbroken run for his composing work on the series, which will last right through to the end of Season Seventeen and The Horns of Nimon. I’m dearly hoping that this won’t be the start of me not liking his scores generally, as it could make the bulk of the Baker years a bit of a chore. Still, he’s been composer for 39 stories before this one, so I’m guessing it may just be an off day!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 449: The Masque of Mandragora, Episode One

Dear diary,

The Secondary Console Room has always been something of an anomaly as far as I’m concerned. When I think about the TARDIS in the classic series, it takes the form of the open, white, sterile space. Oh, sure, it goes through a fair few iterations over the years, but it always boil down to the same distinct template – the big white roundels and the large, hexagonal console in the centre. Once you reach the Eighth Doctor, things start to become a bit more flexible, and we have huge Jules Verne inspired cathedrals, or coral shells, or bright, orange monstrosities, but in the original series, there’s only one style of console room.

Except that there isn’t! I think it’s my lack of familiarity with this period that makes this room seem like such an anomaly for me (I don’t think I’ve ever watched any of the stories in which it appears, only odd clips of them like Sarah Jane’s farewell in the next tale). It’s also slightly strange to see how we end up with it, literally coming from a brief scene at the start of the episode where Sarah wanders the corridors of the ship and opens doors at random. It’s a lovely touch that earlier Doctors have their own effects scattered through the room (I can assume that the Third Doctor may have tried to jump-start the ship from here when in the earliest days of his exile, maybe in an attempt to bypass the Time Lord’s lock down), and I’m glad that we don’t spend too much time exploring the place before we’re caught up in the adventure.

And what an adventure to be caught up in! The TARDIS being sucked into the Helix is a beautiful effect (is it Mirrorlon, the same technique used for the Ice Warrior’s sonic weapons?), and then when the TARDIS rives at the bottom of the spiral, allowing the Doctor to step out into a mostly empty black void, it’s very effective. I’ve never seen this story before, but I have used some images from the production when doing design work before. There’s a lovely shot of the TARDIS against the CSO background which is perfect as an image of this era’s new prop: it seems obvious to me now that it was to be transplanted on another image for the episode, but I’d always assumed that the heart of the helix was a plain white void, which didn’t look very good! It’s always great when these kind of pre-conceptions of stories are overthrown, especially when they’re as good as this.

And then we’re off to 15th century Italy! I know that this story’s locations are filmed in and around Portmerion in Wales, but it’s easy enough to forget that fact when you’re watching the story, because it makes such a good stand in for Italy. We’ve not seen all that much of the town itself yet, mostly the surrounding areas, but they’re all uniformly lovely. Orange groves, and country lanes… I’m looking forward to watching the location work expand as the story goes on.

Ah, yes, the story. That’s the one thing which isn’t quite grabbing me yet. Due to the slightly odd nature of this episode, it feels almost like we get a false start with the Doctor and Sarah getting snared in the helix – when we cut to a hunt on horseback about ten minutes in, it feels like the opening scene of a new episode. But nothing in here yet feels very fresh or exciting. It’s portents and death, and there’s a sparkler floating around having hitched a ride in the TARDIS… I don’t know what it is, but something’s lacking for now. Still, it’s early days and we’re off to a good start.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 448: Doctor Who and the Pescatons, Episode Two

Dear diary,

The beauty of listening to an audio story again is that I can put it on through my headphones and listen to it as I make my way home from the shops. And with the weather we're currently experiencing, it seems only right that I should listen to a tale of fish aliens looking for a wet new home while I try not to be completely soaked to the core by the rain. Maybe there's a Pescaton attack on the way? Was that a meteor I just saw falling into that river?

I suppose after all my comparisons yesterday between this story and Pemberton’s earlier script for the series in Fury From the Deep, I really should have seen this resolution coming. Of course the Pescatons were going to be defeated by the use of sound - it seems so obvious in retrospect. What seems less obvious is that the Doctor would come to this resolution while playing his paccalo, which as he tells us here, he always does when he’s nervous. Just like he did when he realised that Morbius may still be alive, or Sutekh may break free of his eternal bonds.

It’s not the only thing that’s somewhat out of character for the Doctor here. We end the story with him effectively committing genocide, and ensuring that the Pescaton civilisation is eradicated forever. Whatever happened to all that ‘do I have the right?’ stuff on Skaro last month? He reminds us (repeatedly) in this episode that Pescatons are creatures of pure evil - which means it’s ok for your hero to wipe them all out! - but it just feels very… odd.

Still, I’m more interested in the Doctor’s earlier trip to Pesca. When is this supposed to have happened? The assumption is that the Fourth Doctor made the trip, though that’s only because we’re listening to Tom Baker relate the tale to us. I suppose it could take place at the same time he makes his trip to the world of the Sevateem (I don’t know a great deal about that excursion, yet, but I imagine I will do in a few weeks’ time), but it could just as easily be an earlier Doctor who does those parts of the story. Sure, Zor seems to recognise the Doctor, but… oh, come on. You’re not really going to apply much logic to this one, are you?

On the whole… Hm. It’s a bit of an odd one, this, isn’t it? On the one hand, i can see it making quite a good story for TV (there’s some lovely moments, such as the cliffhanger for Part One), but on the other, it feels too much like a rehash of old ideas, mostly from Pemeberton’s other contribution to the series! And, at the end of Part Two, I’m not sure why they bothered to have Elisabeth Sladen even come down to the studios - she’s only got about six lines!

Day 448 EXTRA: *Exploration Earth: The Time Machine*

Dear diary,

Hello! It’s me! Again! Yeah, I know, I’ve already done my episode for today. There were shark aliens, and meteorites, and the Doctor played his piccolo to save the day. You know, like he does never. But you’ll never guess what! The best thing happened. I got to school, and we were learning all about the creation of the Earth, and to demonstrate the various stages of this, we were allowed to go on an adventure with the Doctor and Sarah Jane!

Oh, ok. What really happened is that I mentioned to Nick that I’d just listened to Doctor Who and the Pescatons, and he suggested that I’d have to do Evacuation Earth: The Time Machine next or there’d be uproar among fans of The 50 Year Diary that I just wan’t taking this experiment seriously. To be honest, I’d completely forgotten that this story even existed, but now that I’d been reminded… well, I had to do it somewhere. Since I’ve been taking a little sojourn into non-televised media between seasons, I thought I might slip this one in today and create a bumper entry - rather than spend another day kicking around on audio.

Produced for a BBC Schools series on the radio, this is probably the closest the programme has come in a long time to fulfilling it’s initial remit to both entertain and educate its audience. In the story, the TARDIS is dragged right back to the very formation of the Earth, and the Doctor takes Sarah on a journey through the evolution of her planet. It’s very clearly being made as an educational programme for children, and it features plenty of the dialogue you’d expect to hear in a schools-based programme (after Terror of the Zygons the other week, I watched Elisabeth Sladen’s episode of Merry Go Round which is on the DVD as a special feature. This is done in very much the same style, and they both remind me of the kinds of programmes we used to watch at school back in the 1990s - there’s a certain feel to these educational programmes).

That said, they’ve opted to use the characters of the Doctor and Sarah to tell the story of the Earth’s creation, and as Madame de Pompadour tells us, you can’t have the Doctor without the monsters. To that end, during their exploration of the planet’s history, our heroes keep running into Megron, High Lord of Chaos. Megron serves to introduce a bit of threat to the proceedings, but mostly he just pops up and booms at the Doctor for being near the Earth, and then gets shirty when the Doctor tries to teach us all a little something about geography and science.

I’ve been watching this little interlude in the form of some animations on YouTube by ‘adamsbullock’ (I watched his animation for The Feast of Steven, too, back in the day), and they’ve certainly made the story come to life a bit more. I’d have probably given up and switched off otherwise! It also helps to fill in some visual areas that would have been completely lost on me - when the TARDIS has come to a standstill at the start of the planet’s formation, the Doctor explains that there is absolutely no oxygen outside the ship… but he can still take Sarah Jane out to show her! Here, step into this handy capsule by the TARDIS door!

Oh, I’m not being fair, really. This isn’t supposed to be an episode of Doctor Who in the traditional sense, so it’s not fair for me to rate it amongst everything else (and that’s why it’s not received a day of its own on the Diary). It was created as a means to educate a young audience about the formation of the Earth, and in that respect I think it succeeds. It certainly gave my knowledge a bit of a brushing up! It should really be filed away with things like the Doctor Who Discovers books as an odd, educational, side-step.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 447: Doctor Who and the Pescatons, Episode One

Dear diary,

It seems like an absolute lifetime since I had to listen to an episode of Doctor Who instead of popping in a DVD to watch. Doctor Who and the Pescatons was released on LP in June of 1976, between the transmissions of The Seeds of Doom and The Masque of Mandragora, and with Sarah Jane’s time in the TARDIS heading towards its end, I’m happy for any excuse to prolong her adventures with the Doctor.

My first thought in all of this is just how… familiar it all seems. The stories it most closely recalls are Fury From the Deep and Terror of the Zygons, and there’s elements from both present in this opening episode. We’ve got a killer seaweed, which is signalled in the soundtrack by an ominous, thumping heartbeat, which the Doctor first hears on the beach. The main enemies are trying to find a new world, because their old one is (nearly) destroyed. Then there’s a spaceship hidden at the bottom of a large expanse of water, and a creature swimming up the Thames, as people look on in horror. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised this story was written by Victor Pemberton, which perhaps makes the Fury comparisons even more obvious.

I found myself mostly confused by the scene in which the Pescaton swims up the Thames, but mostly because of my own preconceptions about this story. For some reason - despite what the cover to the LP clearly depicts - I’ve always imagined Pescatons as being short creatures. I don’t know why, but In my mind whenever I’ve seen an image of the one on the cover, I’ve assumed that they’re about three-and-a-half feet high. The kind of alien which would have been played by Jimmy Vee in the Russell T Davies era. I’ve also always assumed that they’re a kind of comedy alien played for laughs, but the script seems to be treating them in a deadly serious manner.

I’m not sure where any of these thoughts have come from, because I’ve never listened to the story before, or even really given it a second thought, but it’s certainly not what I was expecting it to be. I’m induing myself surprised, too, by how much this is Tom’s story. I was always under the impression that it was released due to the popularity of The Doctor and Sarah Jane as a partnership in the television series, but she harpy appears at all during this episode. She turns up to be attacked by a monster early on, and then to ask the Doctor what a Pescaton is, so that he can fill us all in on the idea, but that’s really all she gets to do in this one so far!

