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

Day 596: The Visitation, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I’ve always been a bit surprised that the Terrileptils never really made a return to the world of Doctor Who after this story. I think I’m right in saying that they feature in a few novels (though never majorly - usually in the form of a namecheck more than anything), but they never had another story on TV, or featured in any of the Big Finish audios. I’m not especially gagging for them to make a return, but I’m just somewhat surprised to think that they haven’t - when you consider how much of the programme’s history has been mined over the years.

Part of the surprise that they never came back on TV (outside of a brief appearance later in this same season) stems from the fact that they’re suck a nice design for a creature. There’s something about them which is wholly unlike any other monsters we’ve had… I’ve been searching for a way to describe it, but all I can think of at the moment is that the mouth reminds me of Barney the Dinosaur! I don’t mean that in a bad way, simply that we’ve never had a monster costume quite like this before. It’s been so long since I’ve seen The Visitation that seeing the close up detail on the scars to our lead monster came as quite a surprise to me today - to the point that I even wondered if the costume had simply been damaged between recording sessions! I was watching through wondering if I’d just seen an eye missing, so I’m rather pleased that the damage gets addressed and even becomes a part of the dialogue. I like that, and it’s another point in favour of this story.

Still, all this talk of Terileptils is really just ignoring the elephant in the room, because this episode features the moment for which The Visitation is most famed - in which the Sonic Screwdriver meets its demise, and we wave good bye to the tool until it turns up again in the TV Movie. It’s always spoken of as though it were some huge important event in the programme’s narrative… but it really isn’t! Not for me, anyway, because the Sonic Screwdriver has never felt like that much of a big part of the show. I remember the anticipation of getting to Fury From the Deep and seeing the device for the first time, and although its uses have expanded vastly since then, it’s never really felt like a particularly important tool. Even Tom Baker’s Doctor stopped bothering with it from time to time!

Fury From the Deep is a useful point of reference for something else that seems to go a bit wrong with the device in this story, too. The Sonic is blown up, the Doctor is hurt because he’s lost ‘an old friend’, and I simply don’t care. I say that the Sonic hasn’t felt like a particularly important tool in the programme, but that’s possibly my viewpoint being coloured by the stories we’ve had so far in Season Nineteen. The Doctor makes good use of it during Four to Doomsday to disable the Monopticons, but then he sort of stops caring about it. At the start of Kinda, when Adric points out that he’s not got the tool on him, the Doctor wonders what use they could possibly have for it! Of course, it would have come in useful for escaping from a cell, but that doesn’t even get mentioned, as I recall.

Anyway, yes, Fury From the Deep. In that story, you can tell that Victoria is about to pack her bags and leave life aboard the TARDIS because she’s suddenly become completely indispensable to the Doctor. We get none of that with the Sonic, though. As I’ve said, it’s completely dismissed in Kinda, and even in this episode the Doctor has looked at it and wished for a ‘proper key’ while musing that he should probably get a ‘real’ survival kit together (good advice, actually, Doctor!). I don’t feel as though the Sonic’s destruction is any great loss, because the Doctor himself doesn’t seem to care about it any more. If nothing else, the fact that he doesn’t bother to make a new one until late in his Seventh incarnation probably tells us how useful he was finding it. All ‘kettle and a piece of string’ from now on, I think!