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…