That’s not necessarily a complaint, because Tom Baker is (of course) on fine form throughout. I’m surprised by how much this feels like on of Big Finish’s ‘Companion Chronicles’ range, with Tom taking on the role of lead narrator, guiding us through the story. It moves at quite a pace, too - on more than one occasion, I had to skip back a minute or so, just so I could catch up with what’s going on, or where I was supposed to be. My favourite bit, though, has to be his opening speech, which introduces us to the story:

THE DOCTOR
My life is an endless journey across the bounds of space and time. A time traveller, drifting among the great galaxies of the universe.

It paints such a beautiful picture, and it sounds so right coming out in Tom’s very unique tones. It’s a lovely description, and it makes the episode worthwhile in those opening few minutes.

And then we end on an equally beautiful image, as we’re described a view of the sky over London lighting up as a shower of meteorites fall into the Thames. I’ve got my concerns about how well this would have been achieved on screen in 1976 (so perhaps it’s better suited to being on audio here!), but I’d love to see the modern team tackle it - I’m sure they could make it look lovely…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 446: The Seeds of Doom, Episode Six

Dear diary,

Oh, there’s something rather sad about all of this. UNIT have been a part of Doctor Who since Season Six (and some characters, like the Brigadier, stretch back even further into Season Five), and for a while they’ve been a huge part of the programme. Now we’ve reached their last appearance for a good long time, and instead of going out in a triumphant blaze of glory, they’re leaving in a slightly diminished form. It’s like a popular TV series limping on for one more season once all the main cast have departed, and then facing a slow, agonising death.

We’ve been watching the break up of the ‘UNIT family’ for a long time now. If anything, it started as far back as Season Eight, with the Third Doctor’s first excursion off-Earth, and then continued on from there, with less and less time being spent on Terra Firma. Then we see Mike leave (he returns, of course, for Planet of the Spiders, but it’s not really the same), the Brigadier parts with Terror of the Zygons and has been stuck in Geneva ever since, while Benton bowed out with The Android Invasion earlier this year. That same story introduces Colonel Faraday to the UNIT team, but here he’s not even mentioned, and we’re left in the hands of Sergeant Henderson and Lieutenant Beresford.

It’s just not the same. This lot are all wearing the right uniform and running around in the right style to be UNIT soldiers, but there’s none of the shared history we have during the early 1970s. Part of the fun when Benton turns up in Ambassadors of Death is that we previously saw him helping the Second Doctor and Jamie repel the Cyberman invasion of London. By the time Mike turns on the rest of his colleagues, it holds impact because we’ve watched him work alongside them for so long. In this story, when Henderson is subjected to the composting machine it’s a shock because it’s such a brutal death, not because they’ve killed off one of our UNIT team. We’ll not see the organisation back properly for another thirteen years, when we’ll be given another new UNIT during Battlefield, so it’s been a shame to watch them face diminishing returns over the last few seasons.

It’s not enough to ruin the episode, mind, and there’s still an awful lot in here to love. After my praise for the shot of the house-sized Krynoid at the end of yesterday’s episode, I was sorry to see a similar shot not being done as well here, but it’s only a brief distraction because we spend much of this episode seeing the creature in the form of a model monster atop a model mansion… and that looks fantastic! There’s plenty of shots where the tentacles writhe and thrash around, while the building starts to crumble underneath them, and it’s all really effective.

And then of course – as is traditional – they blow up the model at the end. I joke about how often it happens, but it is always a very good effect. That we see it happen in stages here makes it a little different to the usual, but surely someone must have started noticing that every time UNIT get involved in a situation, the location ends up in flames!

The one thing that I don’t get… the adventure is over. The Doctor and Sarah decide that they need to go on holiday. I mean, it’s only natural – in the last few weeks, they’ve come up against alien doubles, sentient planets, Egyptian gods, alien doubles again, Frankenstein’s monster, and now this. Sarah’s got her swimsuit on, the beach ball is ready… and they arrive in Antarctica. Back where they started because the Doctor hasn’t cleared the co-ordinates from earlier in the story. Did they initially plan to take the TARDIS to the snow base before opting for the more traditional jet (don’t forget that they’ve spent most of this season trying to get back to UNIT HQ via the TARDIS, and failing spectacularly)? It’s a bit of an odd end to the adventure, but it’s a great way to end the season – with the Doctor and Sarah joking and laughing, and completely reaffirming his earlier statement that they’re the best of friends. Their time in the TARDIS is short now, with only a couple more adventures for the pair, so I’m glad that I’m enjoying them so much at the moment.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 445: The Seeds of Doom, Episode Five

Dear diary,

I’d been worrying that this story was going to really suffer from being a six-parter. Everything just seemed to be happening too soon. The full transformation from Keeler to Krynoid was done by the end of Episode Four, which meant two episodes of the creature stalking around the gardens of an English country home… not great telly, surely? I genuinely worried about how the story was going to fill out for another 50 minutes. I’d not taken into account the idea that the shuffling, wobbling, Krynoid creature isn’t really the focus of the threat here. Oh, sure, it’s the main monster for the story, but we’ve also got Chase to deal with, and plenty of action with other plants.

Realistically, a story which revolves around vegetation that’s ‘more animal than plant’ should feel like the most typical Doctor Who tale ever. It’s a concept that Terry Nation has been toying with since as far back as the first season. Indeed, the scene in todays episode when Sarah and Scorby are attacked by the plants coming to life in the ‘Green Cathedral’, is hugely reminiscent of The Keys of Marinus. And yet it works! It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen the concept down this well, and it’s filtered through the way the programme works by this period.

The scary thing isn’t the plants on the attack, or the way that we watch characters writhe about under them gasping for air - it’s the way the camera pans around to find Chase sat in the middle of the melee, perfectly calm and content. When people all about the darkness in this era, I think a lot of it comes down to these types of moments. It’s not all about the rubber monster suit, but rather the human characters that the Doctor and Sarah encounter.

While Chase is a great character in himself (and thoroughly dislikable, in just the right way), I’m more impressed by Scorby. He started the story off as little more - really - than ‘hired gun of the week’, but we’ve gotten the chance to see lots of different sides to him as the story unfolds. It’s nice to see what an uneasy alliance he’s formed with the Doctor and Sarah here, too, because I’d feared that when the Krynoid started to grow, he may simply switch sides. Having him be distrustful of the Doctor’s escape, and still only out to save his own skin makes him feel a much more real character than I was expecting to find. He’s not the only one I’m loving, either. I think that Amelia Ducat may have become one of my favourite characters ever! She’s such fun! Oh, how I’d love to see her head off on an adventure in the TARDIS.

And then we’ve got the Doctor and Sarah Jane in the middle of it all. I mused during Pyramids of Mars the other week that I didn’t really buy into the severity of the threat. The Doctor kept on telling us how bad things would be if Sutekh were to break free and continue his reign of terror, but it never quite felt true. Even when we take a trip to 1980 to see how bad things could get, I still didn’t believe it. Here, on the other hand, I’m completely sold on how bad the situation has gotten. The Doctor snaps at people. He shouts, and rants, and he’s very obviously scared. It’s terribly effective, and I’m really very impressed by it all - this is another one of those occasions where Tom Baker really shows us why he’s the right man to be fronting one of the BBC’s biggest programmes.

Quite aside from the characters, I’m also very impressed with the effects work. There’s a shot at the end of the episode, where the Krynoid appears over the roof of the house, and it looks flawless. Those days of yellow fringing around CSO shots feel like they’re a million miles away from now, because this looks as good as any of the best effects we’d get today. Granted, it’s only a brief shot - so I’m hoping that it’ll be able to hold this kind of standard as we move into the final episode. With the Kynoid almost at full size, we’re going to be getting a lot of shots like this coming up, I’d wager…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 444: The Seeds of Doom, Episode Four

Dear diary,

During Season Twelve, when the programme first started trying out some experiments with outside broadcast video for location work, I was less than keen on the results. Robot came across as looking a bit like a fan-made video in places, and The Sontaran Experiment was just lacking any kind of texture or depth for me. I thought that those two stories were the only examples (pre Trial of a Time Lord) of the programme using ‘all video’ inside and out, but it turns out that The Seeds of Doom falls into the same category. I can guess why. I know that the Krynoid will end up growing bigger than the house before the story is out, and I’m guessing that they’ll be using all-video so that they can do some effects with that later on.

What’s surprising to me is how much I’m enjoying the location sequences in this one, and how the video look to them isn’t putting me off in the same way it did last season. I don’t know if I’ve simply grown used to the feel of stories being made in this way, or if it’s because Douglas Camfield is back in the director’s chair (he could make anything look good), but I’m actually quite liking the finished product. It has the effect of making the studio-bound inside of the house and the location-recorded outside feel like they belong in the same place - you never get that switch which tells you that we’ve picked up the recording some weeks later and somewhere completely different.

Don’t get me wrong - I think I’ll always prefer the film look for the programme (and in some ways, I’m sad to see Camfield - the master of film sequences - going out without a final chance to use it), but this is the most I’ve enjoyed them attempting outside broadcast to date. Ten years from now, in Season Twenty-Three, this will become the norm for Doctor Who’s production, so I’m hoping this story is a step in the right direction.

Something which really does help, and can’t be underestimated, if just how great the locations themselves are. The Antarctic setting, the quarry, the grounds, and the house… there’s a real scope to this story, and all of the locations have been brilliant. It’s also nice to see them taking part in a night shoot outside the mansion - it’s still a relatively rare occurrence in the programme at this point, but it really does add a whole new atmosphere to things. My only slight gripe is that the lighting for these sequences is a little off, maybe a tad too bright. It’s only a minor quibble, though, and it doesn’t spoil the effect.

One of those things people tend to know about The Seeds of Doom is that one stage of the Krynoid’s evolution is produced by dragging an Axon costume out of storage and painting it green. They even did a similar thing with the action figure, so you can have both monsters on your shelf pulled from the same mold. I’m surprised to see how little tho version of the creature is actually used, though. It turns up most prominently during the first couple of episodes, when it’s the main form of the creature as it stalks around the snow base. Here, it’s only around for a matter of minutes before we move on to another - previously unseen - stage of the lifecycle. I think the version we see in the closing moments of today’s episode is perhaps a weaker design than the repurposed Axon, though, and the way it shuffles towards the camera in the final seconds is a bit reminiscent of the Slyther for me!

