Tag Archives: Christopher Barry

Doctor Who — Destiny of the Daleks, City of Death, The Creature From The Pit, Nightmare of Eden, Horns of Nimon, Shada

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Remember when I was writing about classic Doctor Who for Halloween?  Let’s get back to that with a look at the 17th season of the original series.  This season is a controversial one.  It featured some of the show’s worst serials but also one of its best.  Today, it’s remembered for introducing Lalla Ward as the second Romana and for featuring Douglas Adams as the script editor.

One frequent complaint about this season is that, under Adams’s influence, the season featured more comedy than before and it sometimes felt more like a version of Hitchhiker’s than Doctor Who.  There’s some truth to that but Adams’s influence also made Season 17 into a season unlike any other.  Many of Adams’s ideas didn’t work but he did give us City of Death.

Destiny of the Daleks (1979, directed by Kim Grieve)

Destiny of the Daleks will always have a place in my heart because it opens with Romana regenerating into Lalla Ward.  I will admit right now that, as a kid watching Doctor Who on PBS, I had a huge crush on Lalla Ward.  So did Tom Baker.  He ended up marrying Ward, though the marriage did not last for long.  The relationship between Baker and Ward often seemed to reflected in the relationship between The Doctor and Ward’s Romana.  Long before the Doctor Who reboot had people buzzing about the Doctor and Rose, fans of the original series knew that the Doctor and Romana were in love.

Destiny of the Daleks opens with Lalla Ward’s Romana cheerfully informing the Doctor that she’s decided to regenerate because she was bored and she’s decided to look like Princess Astra.  The Doctor points out that Princess Astra is a real person and Romana can’t just take on her appearance.  Romana then tries out several other appearances before The Doctor tells her to go with Astra.  This goes against everything that the show had established about Time Lords and regeneration but at least we end up with Lalla Ward as Romana.

It’s too bad that the rest of the serial itself isn’t that interesting, even if it does feature the first appearance by the Daleks since Genesis of the Daleks.  Davros returns as well, though he’s now more or less just another generic villain.  The Daleks have a new enemy, a group of robots called the Movellans.  The war between the Daleks and the Movellans are at a standstill because both are governed by logic.  That goes against everything we know about the Daleks.

This was Terry Nation’s final script for Doctor Who.  Reportedly, he was angered when Douglas Adams extensively rewrote the script.  Nation moved to America and later created the original MacGyver.

City of Death (1979, directed by Michael Hayes)

City of Death is a Doctor Who classic.  Romana and the Doctor visit modern-day Paris and the BBC found the money to allow the production to shoot on location.  The Doctor and Romana walk around Paris, hand-in-hand.  Count Scarlioni (Julian Glover) is actually an alien who wants to steal the Mona Lisa so that he can use it to fund his time travel experiments.  Countess Sacrlioni (Catherine Schell) is a classic femme fatale.  An American private investigator named Duggan (Tom Chabdon) wears a trench coat and solves problems by punching first and asking questions later.  John Cleese and Eleanor Bron appears as museum patrons who think the TARDIS is a work of modern art.  Douglas Adams later reworked bits of his script into Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Even people who cannot stand the rest of season 17 will agree that City of Death is one of the best of Tom Baker’s serials.  City of Death balances humor and drama and it features an excellent villain in the form of Julian Glover.  Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are at their best, the story is genuinely interesting, and — much like Jago and Lightfoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang — Duggan deserved his own spin-off.

The Creature From The Pit (1979, directed by Christopher Barry)

This serial features the season’s first appearance by K-9, who is now voiced by David Brierley.  Though this serial was third to be aired, it was the first to be filmed.

It’s not much of a serial.  The TARDIS materializes on yet another feudal planet where Lady Adastra (Myra Frances) rules through fear.  Lady Adastra’s critics are thrown in the pit, which is said to be home to a great monster.  Instead, it’s home to a gentle blob that was sent to the planet as an ambassador.  The Doctor helps the blob gets its freedom while Romana and K-9 are briefly detained by a group of bandits.  Whatever potential the story had is short-circuited by the very unconvincing monster.

