Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 535: The Creature from the Pit, Episode One
Dear diary,
I’m not entirely sure if Creature from the Pit is a story that’s generally frowned upon by fandom, or one that’s simply caught in that ‘no man’s land’, where things are neither good or bad, they just… exist. Certainly, it’s not a story that get’s talked about very often. It seems a shame, in a way, because this story contains a number of notable things in the history of Doctor Who.
It’s the last story of the series proper to be directed by old hand Christopher Barry, who’s been turning up intermittently since The Daleks way back in 1963 (I’ve never noticed before the odd coincidence that both Chris Barry and Terry Nation joined the series with the same story, have input across each of the first four Doctor’s era’s, and then bow out from the series just a few stories apart here). It’s also the first story filmed by Lalla Ward as Romana, as opposed to Princess Astra. We also get to hear K9’s new voice box for the first time, with John Leeson sitting this season out, and David Brierley stepping in to the role. Less noticeably, it’s also the last story to feature Terry Walsh, who’s been turning up in (mostly action) sequences for a while now, too.
Quite aside from all that… this is a very good opening episode! It conforms in some ways to the same ‘Doctor and companion arrive and explore for a bit’ format that Destiny of the Daleks did, but it does something interesting with it, and has them caught up in the local action at just the right time. Indeed, this is one of those episodes where the cliff-hanger comes and it feels like you’ve had two episode’s worth of action packed into one. We move from the TARDIS, to exploring the landscape, to capture, through fights and scenes with barbarians, the Doctor meeting the local ruler, being taken to the pit, and then the Doctor’s jumped down it… the story stops for breath when it’s needed (there’s some lovely lingering shots of the Doctor examining the ‘egg’), but there’s an awful lot going on in these first 25 minutes.
It also helps that whereas Destiny of the Daleks saw the Doctor and Romana exploring a familiar quarry, we’ve got a gorgeous setting here. People rave about the jungle set from Planet of Evil (and, in fairness, that’s a very good jungle), but I’m completely captivated by this one! It feels so very real, clearly based more on Earth jungles than the one in Planet of Evil was, but with just enough alien items, such as the egg and the wolf weeds to keep it interesting. We’ve also got an awful lot of ‘fog’ going on in the background, and I can’t help but think back to my comments during Planet of the Daleks that the jungle simply wasn’t foggy enough to create any mystery. I’d love to see a Dalek shot on this set.
Because of the scale of the set, and the fact that lots of this episode is set out in the jungle, large chunks of this one are shot on film, which really does help. Every few weeks I bring up my wish that all 20th century Doctor Who could have been produced on film, and it’s episodes like this one which really make me think about it. I worry that as the story goes on, we’ll be seeing more and more scenes set away from this lovely setting, and moved to the various studio-bound locations, which would be a shame. Still, if Christopher Barry can keep this kind of style up for the remaining three episodes… what a way to part from the programme!