I’m not sure where it’s going from here, design-wise, because this feels like a far more cumbersome costume to use for two whole episodes than the one we had earlier on. I’m assuming that at some stage they’ll try and lure the creature towards the compost machine to destroy it (far too much is made of the device here to simply be for injecting drama to the Doctor’s situation), although I know that we’ll be escaping that fate before UNIT turn up at the end.

Everything is connected together a lot more than I was expecting it to be, actually. I’ve known for a long time that UNIT rock up at the end of Episode Six to save the day (sans any of our regular faces), but I’d assumed they came out of nowhere when the story was running out of time and needed a resolution. Here, though, they’re already being woven into the plot, with characters making reference to calling them in as the situation grows larger and larger. We’ve even got characters like Amelia Ducat creeping back into the narrative - I’d assumed she only featured in yesterday’s episode to provide some light relief! In many ways, this is making it feel more thought-through than your average Doctor Who story. Everything is tied to everything else, and it’s making for a very satisfying story. 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 443: The Seeds of Doom, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I’ve always thought of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who as being divided into three different ‘sub-eras’: The ‘Gothic’ Era, The ‘Comedy’ Era, and The ‘Serious’ Era. You may have guessed that these subdivisions are based on the tenures of Tom’s three producers, Philip Hinchliffe, Graham Williams, and John Nathan-Turner. Of course, there’s transitional periods (Season Twelve is a change from the Pertwee years, but it’s not as far removed as Season Thirteen is, for example), but largely, in my head, they’ve always been very distinct.

So I’d always thought of outright funny episodes featuring Tom Baker as coming from the Williams period of the show - with Douglas Adams as script editor, there’s plenty of moments of humour. The ones that spring to mind are from Season Seventeen: The Doctor’s excited exclamation of ‘Rocks!’ when the TARDIS lands in Destiny of the Daleks, or… well… every episode from City of Death. There’ve been flashes of this kind of Doctor ever since Baker took over the role (Indeed, at times, Robot didn’t feel all that far removed from that later period), but this episode is the closest I’ve ever felt to that style.

So many of the Doctor’s lines are funny. Even with the seriousness of the situation (don’t forget, the Doctor and Sarah come close to being murdered twice in this episode, and we’re in the unusual position of having already seen what will happen if the pod is allowed to grow), I found myself laughing throughout. Amelia Ducat’s sudden realisation that she was never paid for her painting. The Doctor’s attempt to introduce everyone in the room to Chase. The grin he gives when waking up in the snow to see Sarah’s face. And, of course, ‘That’s right! Grab us! We’re very dangerous!’

And yet, it never slips into farce. The whole episode is still very dark, but the moments of humour are being used very effectively to bring the tone up some more. Hope never feels lost, but you’re always aware of the severity of the events on screen. In amongst all the funny lines and the jokes, there’s some very powerful moments. The Doctor’s anger when he returns to the World Ecology Bureau is so effective - we’ve seen the temper of this incarnation before now, but this is perhaps the strongest its been yet. Even here we get to see the humour seeping through, in the Doctor’s description that ‘the end of everything’ will also include Sir Colin’s pension, but you almost find yourself laughing nervously, because you’re almost scared by the Doctor.

He’s even fairly violent in this episode, although only when trying to escape death himself. The way he jumps on the chauffeur, wrestles him to the ground and then punches him out cold is harsher than we usually get to see him behave, but then later on he cricks Scorby’s neck in order to make his escape. This kind of action is usually reserved for indicating someone’s neck being broken (indeed, at first I thought that’s what had happened, and I was almost a bit put off by it!), so it’s a very serious thing to see our hero doing.

It’s this fine line of ‘comedy’ and ‘darkness’ which is making this story (and, in some ways, this season as a whole) so appealing to me, and I’m rather glad to see that this period of the programme’s history isn’t quite as segregated as I’d imagined it to be. This story wouldn’t be half as effective if it was just bleak from start to finish, but it’s managing to be hugely entertaining this way.

Oh, and is it just me, or is the World Ecology Bureau based in BBC Television Centre?!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 442: The Seeds of Doom, Episode Two

Dear diary,

It became so common during the Pertwee era as to almost become a cliche: when you’re done with the setting for your current adventure, you build a perfect model replica of it and then you blow it up to create a spectacular finale. The one upshot of it happening so frequently was that they became really rather good at it. But even deep in the heart of the early 1970s, where they were blowing up everything from churches to stately homes, they never went as far as to blow it up a third of the way into the story!

I suppose I should have seen it coming, really. I mused yesterday that I didn’t know about the story spending so much time in the Antarctic base, and I thought the whole story took place in England. At some point, the action had to shift. I’d assumed, though, that we’d simply see the Doctor and Sarah making a daring escape from the snowbase, possibly heading off in a helicopter while the Krynoid was left behind to fend for itself in the Arctic wastes. I figured that the second pod they’d uncovered would somehow make it onto the helicopter with them (probably placed there by a sneaky weed), and that they’d then all end up back home thinking the threat was over before it starts up all over again.

I’m glad I was wrong – this is a much more exciting way to do things! It’s typical of this period of the programme ot be so bloodthirsty, killing off all three of the characters I was so full of praise for yesterday, each in a gruesome way. That we say goodbye to this setting with a huge explosion of the set seems only fitting, because this is the end of an adventure – we’re off somewhere new from tomorrow, and I’m imagining that the whole story is going to feel a bit different as a result.

So it’s worth taking the time now to say how good all the Antarctica sets look. When Doctor Who Confidential followed the filming of Planet of the Ood a few years ago, they spent a bit of time telling us how they’d covered a large area of quarry with fake snow, and then used CGI effects to insert that into a larger ice world. Upon the Doctor’s return to the planet for The End of Time, they went a whole step further, and coated an entire ‘cliff face’ with the stuff.

But here we are, in 1976, and the sets we’re given here are just as serviceable. The over-layed ‘snow’ affect on top of many shots can get a bit much at times (it falls too un-naturally to look all that good), but you really do get the impression of a vast expanse that the Doctor and our guest cast are running around in. That’s good – because it contrasts very well with the cramped, claustrophobic interiors of their research station. There’s a shot early on in this episode, when Winlett (half converted into a Krynoid) makes his way towards the door, and we follow him down the dark corridor. It’s creepy, and beautiful, and you’re left in absolutely no doubt that you’re watching Douggie Camfield back behind the camera again.

Someone told me today that these first two episodes were crafted onto the start of The Seeds of Doom after the other four had been written, because they needed to extend it up to a six-parter. While these instalments do seem to have their own separate function, and I’ve not seen where the story is going from here, I can’t imagine that to be true (a bit of digging around on the web tells me that it isn’t, anyway). These episodes feel integral to the story – they set everything up nicely, and tell a rather nice, self-contained story of their own. If the rest of the tale can continue at the same quality, then we’re in a very good position for a season-closer…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 441: The Seeds of Doom, Episode One

Dear diary,

Much like The Enemy of the World, or The Web of Fear, toady is exciting because I get to watch an episode which was lost from the BBC’s archives before being returned. The only difference is that The Seeds of Doom Episode One remains the only episode of Doctor Who history to be lost from the BBC before it was shown on television! The story has always fascinated me - this episode was filmed, edited, signed off… and then went missing! In a newspaper article at the time, Philip Hinchcliffe explained:

”Our tapes for the entire six-part serial were tucked away safely - we thought - the actors had all gone away, and the sets had been dismantled. We rang the library asking for our first episode and, after a check, the answer came back that they couldn’t find it. It had just vanished!

”Panic? It was more like a mass rave. They started checking, and I started making plans to re-edit the serial - a mammoth job with very little time to spare. Finally, after two days, they found it. It had been wrongly numbered. But in that time, I’d aged about 20 years!“

I’d love to know what the contingency would have been. It’s one of my favourite little bits of Doctor Who trivia, and in some ways I’m a little sorry that the episode didn’t turn up until years later - it would have made for a great, Shada style ‘lost episode’ saga!

I’m glad that it did turn up, though, because this episode is really rather good. The Seeds of Death is yet another one of those stories that I’ve never seen, but I know the general premise of. Alien seed pod is found buried in the ice at the South Pole. It turns people into plants, and they take over a country house. But I didn’t know that some of the story was properly set in the Antarctic. I thought that the majority of the story took place in (or around) said country house, so it’s a nice surprise to find ourselves somewhere a little more unexpected.

And it’s also nice to be in the company of some great guest characters. The three researchers at the polar base feel like real people, and they laugh and joke as though they’re real colleagues working together in tough conditions. We get plenty of time to bond with them, too, because aside from a brief scene with the Doctor at the World Ecology Bureau, our regulars don’t really show their faces until half-way through the episode. Until then, we’re left to bond with new characters, and get caught up in their lives.

Once our heroes do arrive, though, they’re on fine form as usual. I seem to be saying it under every single story at the moment (I had a similar issue when Troughton first took on the role. It’ll wear off slowly…), but Tom Baker really is great value for money. I could watch him all day long. The way he plays with his yo-yo during his briefing is great fun, and his warning (‘remember - no touch pod!’) is as childish and patronising as it could be - impossible not to love. And then once he’s reached the snowy setting down south, he’s back to serious, worried mode again. There’s something great about showing him as unable to feel the cold, and it helps with the kind of aloof, alien performance he’s giving throughout these scenes.

The whole episode is filled with a great atmosphere, the same as pretty much everything else this season, and it’s good to see them using stock footage again to set the scene right at the beginning. They used the same trick at the start of Pyramids of Mars, and it really does help to expand the scope of the series’ setting. Even though we’ve got lots of time spent on near-contemporary Earth (Zygons, The Android Invasion, and this story all take place in the same decade, while Pyramids of Mars is only set around half a century out), the scale of the series here feels much wider than it did during the Pertwee years.