Nightmare of Eden (1979, directed by Alan Bromley and Graham Williams)

Two ships materialize in the same location and end up locked together.  Then the TARDIS materializes and the Doctor offers to find a way to unlock the two ships.  One of the ships is a luxury space liner and the passengers are soon being menaced by clawed monsters that look like stuntmen in rubber suits.  The other ship is a trade ship that the Doctor comes to suspect is involved in a drug-running operation.

Once again, the monsters were not at all convincing but the Doctor investigating the interstellar drug traffic was at least something different.  Much like City of Death, Nightmare of Eden, with its luxury spaceliner, had a few moments of satire that worked.  Unlike City of Death, the supporting characters were not that interesting and Tom Baker himself just seemed to be going through the motions.  Nightmare of Eden was better than a lot of Season 17 but it still ultimately comes across as being rather muddled.

The Horns of Nimon (1979 — 1980, directed by Kenny McBain)

The Horns of Nimon, is it terrible or is it great?  Some defend it because of its allusions to Greek mythology, its deliberate humor, and the over-the-top performance of Graham Crowden as Soldeed, the leader of the Skonnan Empire.  Others, like me, point out the turgid pacing, the bad creature effects, and the fact that the majority of the serial is just people walking around.  Based on the myth of the minotaur, The Horns of Nimon looks and feels cheap.  Crowden splits his pants at one point and I guess there was no time to stitch them back up.  The whole thing is just too slapdash.

Shada (2018, directed by Pennant Roberts and Charles Norton)

For decades, Shada was the Holy Grail of Doctor Who.  The final serial of the 17th century, Shada was in the process of filming when the BBC’s technicians went on strike.  With 50% of the serial filmed, production was suspended and eventually canceled.

Afterwards, Shada developed a legendary reputation.  It was often described as being a potential masterpiece, despite the fact that Season 17 was not one of Doctor Who‘s best.  Footage of the Doctor and Romana visiting Cambridge was widely released and even used in The Five Doctors.  The footage itself did look good but that was because it was mostly just Tom Baker and Lalla Ward relaxing and trading funny quips.  There was very little of the actual plot to be found in those scenes.

Finally, in 2017, Shada aired.  Animation was used for the unfilmed sequences and a white-haired Tom Baker even returned to shoot some new linking scenes.  Shada was finally broadcast in the U.S.  And, it wasn’t bad.  It may not have been the masterpiece that so many assumed it would be but it was certainly an improvement on The Creature From The Pit, Nightmare on Eden, and the Horns of Nimon.  

The Doctor and Romana travel to Cambridge to help out another timelord, Prof. Chronitis (Denis Carey).  After Chronitis is apparently killed, The Doctor and Romana discover that space criminal Skagra (Christopher Neame) is seeking a Time Lord named Salyavin who is somewhere on the prison planet, Shada.  Things get muddled once the Doctor actually travels to Shada but the Cambridge scenes are a definite highlight of the serial, a very British diversion for a very British show.  Much as with City of Death, the best moments are the ones where Tom Baker and Lalla Ward just get to play off of each other without having to deal with any sort of intergalactic menace.  Also, as with City of Death, Douglas Adams would borrows bits and pieces of Shada for Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Shada may not have been a masterpiece but it would have been a decent end for the seventeenth season.

 

 

 

Doctor Who — The Brain Of Morbius (1976, directed by Christopher Barry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The Time Lords once again decide that they need the Doctor to do their dirty work for them.  The TARDIS, with the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) on board, is sent to the rocky planet Karn.

On Karn, the crazed Dr. Solon (Phillip Madoc) lives in a castle and is kidnapping shipwrecked travelers and using their limbs to build a body for Morbius (Stuart Fell with the voice of Michael Spice).  Morbius was once a Time Lord but, after being found guilty of war crimes, his body was destroyed but his disembodied brain survived.  It now sits atop a makeshift body that has been constructed out of several different alien races.  Solon takes one look at the Doctor’s head and decides that it would be the perfect house for the brain of Morbius.

