aWill Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 281: Inferno, Episode Three
Dear diary,
I always used to find it so strange that Doctor Who waited seven years and fifty-something adventures before it went for that old sci-fi cliché, the ‘parallel universe’, but actually, having been through everything that comes before Inferno, it suddenly makes complete sense. Even though we’ve been in a different location for each story this season, they’ve all felt relatively close together. Trapping the Doctor on Earth, and giving him a wider circle of acquaintances (People can’t even agree on whether Sara Kingdom is a companion, so I doubt there’s any hope of getting all of UNIT added to the list!) means that when we follow him across the sparkly void and into the alternate universe, there’s a real impact to it.
That’s not to say that it couldn’t have worked to see the Doctor confronted by an evil version of Ian and Barbara, but if you set it out on some far-flung alien world, there’s far less of an impact. The Stahlman project, on the outside, looks just like the location from The Ambassadors of Death. Wasn’t the Brigadier chasing someone over some very similar gangways (though much closer to the ground) a few episodes ago? It’s not even that far removed from the location we see used as the factory in Spearhead From Space, which was previously used for The Invasion. I think that’s the big success of this story – it’s taking something which is readily in danger of simply becoming normal for Doctor Who, and it turns it completely on its head.
The same thing is being done to UNIT. When the Doctor emerges from what should be his lab, and a soldier starts to shoot at him, it genuinely feels unnerving. It’s why I’m so pleased that Benton turned up at the tale end of The Ambassadors of Death - I know that he’s a big part of the UNIT ‘family’, because I’m coming to this story more than 40 years after the fact, but today’s cliffhanger doesn’t pack half as much of a punch if it’s simply that Sergeant who turned up two episodes ago threatening the Doctor.
I’m not sure that the Doctor has too much to fear from his former friends here, though, because as in the last story UNIT are absolutely terrible. They spend several minutes chasing after the Doctor and taking shots at him (it has to be said that the chase scene in this story is far more thrilling than many of the action set pieces in the last one – hooray for the return of Douglas Camfield!), and then manage to completely lose him. As soon as they spotted people up high on the roof, I was willing to bet a considerable amount of money that they’d hit the infected soldier rather than our misplaced Time Lord.
One of the things that’s really impressing me is just how much back story about this parallel universe has already been seeded in, without it feeling like a massive info dump. I knew that we’d be seeing an alternate world in this story (I’ve head the eyepatch story enough times to recite it backwards!), but I didn’t know anything really about it. Right from the moment the Doctor arrives in this new world, we’re given lots of hints about this place. From the poster on the wall of his lab – ‘Unity is Strength’, a phrase which instantly says ‘totalitarian regime’ to anyone who’s read Orwell’s 1984 - to the odd symbols on the door of the lab. Even the Doctor lingers to give both a puzzled look, making sure that we get plenty of opportunities to take it all in.
(While I’m on the subject, there’s another one of those ridiculous things that I want to praise. The symbol stuck to the door of the ‘lab’ is all battered up. Now, I know it’s simply because the BBC props men have been lugging it around for a while before sticking it up onto the door, but it has the effect of making it look like the sign has been there for ages. I know it’s a stupid thing to draw attention to, but I’d not have been surprised to find that everything added to the sets to denote them as being from the parallel world looked brand new…)
We’re given lots of beautiful dialogue between the Doctor and the Brigade Leader to help establish the kind of world we’ve ended up in, too. My favourite is possibly the moment that the Brigadier describes the ‘Republic’ and the Doctor asks what’s happened to the Royal Family. He’s cut off mid sentence, simply told that they were executed. All of them.'
Perhaps my absolute favourite piece of dialogue from today's episode - possibly from the season so far - is the Brigade Leader's response to the Doctor's protests that he 'doesn't exist' in this world - 'then you won't feel the bullets when we shoot you.' Brilliant!