This is another one of those stories that people insist on rating very highly, and it’s off to a good start…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 440: The Brain of Morbius, Episode Four

Dear diary,

This episode contains another one of those scenes which Doctor Who fans find themselves arguing over. You know the one - the Doctor and Morbius are engaged in a spot of Time Lord wrestling, and we watch on the screen as an image of the Fourth Doctor’s face shifts into that of the Third Doctor. As the battle goes on, we then see the Second Doctor! And then the First! Hooray! All the old Doctors! But then… hold on… who’s that?

The… Zeroth Doctor… and the… Minus First Doctor… and… hold on… what?

Eight more faces appear up on the screen, all in various costumes plucked from history. Specifically, it’s the faces of Christopher Baker, Robert Holmes, Graeme Harper, Douglas Camfield, Philip Hinchcliffe, Robert Banks Stewart, George Gallaccio and Christopher Barry - all people working on the production team at the time. As the faces begin to appear, Morbius wonders how ‘far back’ the Doctor goes, and the implication is seemingly that these are the Doctor’s first eight incarnations, pushing Tom Baker up to number 12!

Obviously, this goes on to cause problems a year later, when it’s announced that Time Lords can only have thirteen lives (although we’ve recently seen the Doctor overcome this problem on Trenzalore). I’ve seen all kinds of theories thrown around over the years to try and explain away these various other faces, but to me the most plausible explanation is that they’re the faces of Morbius’ earlier forms. There’s nothing to contradict this, and while his dialogue about reaching back in to the Doctor’s past overlaps with the first of these faces, the longer they go on, the more Morbius seems to be in pain… and then the machine displaying the faces blows up! As fa as I’m concerned, this explanation is as good as any other, and it’s certainly the one I’ll keep in mind if I ever need to join the debate. To be honest, the whole sequence was less of a big deal than I’d been expecting it to be - considering all the fuss that seems to be made of it from time to time, it seemed to be quite tame!

I have to draw special attention to an exchange in this episode which may be my favourite ever between the Doctor and Sarah. She stumbles across him having escaped from the lab, and is surprised when he starts to wake up. ‘You thought I was dead, didn’t you?’ he asks, before adding ‘You’re always making that mistake…’ Considering how often I’ve drawn attention to it over Sarah’s time in the TARDIS, it’s lovely to see the show itself drawing attention to it!

It’s just another example of this being one of the best scripts that Terrance Dicks has ever produced for the programme. It was extensively rewritten by Robert Holmes one it had reached the production office (so much so that Dicks asked for his name to be taken off the broadcast, and have it put out ‘under some bland pseudonym’), but I think as a team working together, they’ve created something really rather special. Is it a perfect story? No, it’s not. As stories go, it probably isn’t deserving of the high praise it often receives. But there’s bits of this tale which are really very good, and I’m sure I’ll be revisiting it again at some point in the future.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 439: The Brain of Morbius, Episode Three

Dear diary,

In November of last year, when Night of the Doctor first premiered on the internet, everyone was thrilled and excited and surprised by the return of the Eighth Doctor after so long. But not me! There’s been rumblings for ages that we’d be getting a return of the character during a short episode simply to show his regeneration, and so that morning when I received word that the special would be arriving online later that day, I wasn’t surprised at all. Thrilled? Yes! Excited? Very! But not surprised.

What did come as a surprise, when I finally sat down to watch it a few hours later, was the Doctor’s return to Karn! And the return of the Sisterhood! I’ve not seen The Brain of Morbius before my current viewing, but I know enough about it to know of the Sisterhood, and their flame of eternal life. That set my mind wandering, though. Was the sister we saw in Night of the Doctor one of the ones from this story? Was the flame so key to regeneration when it made its first appearance back in the 1970s? I can’t tell you how tempted I was to head online and find out, but I wanted to wait and maintain the surprise. At the time, I was still knee-deep in the Pertwee era, and it felt wrong to skip ahead and read about the Doctor’s upcoming adventures. Like cheating, somehow.

So right the way through this story, I’ve been enjoying piecing things together. I’ve decided that the character who helps the Eighth Doctor to regenerate into the man he needs to become is not one of the ones during this story, but only because a quick scout round on the web just now seems to imply that she isn’t. Somewhere, deep in the back of my mind, I’d rather hoped that one of the original caresses had returned for the part. It’s no great loss, of course, but it was still something I liked to hope for. I’m more keen to see just how linked the elixir is to the Regeneration cycle.

The Doctor explains here that the Time Lords only use it for particularly difficult regenerations, which does tie in with the Eighth Doctor’s end. We also find out today that ships crash so often on Karn because of the Sisterhood, so it’s nice to think that they purposely brought the Eighth Doctor down to their world to further the course of the war, and eventually bring an end to it. There’s something quite fun about the Fourth Doctor here setting up the flame to burn brighter and longer than anyone had ever guessed, and knowing that this will one day come back to save his life - there’s a kind of neat symmetry to all that.

I’m also impressed by just how well the look of this original serial holds up. Night of the Doctor is shot with some very nice looking caves as the background, whereas The Brain of Morbius is one of the entirely studio-bound adventures. Thankfully, it’s one where all the design elements hang together very nicely. As much as I like the surface of Karn, I think it’s possibly the weakest element of the design - and I do prefer the digital matte painting we get during the planet’s second appearance.

The highlight in terms of the set design is probably Solon’s home. Every bit of it feels really well-done, from the entrance hall, to the basement, to the lab. It’s holds a pleasing sense of gothic architecture (and it wouldn’t look out of place in a horror film), but at the same time contains enough elements to make it interesting and unique. In a special feature on this DVD, Barry Newbery explains his thought process behind the design, and goes into great detail about my favourite aspect of the set - the various columns and buttresses that run throughout the house. He explains that on this world, architecture had taken a different course to that on Earth, where we place things like this on the outside, or at least with the walls where possible, and that he wanted to creature something different. Of course, ti also works out beautifully for a director, and leads to some especially nice shots in the ‘lower lab’ set - especially during Episode Two, when Solon and Morbius argue.

Perhaps the greatest bit of design on show here, though, is the Morbius creature itself. A few years ago, when the action figure for this one came out, I made a point of not buying it. It came as part of the second ‘wave’ of classic figures, where releases such as an Ice Warrior or an Earthshock Cyberman took up most of my budget. I was never all that fond of this design, and I didn’t think that it related particularly well to figure form. Now, though, I think that I appreciate it more. There’s something about the odd mash of elements that simply works, and I simply love that Condo’s missing arm has gone into creating the creature. In retrospect, that fact seems blatantly obvious (mad professor is building a body from various parts. Same mad professor is holding on to one of his servant’s arms. It’s not that difficult to put two and two together, but I didn’t! Hah!), but it comes as a lovely surprise when watching through.

My only complaint is that there’s nothing really recognisable within the Morbius design. I’m sure I’d be complaining if it were completely made up of creatures we’ve seen in the last few seasons, but having encountered a Mutt at the start of the story for the first time in years, it would have been nice to see one or two elements that I’d recognise as a part of the design. Someone did point out to me today that Morbius’ ‘claw’ could come from a Macra, and that’s something that I’m going to be clinging on to for now, but it’s a pity there’s nothing more immediately obvious to pick up on!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 438: The Brain of Morbius, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I seem to say this a lot, but Tom Baker really is very good at this whole ‘being the Doctor’ thing, isn’t he? There’s so many moments in today’s episode where you simply forget that anyone else can have ever played the part, because it’s just so right for him.

He’s helped by a rather brilliant script - there’s a lot of humour in here. For all the darkness in an episode where Sarah is blinded, the Doctor is very nearly burnt at the stake, and a mad professor has an argument with a brain in a jar, I found myself smiling and laughing right the way through today’s instalment. It’s doing that thing that Doctor Who is so very good at: walking the very fine line between scares and humour, and being throughly entertaining throughout. I’ve enjoyed a lot of episodes over the past few months, but I can’t remember the last time that I had so much fun watching one.

It’s the Doctor who benefits the most from all the joking around in the script, from his ‘confession’ to the sisterhood, through seconding the motion that he be spared from death, and the way he reacts to the TARDIS being moved via mental projection (‘Now, if you were to get yourself a nice little fork lift…’), and Tom also gets a fair amount of physical comedy, too. When Solon emerges from the basement to find the Doctor sitting there, grinning away… it’s impossible not to love it. Solon, too, benefits from the jokes, and his insults towards Condo are as amusing as anything else in the story.

All this humour being injected could run the risk of making the story seem light-hearted or trivial, but Dicks manages to alternate these moment with a fair amount of darkness. The aforementioned argument with Morbius is very well played, and I love that you never see who he’s arguing with, but merely hear the voice as we keep following Solon, letting Philip Madoc’s performance be the sole draw for your eye. Then you’ve got Condo finding out just how little his master cares for him, and threatening to kill him… it’s all quite powerful stuff, and it helps to readdress the balance between light and dark in the story.

It’s also nice to see more and more detail being shaded in about Morbius and his history. I mused yesterday that he was being built up as a kind of mythical figure in Time Lord society, much like Omega or Rassilon, and I still think that’s true, but there’s shades of it bridging the gap more with the version of the Doctor’s race that we’ll be seeing soon enough. Morbius led a rebellion, centring on Karn. He was exiled and disintegrated, and now Solon prepares to revive him to rule once more. Obviously, there’s great big shades of Frankenstein in Solon’s methods, but it’s still interesting enough to watch here.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 437: The Brain of Morbius, Episode One

Dear diary,

The Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons, Pyramids of Mars… People always seem to rate the Hinchcliffe years as being Doctor Who’s finest, and it’s not hard to see why. Every other story is one where I find myself saying ‘this tale is considered to be a real classic’. And here we are again! The Brain of Morbius is another one of those tales that people always speak about with such glowing praise, and another tale that I’ve never seen before.

It certainly gets off to a good start. The opening shot of a Mutt’s hand as it scrabbles up over a rock is lovely, and the lighting throughout this scene is simply gorgeous. The whole scene - and, indeed, the episode as a whole - is dripping with atmosphere, and hooks you in right from the very beginning. That’s always a good sign: if a story starts well, and snaps up my attention quickly enough and firmly enough, then I’m always happy. Things don’t let up from here, though, and once the TARDIS arrives, things get even better.