There’s a subplot about the Sisterhood of Karn and the Elixer of Life but make no mistake.  This is Doctor Who‘s take on Frankenstein, with the Baron reimagined as a mad scientist on a distant planet and the Monster reimagined as being not at all sympathetic.  When I was a kid and first watching these episodes of PBS, The Brain of Morbius was one of my favorites because of the Frankenstein connection and also the look of Morbius.  The original Doctor Who was known for its often-shoddy monsters but Morbius was a definite triumph.  The brain sitting in a transparent bowl atop a stitched together body was one of the defining images of classic Doctor Who.

The Brain of Morbius is also known for a controversial moment during the final episode, where the Doctor and Morbius engage in a battle of the minds.  On a view-screen, the faces of the three former Doctors appear, followed by several faces that had never been shown before.  It was actually an in-joke on the part of production.  The faces were all members of the Doctor Who crew.  For decades, though, this in-joke led to a fierce debate whether or not William Hartnell was actually the first Doctor.  This, of course, was back when it was still believed that a Time Lord could only regenerate 12 times.  The Doctor Who revival tossed out that idea, along with a lot of other good ideas.

All these years later, The Brain of Morbius still remains one of my favorites of the Fourth Doctor’s adventures.  This serial was the Tom Baker/Elisabeth Sladen era at its best.

Doctor Who — Robot (1974-1975, directed by Christopher Barry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Robot, the first serial of Doctor Who‘s 12th season, introduced us to a new Doctor.  The Third Doctor has regenerated and in his place is a slightly younger and more eccentric man.  Robot was the first regeneration story to introduce the idea of the Doctor being disorientated after regenerating.  The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) wakes up without the Third Doctor’s pressing concern for Earth or the goings-on at UNIT.  At first, at least, he has the wanderlust of the First Doctor without the Third Doctor’s sense of duty.  He wants to get in his TARDIS and explore the universe.

The only thing that stops him from leaving are his companion, Sarah jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), and the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney).  When they tell him that there have been some technology thefts and that they need his help to investigate, the Doctor agrees to stick around and help out.  Of course, before he investigates, he changes his costume.  Out are the Edwardian clothes that the Third Doctor favored.  In are wide-brimmed hats, trenchcoats, and scarves.  Very, very long scarves.

(His scarf in Robot is nowhere near as long as it would eventually get.)

When he was cast as the Doctor, Tom Baker was a character actor who has found some success (even receiving a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra) but not enough to give up his part-time job as a construction worker.  When he wrote to the BBC asking for a job, the letter was forwarded to Doctor Who producer Barry Letts.  Letts, who was struggling to find someone to replace the popular Jon Pertwee, hired Baker for the role after watching Baker play a villain in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.  (There’s a movie I might have to review before the month is over.)  Tom Baker would go on to have the longest run of any actor as the Doctor and, for years, he was consistently voted the most popular of the actors who have played the Doctor.  That’s not bad for someone who, before receiving the role, was tauntingly called “Sir Laurence” by his co-workers at the construction site.

Tom Baker was also the first Doctor that many Americans experienced.  When I was a kid and my local PBS station first started showing Doctor Who, they started with the Tom Baker years.  For many American, Tom Baker was the one who introduced them to things like the TARDIS, Daleks, and Cybermen.  Tom Baker’s Doctor, with the scarf and the sneaky smile and the eccentric humor, became an iconic figure the world over.

Considering how important Tom Baker would be to the show, it’s interesting that his first serial is nothing special.  The thefts are the work of a group of humans who want to construct a robot out of “living metal” so that they can steal Britain’s nuclear command codes and hold the world hostage.  An attempt to shoot the robot with a disintegrator gun causes the robot grows to supersize.  It develops a crush on Sarah Jane, and is destroyed by an early computer virus.  The giant robot special effects rival the dinosaurs from Invasion of the Dinosaurs for ineptitude.  The episode ends with asking Sarah Jane and UNIT’s Dr. Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) to accompany him on a trip in the TARDIS.