Over the last few weeks I’ve praised both the way that Tom Baker can play ‘brooding intensity’ and the relationship he has with Elisabeth Sladen, and we get to witness these two areas in action here. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS shouting to the heavens against the Time Lords (and I love that, though an alternative explanation for their arrival on Karn is offered by Sarah, we’re not actually sure if he’s been directed here by his own people or not), and then goes into a wonderful childish strop. He claims that he’s just going to sit on a nearby rock and play with his yo-yo, but he does it with that wonderful voice of his, so it feels exciting - like the best tantrum ever.

And then Sarah Jane mocks him for it! Sticking out her tongue, making silly noises, and telling him that she’s going off to explore their new surroundings even if he can’t be bothered. It’s lovely, and we really are deep now into the period where these two are best friends. That he jumps up and rushes after her the second she screams is another beautiful touch, and it’s something that he’s seen to do quite often, from Revenge of the Cybermen through Terror of the Zygons… it’s almost becoming a trademark!

As they continue to explore, the Doctor’s more playful side emerges again, and he’s back into his usual fine form by the time they reach Dr Solon’s house on the hill. I love the way he jokes about having several heads, including an ‘old grey model’ before his current one (I love even more the way he jokes that ‘some people liked it’, and Sarah replies ‘I did!’), and the way he flashes his smile all the way through drinks with their host. One of Baker’s finest assets is his ability to switch between serious and smiley in the click of a finger, and all of that is in full display here.

We’re also at a point now where more and more is starting to be added to the legend of the Time Lords. This era of the programme adds more to the Time Lords than any other point in the show’s history, starting really with the story of Omega in The Three Doctors and getting stronger and stronger from there. Season Eleven gives us the name of their planet, events in Season Twelve where they send the Doctor to avert the creation of the Daleks will go on to have much graver consequences in the 21st century series, Pyramids of Mars gives us co-ordinates for the world, then you’ve got Morbius being introduced here, everything during The Deadly Assassin next season, and on to The Invasion of Time after that…

At this stage, they’re still somewhat mythical. During The War Games, they appear as these powerful, God-like beings, but then by the time we reach the Doctor’s description of them to Sarah, they’ve been reduced to ‘galactic ticket inspectors’. Here, they’re seen as almost omnipotent – not responding to the Doctor’s calls at the beginning of the episode, and being involved in a strange deal to share ‘The Elixir of Life’ with the cult-ish Sisterhood on Kern.

The legend of Morbius hasn’t really been fleshed out yet, either, but we know from the Doctor that he wasn’t a particularly nice figure in Time Lord history. I know they’ll be adding more details to this as the story progresses, so I look forward to seeing that happen. From the middle of next season and The Deadly Assassin, they’ll start to lose some of their mystery again, so I’m enjoying these great mythical aspects to their story while I still can…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 436: The Android Invasion, Part Four

Dear diary,

Ahhhrg! Roughly translated, that means ‘The Android Invasion is so bloody frustrating that I think I may burst…’ This episode continues in the same style at the previous three - throwing up lots of interesting ideas and a few really brilliant moments, but then managing to undercut them with just a lot of rubbish. I wan’t so desperately to like this story, and I’m always so glad every time I think it’s about to swing round for me, but it just doesn’t work.

Still, let’s be positive to start with. Things I love in this episode… The Doctor is on fine form throughout, and the scene where both the real Doctor and his android double encounter android Benton in quick succession is brilliant. One of those genuinely lath-out-loud moments. As the two Doctors then go on to fight each other on a few occasions, I have to confess that I’m impressed by the direction - it really works. The pod opening behind The Doctor and Sarah as they talk on the rocket, and the duplicate of our hero peers out is wonderfully sinister. Later on, a similar trick in employed by Sarah Jane, when her duplicate sits up from a pod. If anything, that moment is possibly one of Lis Sladen’s best… but then we never see her double again! Where did it go?

Speaking of sudden departures, it’s a good job I was paying attention today because that’s goodbye to Benton, Harry, and UNIT… and they don’t waste any time in giving them a send off! Benton’s final moments see him accepting the Doctor’s orders and heading out of the main control room at the Space Centre… before being seen unconscious a few seconds later, where he’s walked right into an ambush (John Levene continues to play android Benton for the rest of the episode, including the scene I’ve already mentioned where both Doctor’s confuse him, but this is the last sight of the real Benton). Meanwhile Harry gets an equally inglorious send off, being rescued from the rocket by Sarah, and expressing surprise at the fact that he’s got a twin.

The Brigadier - who was clearly supposed to be around in this final episode - has been replaced with a completely new soldier, who speaks lines that would be just right for our regular man-in-charge-of-UNIT. In a funny turn of fate, though, the replacement soldier is played by Patrick Newell, who was also in the episode of The Avengers that I watched yesterday! Small world.

I suppose at the time, they didn’t really know that UNIT wouldn’t be seen again for such a long time. Although Phillip Hinchcliffe was moving the series in a new direction, and Tom Baker wanted to get away from the trappings of his predecessor, I’d imagine they still expected the organisation to crop up from time to time. As it is, we’ll never see Benton or Harry again, and UNIT, save for a brief cameo at the end of this season, won’t be back properly now until Battlefield.

We also say goodbye to Barry Letts with today’s episode, as it’s his last directing work on the series. He’ll be back to oversee things as an executive producer for Season Eighteen, but this is the last time he takes such a direct input to the series. It’s nice to say that the direction has been one of the highlights for the story, and it was only today that I realised both Letts’ first and last direction work for the series feature doubles of the Doctor fighting themselves. In The Enemy of the World, we get to see the Second Doctor fighting against Salamander, while here we’ve got the Doctor vs his android double. It’s not the only connection Letts makes to his first work on the series, either, because Milton Johns turns up in vital roles for both stories.

I’m tempted to say ‘this is the last time Terry Nation writes a non-Dalek story for the programme’, too, but he only does it on two occasions, over a decade apart! Having been an active voice on the writing team for the last few seasons, though, he’ll now be slipping back into the shadows for a while to concentrate on Survivors and Blake’s 7, and we won’t see him again until the Daleks decide to make a reappearance in the Doctor’s life.

On the whole, The Android Invasion is filled with some brilliant ideas, some great concepts, and some wonderful moments… but it just doesn’t quite gel when you put everything together. A real shame, and possibly the biggest ‘blip’ in Season Thirteen’s track record…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 435: The Android Invasion, Episode Three

Dear diary,

There’s a few people who I tend to use as a ‘sounding board’ when I’m making my way through the stories for this marathon. It’s usually quite simple – just someone I can talk to about the stories, which tends to help clear my head a bit so that I know what to write about when I sit down to pen the day’s entry. It also serves the useful purpose of giving me extra things to consider, which I may not have thought about myself. When I told my friend Nick the other day that I was now starting out on The Android Invasion, he suggested that I take a look at the production subtitles on this DVD, because they were a particularly good set.

I usually find that I only resort to the Production Notes when I’m particularly bored by a story. Nothing against them as a special feature (they’re often one of the best on every disc), but I find them too distracting when I’m watching a story for the first time. Episodes One and Two of The Android Invasion have had an awful lot to love in them, but they’re not exactly thrilling me as much as I’d like. So, taking on board Nick’s advice, I decided to go back to the menu and switch on the Subtitles before starting out on today’s episode.

It’s ironic, then, that after I’ve spent two days talking about how much this story feels in places like an episode of The Avengers, that the subtitles to this episode should highlight a few episodes from that series which share elements with this story! If nothing else, it’s nice to know that I can pick up on the similarities in style. The main story that’s brought up comes from Season Four of The Avengers, and since it’s not one I’ve seen, I headed straight for the box set and watched it after today’s instalment of Doctor Who. So… now it’s time for something completely different…

Day 435: *The Town of No Return*

This is The Avengers right at the height of its popularity, with arguably the most famous of the teams, Steed and Emma Peel. They take the train out to a small coastal town, where agents have been sent to investigate strange goings on and never returned from. The story isn’t a complete clone of my current Doctor Who tale – the village doesn’t turn out to be a training ground on an alien world, for example – but there are a lot of similarities.

People in the village known to one of your ‘good guys’ who aren’t quite who they seem (indeed, in The Avengers, the people have been replaced with entirely different people taking their place), there’s a hunt out on location with bloodhounds, a character taking a pivotal role in the plot who turns out to be officially ‘dead’, and a sting of slightly unusual mysteries to solve, such as missing parish records for the last 20 years, or the lack of pupils at the school.

There’s even a slightly surreal scene where the ‘new’ versions of people arrive in the town for the first time. In The Android Invasion, a truck rolls up in the village loaded with perfectly still people. For The Town of No Return, a black sack walks out of the ocean, unzips, and a gentleman steps out, strolls across the beach, and greets a watching man. Both are rather brilliant in their own ways, but I think – and this goes for the story as a whole – I prefer this episode of The Avengers to these four episodes of Doctor Who.

It’s possibly helped by the fact that the entire Avengers story is told in 50 minutes, whereas the Doctor’s adventure in Devesham is spread over almost double that time, and the fact that it reminds me so much of a recent story with a similar plot which I’ve seen so recently. Still, all that said, and no matter how much I’ve enjoyed by brief excursion back into the 1960s with this Avengers episode, there’s still plenty that I’m liking about The Android Invasion.

The idea that the village isn’t even on Earth, but rather is a testing ground for a later full-scale invasion really works for me… but I’m not entirely sure why they’ve got copies of Harry, and Benton etc around. I did wonder if it might be to prepare themselves for a confrontation with UNIT (although we’ve only seen the androids working for the Kraals at this stage, presumably they sometimes get set to act simply… ‘normal’?), but then why no Brigadier? And where did they get the plans for them? I’m sure there’s something about them being drawn from people’s memories, which would imply that Crayford has met them before, but… Oh, my head hurts.

And there, you hit the crux of my issue with the story. There’s so many great ideas, but they’re all just out of reach from being brilliant. In many ways, then, it’s the typical Terry Nation of old. Perhaps my biggest issue is the Kraals themselves. I can’t tell if they’re supposed to be ‘funny’ comedy aliens, who are a bit inept and bumbling… or if they’re just really rubbish by accident. It’s been troubling me for a while, now…

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Andrew Smith

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: February 2013

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 10th March 2014

“Space travellers are warned to keep away from the area of the planet Asphya and its unremarkable moon Erys. Not the best place to materialise the TARDIS, then – as the Doctor discovers when his ship is raided by the imp-like Drachee, and his companion Flip is carried away…

But the TARDIS isn’t the only stricken vessel in the region. Aboard a nearby space yacht, the Doctor encounters a woman who holds in her head the secret of Erys – a secret suppressed by amnesia, or worse.

Flip, too, is about to learn Erys’ secret. But once you know Erys’ secret, you can never escape.”

* * *
Andrew Smith and Big Finish are rapidly becoming closely associated with one another, and it is easy enough to see why with a play like The Brood of Erys.  It has a colourful cast with some pleasingly odd voices, a solid pace and ending which sets up things to come, a story which is at once nice and evocative of past stories whilst also being firmly grounded in ‘the now’, and lots of action set pieces which place the companion in the centre of things: DWM would have had a field day drawing Flip plummeting through space back when they used to paint previews of the monthly releases.

Despite all this though, the adventure lacked a certain spark for me.  It’s certainly a world away from the heights of The First Sontarans and the imagination of Vengeance of the Stones, Smith’s contributions to The Lost Stories and Destiny of the Doctors ranges respectively.  Perhaps oddly, given his first script for Big Finish was set in E-Space, this feels more like Full Circle than any of his post-TV scripts have so far.  Now, that’s not a bad thing at all: Full Circle is not a bad story or script at all, and if you ever get the chance to read Smith’s novelisation of it, then I recommend you do so: it’s lovingly written and oozes imagination, wonder at even getting to write it, and genuine enthusiasm.  I had that feeling when listening to The First Sontarans, too, but there was something about The Brood of Erys which missed the spot for me.  Perhaps it’s because a lot of it felt very... familiar.  Not just to other scripts Smith has written, but in general.  It doesn’t break any new ground, and whilst not every Doctor Who script has to of course, it would have been nice to see it done so here all the same.  It feels like there is a better story hidden in there somewhere.

It feels like I am being rather down on The Brood of Erys and I do not wish to be.  There are other stories out there which deserve that sort of derision, and this story most definitely is not one.  Let’s focus on positives instead, namely the leads.  Colin Baker is forever brilliant as The Doctor (twelve times now they’ve cast the lead role - well, thirteen if we want to throw in John Hurt, and seeing how great he was, I reckon we should– and twelve/thirteen times now they’ve got it so very, very right) and here is no exception.  He sounds like he’s having fun throughout, which in turn makes for a more enjoyable listen, even if the material isn’t the greatest he’s ever had.  Likewise, Lisa Greenwood as Flip is strong.  As a companion, I don’t think she’s ever going to make a real dent for me as Flip is a bit too... generic to really do much.  Greenwood, however, is a different story.  As with Baker, you get the sense that she really wants to be there, acting and playing along.  It makes a real difference and helps Flip stand a bit stronger.  She is a far better actor than her character, though.

All the signs are pointing to an end of an era though, not just for the trilogy but in a wider sense, so it’ll be interesting to see what the third main range release of 2014 has in store for The Sixth Doctor and Flip, and whilst this was definitely better than the rather tedious Antidote to Oblivion, which committed the cardinal sin for any Doctor Who story in that it was really rather boring, I hope that it ends with a tale a little less serviceable than The Brood of Erys was at times.  All that said though, a script by Andrew Smith is always well worth listening to, so I do genuinely look forward to what he comes up with next.

Reviewed by: Matthew Davis for Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 10th March 2014

After last month’s slightly disappointing Antidote to Oblivion, The Sixth Doctor triliogy picks up with the rather enjoyable The Brood Of Erys.

Andrew Smith is a familiar name to Doctor Who fans having penned the first part of the E-Space Trilogy Full Circle. In The Brood of Erys, Smith deals with some very interesting science fiction ideas but the story towards the end does tend to delve somewhat into sentimentality.

The story deals with the concept of a sentient planet, breeding its own offspring to not only protect it but to follow it’s every command. This is very interesting and is one of the plot lines which keep your attention throughout. The story builds up its mysteries rather strongly throughout the first three episodes but it is only in the last half of episode four that it turns into more of a dysfunctional family drama. I will not give away what happens but for me it was too much of a sudden change of direction in what had been a fascinating and rather dark story.

The cast is one of the strongest aspects of this release with Colin Baker charging full steam ahead in a superb performance as The Doctor. Despite my misgivings about the sentimental ending of the story, Baker brings great subtlety to the dialogue. He truly is a masterful actor, and he has made his Doctor something very special over the years at Big Finish.

Lisa Greenwood gets a lot more to do as Flip in this story, and Greenwood goes for it with gusto. Flip is certainly one of the best foils The Sixth Doctor has had and it remains to be seen if the character’s recklessness in dangerous situations will have dire consequences in the future.

 With a brilliant supporting cast that includes Nicola Sian, better known to us as Clara’s mother and Brian Shelley as Erys, this play has a lot of great talent throughout.

At times comical and serious The Brood of Erys is a very interesting slice of Doctor Who and worth checking out.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 434: The Android Invasion, Episode Two

Dear diary,

Oh no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no… I can’t think of anything worse. This may actually be the most nightmarish thing to have ever happened in Doctor Who. People talk about the Hinchcliffe years as being dark, but… this? An entire village, trapped eternally on a single day. July 6th… the day before my birthday. If I lived in Devesham, I’d wake up every singe day, and my birthday would never arrive. Boo. Course, it would also mean that I’d be an android duplicate, having undergone a painful process aboard the spaceship of an evil alien, but still… I’d never get my presents!

The Android Invasion is blowing a bit hot and cold for me at the moment. On the one hand, there’s loads that I’m loving. This episode continues with some of the strange mystery that we started building up in yesterday’s episode, and I’m finding it more and more like something out of The Avengers (the Doctor’s reaction to finding that calendar would surely give us the title of the story, too: The Village Without a Future), and that’s no bad thing. It’s nice, sometimes, to get away from the usual Doctor Who fodder and have something a bit different.

But then, on the other hand, this episode isn’t getting away from being generic Doctor Who at all - in fact, I think it may be the epitome of it in places! What I actually mean is that this story seems to be drawing inspiration in places from the programme’s past. Specifically, the past of just a few stories ago, because there’s an awful lot in here which feels like a sub-par Terror of the Zygons. I don’t know if that’s intentional, or simply a coincidence, but both Terry Nation on writing duties and Barry Letts as director seem to be aping elements of the season opener throughout this episode.

On the writing side, the local pub (well… the local inn) is being used to spy on the operations of the outsiders to the village. In Zygons, the hidden camera was in the eyes of the deer head, whereas here it’s in the centre of the dartboard (it’s a good job the Doctor didn’t damage it with his triple bullseye!). This then sort of leads into the similarities in direction, where a shot of the Doctor looking down the camera lens and being watched on a monitor in the Kraal’s spaceship is almost identical to a shot of Benton doing the same with the Zygon spying device. Then, while I’m glad that they’re trying to conceal the look of the aliens for as long as possible, we seem to follow the same process as in that earlier tale. Our first glimpse is a close up of the face (In Zygons it was a more extreme close up on the eyes, whereas here you get the full face peering through a hole in the cliffhanger to Episode One), this is then followed by a shot of the creature’s hand on the controls of the ship. At least the reveal is done well, again, with the face of the creature appearing as Sarah undergoes her processing.

That’s not to mention the fact that this is a story about a species of aliens we’ve never seen before, who are able to create perfect facsimiles of human characters, and have created a version of Harry who’s hostile towards the Doctor and (especially) Sarah. It’s not just minor similarities - there’s whole ideas which are shared between the two stories. It seems odd that the production team have let this happen so close together (only eight episodes between the end of Zygons and the start of this one), but I wonder if that’s a peculiarity of Zygons being held over from Season Twelve? Had it been shown earlier in the year, as planned, this story may not have come as such a close resemblance.

Of course the big moment today is the cliffhanger. Sarah Jane falls down a slope… and her face falls off! She’s an android! It’s another one of those moments that you just know about when you’re a Doctor Who fan, and I’ve probably seen it a thousand times. But I’d always assumed that it was supposed to be a shock to the viewer more than it actually is. Earlier on in today’s episode, Sarah trips and falls, spraining her ankle. I’d always figured that a similar thing would happen at the end of this episode. She’d stumble, fall to the ground… and then when the face pops off, it’s a huge surprise! I didn’t realise that by the time this cliffhanger rolls around, we’re supposed to know that she’s a duplicate.

I wonder if I prefer the version of events that I’ve had in my head for all these years? By the time of this scene, we know that they’re making android duplicates of people, we know that Sarah has gone through the process, and they’ve laid more enough hints to the fact that this isn’t the real Sarah. It suddenly makes sense of the Doctor’s new obsession with ginger pop (in yesterday’s episode, when he steps out of the TARDIS, offers some to Sarah, and she makes a point of saying how much she hates it I wondered if they were just trying to pad out some time - the whole exchange felt odd!), and seeing Sarah accept it is all the indication we need that she’s not herself.

But then they also add in the fact that she can make a phone call. The Doctor makes a point of checking several phones to make sure we know that they’re not working, and even highlights it as being odd that Sarah can manage to phone in to him. It’s made clear that her story doesn’t quite add up about her escape from the aliens. And then the Doctor’s main deduction is that the duplicate is wearing a scarf… when he’s got Sarah’s scarf in his pocket still from earlier. Actually, that last one is the cleverest idea (and, I have to admit, I didn’t spot it!), but it feels like overkill to add yet another clue.

That said, it’s nice how neatly that ties in. As I say, I didn’t spot the scarf thing, but it’s nicely woven in daly on when the Doctor takes it from her to lead the sniffer dogs off her trail. That chase also gives us a chance to look at the Doctor’s new clothes (the second coat to be introduced in as many stories!), which is quite nice. I much admit that I’d forgotten just how soon this grey coat is introduced. I knew he wore it in this story, and the next, and the one after that, but in my mind I’d never realised just how quickly he started adding these new bits to his costume. To my mind it had always been the corduroy jacket, the brown frock coat introduced in Pyramids of Mars, which then evolved into this one, before heading back to a different brown one, a new grey/beige one for Season Seventeen, and his Season Eighteen look. I rather prefer the way it’s actually turning out, with the Doctor able to swap his coats around on a whim - it gives the impression far more of him choosing clothes as opposed to a costume, and that’s a nice touch.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 433: The Android Invasion, Episode One

Dear diary,

It’s always a nice transition to go from such an acclaimed story to one which I really have no clue about when it comes to other people’s opinions. I don’t know if I hear so little about The Android Invasion because it’s considered to be a bad story, or if it’s simply by chance. I know about as much about this tale as I did Planet of Evil last week, and that turned out to be a real highlight for me, so fingers crossed…!

If this first episode is anything to go by, I may well have another hidden gem on my hands. Once again, we get to spend a lot of time in the company of just the Doctor and Sarah (Right the way through this marathon, I’d assumed that the ‘Doctor and his companion(s) explore the new location without much interference from guest characters’ was something exclusive to the early years of the programme, but it seem increasingly common at the moment for me to refer back to ‘this thing from the early 1960’s’ cropping up - it seems to be just as common in the mid-70s), and the more time we spend with this pair, the more I can understand the love for them.

It also helps that they’ve got an interesting mystery to solve. It feels more like the plot from an episode of The Avengers than it does one from Doctor Who. An entire town has suddenly become deserted? A soldier throws himself from a cliff top? All the money in his wallet (and in the till of the local pub) is freshly minted? The lanes are patrolled by mysterious figures in a kind of radiation suit who fire bullets from their fingers at anyone who trespasses? Mrs Peel, we’re needed!

The Doctor comes up with quite a good explanation for it all. A radiation leak, meaning that everyone’s been evacuated in a hurry. Makes sense. The soldier could be infected, meaning he’s not of sound mind. Makes sense. All the money has to be changed because of the high radiation levels in the area naturally, so it can’t be allowed to circulate far. Makes sense. And yet, it’s interesting to watch the deduction while knowing that he’s completely wrong. I don’t know a great deal about the plot to this story, but what little I do know tells me that it’s got something to do with androids (the clue’s in the title), and they don’t feature in the Doctor’s analysis.

But just when you start to think he’s piecing together a coherent explanation for everything, they go and make it even more mysterious, by bringing in a group of people to populate the pub with. There’s something eerie about the way they all come in silently and resume their positions (it’s a shame that one extra is forced to move his chair to sit down - there’s something creepier about the people before him who just slide down into their pre-placed seats), and when Sarah bursts into the room and they all turn to stare at her with a look of anger… oh, yes, it’s all very effective.

So it’s almost a shame when we follow the Doctor off to the Space Centre, and we’re caught up in boring old action sequences. Chasing, evading, running around… even Tom Baker flipping over a desk can’t make this part of the story as interesting as that initial mystery. It’s telling, perhaps, that all my notes for today’s episode end with Sarah at the pub. After that, I’m just not as engaged.

Something I did notice, and it’s been brought up in a few other recent stories, too, is the fact that Sarah doesn’t seem to have her own TARDIS key. We’re only a few stories away from the Doctor’s claim that she’s his ‘best friend’, and they’ve been travelling together for absolutely ages now, so it does seem a little odd that she’s not allowed her own access to the ship. But then she goes and does something silly, like put the key in the lock and wanter away from it! No wonder the TARDIS has taken off of its own accord - it’s probably trying to teach her a lesson!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 432: Pyramids of Mars, Episode Four

Dear diary,

I think the issue that I’m having with this story is that I don’t really believe in Sutekh’s power. Ever since the Doctor realised what they’re fighting against, he’s spent time telling us how many millions will die if they don’t succeed in stopping this ancient god. We see the future, ravaged and destroyed. Five men are already dead - some quite brutally killed - and they’re only the first of millions once Sutekh has broken free of his restraints. But that’s all we get - a lot of talk about the fact that he’s all-powerful, and that he leaves desolation in his wake. Because he doesn’t get to stand up until the end of this episode, and then finds himself immediately trapped in a time corridor, the threat of this creature feels less potent than, say, the anti-matter force from the last story. Or the Daleks last season. Or… well, you get the picture.

It’s a pity, really, because the opening few minutes of today’s episode consists almost exclusively of the Doctor being tortured by Sutekh’s mental powers. In some ways, these scenes are the ones which come closest to showing you just how powerful this god really is, because he’s reduced our hero to being his plaything, but they feel as though they’re lacking impact having come after Planet of the Spiders. The mental torture inflicted on the Doctor here is far greater than the ‘walking round in circles’ that the Great One caused, but it’s less shocking because we’ve already had that earlier example.

The one thing that really does work for me about Sutekh, though, is his voice. I remember there being quite a bit of excitement back in 2006 when it was announced that Gabriel Woolf would be returning to the world of Doctor Who to voice the creature in The Satan Pit, and I can see now why people were so thrilled. He manages a tone that is at once scary and playful, and the way he laughs as he speaks some of the lines can be genuinely chilling. It’s by far the best thing about the entire story, but it still doesn’t really make me fear him.

Even when - following the Doctor’s protests that he will never help the god - Sutekh takes control of the Doctor’s mind and starts using him as a puppet, I just don’t believe it. I don’t know if it’s something in Baker’s performance, or if it’s just the way that I’m reading into the events, but I was convinced that the Doctor was faking possession. I kept waiting for him to turn to Sarah and give her a wink, a signal to both her and us that things were really ok. After a while, it turns out that - no - he wan’t faking it, and he really was under the control of an outside influence, a puppet for Sutekh… but it comes too late!

Oh, I know, I’m simply having a moan. I think this is another one of those instances, like The Evil of the Daleks, where I’m looking at a story’s high standing within fandom and thinking ‘go on, then. Impress me…’ There’s lots to love about this story, but I just can’t understand why it’s quite so loved. At times, today’s episode feels a bit like a rehash of Death to the Daleks, with logic puzzles standing between the Doctor and his goal (even Sarah comments that it reminds her of the city on Exxilon. A lovely, and unexpected, surprise… although Sarah didn’t actually get to go in to the city. Presumably, the Doctor must have told her all about it…), but at least they’re livened up with some funky moving backgrounds throughout the set.

On the whole, I think the story just lost some of the atmosphere once the action was shifted mainly to Mars. Suddenly, that great mansion set, or the woodlands, was gone and replaced with a fairly generic location for the final showdown. Although the moving segments are a nice idea, they don’t always work well, so I found them more distracting than anything. I think, no matter how I try, I’m just not going to get the love for this one. A good story? Yes, undoubtably. A great story? Not for me, I’m afraid.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 431: Pyramids of Mars, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Whenever we have a historical story, I always catch myself being terribly nice about the set design, and quite often the location work, too, but I rarely seem to talk all that much about the costumes. I think this is a fitting place to do so, because all the outfits in this particular story are fantastic. Elisabeth Sladen really suits the white dress she wears (and it’s a marked change from the type of outfit that Sarah was wearing in the programme for the last few seasons. I hate to use an anecdote from Sladen’s autobiography again, but she talks of loosening up Sarah’s wardrobe the longer she travels with the Doctor, and you can clearly see that in motion here), the fact that it’s mentioned as having been Victoria’s is a nice little nod to the past, too.

Then you’ve got the Scarman brothers. Marcus’ outfit is interesting enough without being too overbearing, but it’s Lawrence’s togs which appeal the most to me. I think most Doctor Who fans have their own ‘Doctor outfit’ - the type of clothes you would wear if you were the Doctor. I think Lawrence’s ones here are pretty much my ideal costume. Indeed, I own a similar three-piece suit (though in a more modern cut, and with a smaller pattern), so there’s no wonder that I’m so keen on his style!

And then you’ve got the real Doctor’s outfit. It’s been evolving for a little while, now, and we’ve settled on the look that - in various guises - will define much of the programme’s next five years. The hat, the scarf, the frock coat, the waistcoat, the ‘chequered’ trousers… There’s a moment in today’s episode, when the Doctor rounds a corner and we see a full-length shot of him and all I could think was how close it looked to the action figure of the Doctor from this story! It seems obvious (this is the tale they based it on, so it would look similar), but it’s a spot on capture of this costume that they’ve produced. In terms of the figures, this was always my favourite version of Tom, but often alternated with the Season 18 variant on the shelf when I couldn’t make my mind up! I think that all things considered, this is my favourite look for the Fourth Doctor - he just fits the style so well.

We’re also seeing just how different this incarnation of the Doctor can be from his predecessors. People talk of Tom Baker as being the first actor who really understood how alien the Doctor was, and it’s perfectly showcased today with his utter lack of concern for the dead Lawrence Scarman. Early in the story, once they’ve escaped the mummy attack he asks if the man is ok. Receiving a positive answer, he barks ‘You don’t deserve to be! You nearly got us all killed!’ It’s not a line that I can imagine as being unique to Tom’s Doctor (I can picture Pertwee saying something similar, and probably Hartnell, too), but the delivery only carries the weight like this when it comes from Tom Baker’s mouth. And then you’ve got a later exchange between the Doctor and Sarah, once they’ve found the man dead:

SARAH
He was so concerned about his brother…

THE DOCTOR
Well I told him not to be. I told him it was too late.

SARAH
Oh! Sometimes you don’t seem… (she catches the next word in her throat, but the Doctor finishes the sentence for her anyway.)

THE DOCTOR
…Human?

From there, he just carries on with his deductions of what’s happening. Sarah tries to protest that a man has just been murdered, but the Doctor simply replies that four men have been killed. Five, if you include Professor Scarman himself. It’s wonderful to see the Doctor as detached as this, and it really does serve as a reminder that he’s not like us. He sees death all the time, so this is just another corpse to him. Even with everything else that the Doctor has had to do through this story, all the fun and laughing with his companion that I love so much, I think this may be his best moment of the story.

I told myself that I’d try not to mention the sets in this story all that much, which is one of the reasons that I’ve chosen to look at the costumes above. That said, I do need to draw attention to one of the set dressings - the Osirian rocket. It looks massive in the courtyard, which really helps to make the whole thing look impressive. I knew that it took this form somewhere in the story (again, from the action figures. I don’t own the set, but one of the Pyramids of Mars releases comes with a model of this missile), but I had no idea that it was so large! When it blows up at the end, the effect if pretty impressive, too. According to the ‘Now and Then’ feature on this DVD, the prop was given to a local school to keep once it was finished for filming… how come nothing that exciting ever happened in my schooldays?

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 430: Pyramids of Mars, Episode Two

Dear diary,

Oh, Sarah Jane, you don’t make it easy for me, do you? Right the way through the Pertwee years, I managed to mostly avoid discussing the whole ‘dating’ issue, but this is one of the most glaring errors at the heart of it all - I simply can’t ignore this one! The last time I touched briefly on the whole dating issue was during Invasion of the Dinosaurs, where I commented that I was going to ignore Sarah’s ‘I’m from 1980’ comment in this story, and only really worry about the dating issues when I reached Mawdryn Undead… but I had no idea that the whole 1980 date was such a pivotal part of this story.

I knew that the Doctor took Sarah into the future to see what would happen to the Earth were they to leave now and not stop Sutekh, but I didn’t realise that they repeated that 1980 date over and over. Sarah says it. The Doctor says it. They open the doors and we look right out in to it. Frankly, the reason I’ve been choosing to ignore the whole subject is because it can’t be reconciled. I’ve seen fans claiming that Sarah is simply rounding up from 1975 to 1980 (which is ludicrous), or that there’s a time slip which moves the UNIT stories around between the 1970s and the 1980s… nothing really works for me. I just have to accept that this is a programme being made by several different production teams over several decades, and that things won’t always line up neatly. It’s a shame, but the 1980 comment is always going to stand out! Now, if only they’d recored as few new bits of dialogue for the DVD, to change the date they all keep saying?

Still, aside from the headaches that it’s given to fans over the years, that whole sequence when they skip forward to see what would happen if they left now is very nicely done. We’ve had a similar idea given to us before in dialogue, but to actually see it is far more powerful. They did a similar thing in The Sarah Jane Adventures, where Sarah Jane emerges back through a time fissure and into the ‘present’ day, to find that her actions in the past have allowed the Trickster to take control of the world, and turn it into a desolate husk. Modern budgets (even the comparatively small one for the spin off) mean that we get to spend a bit more time in this new world, but the core of the idea is the same between both stories.

But back in the world of 1911… well I’m just not sure what to make of the story. There’s nothing wrong with it, I’m certainly enjoying it and being swept along with it, but I can’t quite see how it’s always made it into such high spots on lists of ‘the best ever episodes’. Oh, sure, there’s a great deal of tension - the scene where Ernie Clements is chased by mummies is a great example of this. For ages, he’s way in the lead, with the mummies lumbering along far behind him. After a while, you start to think that he’ll always be able to out-run them, but in that moment, he hits back into the forcefield running through the woods. The same character was used to introduce us to the device earlier in this episode, in a bit of a comedy sequence, but now it turns out to be his downfall. The mummies close in closer and closer…

But then when they do actually catch up with him and crush him to death… People have always hailed this as one of the darkest bits of the story, and in a way it is. The mummy design is beautiful, but the fact that their protruded chest cavity is at just the right height to break his neck is a lovely touch. I don’t know if it was intentional or just a nice coincidence, but it works all the same. That said… I found it more funny than scary. It’s the two mummies cuddling him to death! Much more effective in the closing moments, as one stretches their hands out toward Sarah Jane’s neck, or early on in the episode when we hear the attack, but we don’t actually see it…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 429: Pyramids of Mars, Episode One

Dear diary,

Pyramids of Mars is another one of those stories which usually finds itself placing quite high on fans’ lists of favourite episodes. Indeed, in our recent poll, it came in at number 6 out of 239, which makes it one of the stories that people rate among the best that Doctor Who has ever produced. As usual, I’m slightly sceptical about such high praise, but considering how fan ‘wisdom’ on stories like Genesis of the Daleks and Terror of the Zygons has seemed to chime pretty well with my own feelings lately, I’m intrigued to see if things will continue their current good trend with this one.

This is one of those stories that I’ve seen before, and actually I’ve seen it a couple of times. When I first started out collecting the Doctor Who DVDs, I picked it up simply because of its high regard among other fans… and I have to say I recall being a bit bored by it! That’s all I can recall – no specific scenes or bits of dialogue at all – but it meant that I then spent years thinking of it as a bit of a duff story, one which I could never understand the love for.

I’m not completely alone in this. Nick Mellish – who I mention a lot during my Diary posts, but he’s usually fairly spot on with his assessments of Who stories, by which I mean that we’re usually in tune with our opinions! – pointed out to me when we released our poll results that he could never get his head around why this story always graced the tops of lists.

But a few years ago, when Elisabeth Sladen died, they included all four episodes of this story as a tribute to her on the DVD and Blu Ray release of The Sarah Jane Adventures Series Four. I love The Sarah Jane Adventures, so I was quick to re-watch the entire series when the discs arrived. Having exhausted the supply of episodes, I found myself popping this story on. I didn’t watch the full thing, but I can remember getting to the end of Episode One and being surprised by just how much I’d enjoyed it.

Thankfully, I’m pleased to say that the second viewing of the episode is the one which most closely resembles my thoughts on it today. It may not be an instantly perfect episode like some people would have you believe, but it’s a good strong start to the story, and it’s absolute dripping in atmosphere. I think the highlight for me comes a little over half-way through, when we’ve spent several (largely dialogue-free) minutes watching the Doctor, Sarah, and Dr Warlock being chased by Ibrahim Namin and his mummies. There’s lots of stalking about in the woods, hiding behind fallen trees and in bushes… and then the scene is cut through by the sound of the organ blaring up again from the house. It takes you completely by surprise every time, and it really is a wonderful moment.

Lots of what comes afterwards is very good, too. Namin seems to be set up as the villain of the piece throughout the episode. He’s the one who appears to be covering up Scarman’s absence. He’s the one occupying the house and performing weird rituals with the Egyptian artefacts. He’s the one who pulls a gun on anyone who dares to get in his way… so it’s a real shock to see him killed during the cliffhanger. It serves so well as a demonstration of Sutekh’s power, and that great line ‘I am the servant of Sutekh. He needs no other.’ is really rather wonderful.

And then there’s a multitude of little things that all come together to make this simply an enjoyable episode. Opening with stock footage of Egypt was a real delight (I had a vague memory that they’d used a still image of the pyramids - no idea there that thought came from!), and is actually quite impressive. It means that when we step into a BBC studio set for the Egyptian tomb, it feels exotic and remote - you really get the impression that you’re somewhere very new again.

And then we’re back to somewhere very… familiar. Almost, anyway. Large country houses always feel like a staple of the programme in the 1970s, and I love the idea of visiting the location of UNIT HQ many decades before it’s used by UNIT. In some ways, I find it a shame that we’re in a previous house, not the one they actually use for UNIT, but then their HQ changed so much throughout the Pertwee years that I’m not sure I’d notice them simply redressing the set that became more common towards the end of the run.

But for me, the highlight is in the Doctor and Sarah Jane. I mused during Planet of Evil that I was starting to see the ‘best friends’ aspect of their relationship coming out, but it’s even more obvious here. From the way she playfully teases him in the TARDIS (‘you’ll soon be middle-aged!’) to the way they laugh and joke during their initial exploration of the house, there’s just so much to love in this pair. it’s clearly two people (The Doctor and Sarah and Tom Baker and Lis Sladen) who really love spending time together, and are just having fun. If this is what their relationship is like for the rest of their time together, then I’m in for a real treat.

Hm? Sorry? What? Oh, yes. That. I managed to successfully avoid the whole UNIT dating topic for most of the Pertwee years, but then today we’ve got one of the elements which makes it such a contentious issue.

SARAH JANE
We travel in time, Mr Scarman. I'm really from 1980…

I suppose I’d better finally start thinking properly about the whole UNIT time line issue…Well… Um… I guess that… Wait. Hold on. Was that the doorbell? Yes, I rather think it was…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 428: Planet of Evil, Episode Four

Dear diary,

There’s always a risk built into stumbling upon stories that you didn’t realise were very much up your street. That risk, put simply, is that they might fall apart on you. Over the last few days, I’ve been growing more-and-more impressed by Planet of Evil, a hidden gem amongst the early Tom Baker era that I’d never before given a second thought. Everything seemed to be holding together really rather well - from the sets, to the performances, and the effects. The one thing that had been letting it down for me was the story, but even that had started to draw me in by yesterday.

But then today, I’ve just found myself… I won’t say ‘bored’ with it, but I certainly didn’t feel as engaged with the episode today as I have over the last few. It’s a shame, because everything I’ve loved about the story is still in evidence here, but it feels like a case of diminishing returns. Seeing the outline of the monster rising from the pit towards the end is great - it still may be one of my favourite effects in the series - but the versions of Sorenson as an outline that stalk the ship for much of the episode just don’t quite work for me. I think it’s simply because the costume of the regular monster is designed specifically to give the best version of the effect, while they have to make do with Frederick Jaeger in a werewolf costume this time around.

While I’m on the subject, it’s nice to see Jaeger back in the series - I was rather fond of his performance during The Savages, so it’s good to actually see him this time around. He’ll be back in a few season’s time again, too. In fact, Planet of Evil is a bit of a dumping ground for people who’ve appeared elsewhere in Doctor Who, including Ewen Solon - who was also in The Savages: it’s like having a reunion - Prentis Hancock, Louis Mahoney, and in his last appearance in the programme, Michael Wisher.

I’ve spent a lot of time during this story making notes about just how fantastic the direction is, so it came as no surprise that it’s David Maloney back in the hot seat again. He really has become one of the programme’s most reliable creative personnel. Paired with Roger Murray-Leach on the design side, it’s a truly winning combination. The pair will work together on two further stories (The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang) which are both considered to be proper ‘classics’, so I can’t wait to see their work some more.

Now that Season Thirteen is under way properly, with scripts wholly commissioned under Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, and in a new recording block, it feels like Doctor Who has really hit its stride once more. The tone of the programme has been shifting ever since Pertwee left, but we now feel far more rooted in the ‘horror’ phase of the programme. I can’t imagine him starring in this story, but it feels so right for the programme. We’re starting to see the Doctor’s costume changing, too (with the addition of his orange cravat, and today marks the last appearance of his ‘Season Twelve’ jacket), so it feels like we’re a million miles away from the programme as we knew it not all that long ago.

I’m now deep into what fans seem to think of as a ‘Golden Age’, and I’m really starting to see why. I’ve never been sure that any era would come close to rivalling my love for the late 1960s, but I’m beginning to wonder if this may well be a contender. The next story is yet another one that fans praise very highly, so I’m hoping that the winning streak can continue from here…