The only thing that really stands out about this episode is Tom Baker’s performance as the Doctor.  I hesitate to say that anyone was ever destined to play a role but Baker is so confident from the start and seems like such a natural while interacting with veteran cast members like Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen, and John Levene that it’s hard to believe that anyone other than Tom Baker was ever considered for the role of The Fourth Doctor.  From the start, Tom Baker just seems like be belongs there.

Robot may not have been classic Doctor Who but Tom Baker was the classic Doctor.

Doctor Who — The Daemons (1971, directed by Christopher Barry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When I was growing up and watching Doctor Who on PBS, I had a friend whose mother forbid him from watching the show because she thought that it promoted Satanism.

Her opinion was almost totally based on the cover of the novelization of one of the Third Doctor’s most popular adventures.

She took one look at that cover and decided that both the book and the show were promoting Satan.  I warned him that would happen when he first bought the book but, back in the day, it was nearly impossible to resist the temptation of the shelf of Doctor Who novels at Walden Books.  It was almost as if the books had been put there by you know who.

If my friend’s mother had read the book or even watched the serial when it eventually aired on PBS, she would have discovered that The Daemons did not feature the Devil.  Instead, it features Azal (Stephen Thorne), an evil horned alien who had spent centuries experimenting on humans and who had inspired many ancient myths and religions.  If my friend’s mother had watched the show, she would have seen that, rather than celebrate Satan, the show instead suggested that there was no Satan and that all of mankind’s Gods were actually visiting aliens.  She would have also seen that while The Master (played by Roger Delgado) disguised himself as a vicar, it fell to a local white witch to warn everyone in a quaint British village that the local archeological dig was a mistake.  Because of the Master’s religious disguise, everyone followed him when they should have been listening to the pagan…

In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing my friend’s mother never watched the show.

The Daemons has a reputation for being one of the best of the Third Doctor’s adventures and I’m inclined to agree.  The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and his latest companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning), try to stop the dig and instead find themselves trapped by a heat shield that has suddenly sprung  up over the village.  One of the defining images of this episode was a helicopter busting into flame when it hit the invisible barrier.  With the Brigadier and the majority of UNIT outside of the village, The Doctor, Jo, Sgt. Benton (John Levene), and Captain Yates (Richard Franklin) try to stop the plans of The Master and Azal.  Unfortunately, the villagers themselves have fallen under the sway of evil and are planning a special maypole sacrifice.

 

So many different actors have played The Master (and the character has become so overused) that it is easy to forget just how good Roger Delgado, the first Master, was in the role.  Delgado played the Master as being incredibly evil but he also played him as having a sense of humor and style about his evil, which is something that subsequent Masters have often failed to do.  Delgado’s Master appeared in every serial of the eighth series and he proved to be more than a worthy opponent for Pertwee’s Doctor.  Off-screen, Pertwee and Delgado were close friends and Pertwee later said that Delgado’s death in a traffic accident was one of the factors in Petwee’s decision to step away from the show.  The Daemons featured Delgado at his best as the Master did his worst and tried to claim the powers of someone who humans considered to be Satan.

The Daemons is also remembered for one of the best lines in the history of Doctor Who.  When confronted by Azal’s gargoyle servant, the Brigadier calls over a UNIT solider and orders, “Chap with wings there, five rounds rapid.”  I can only imagine how tired Nicholas Courtney got of having that line repeated to him over the years but his delivery of it is perfect.  The Brigadier was such a uniquely English character, imbued with the unflappable attitude of a country that had survived the collapse of an Empire, the Blitz, and the Suez Crisis.  Nicholas Courtney took a line that sounds like something Graham Chapman would have said on Monty Python and instead made it into an iconic piece of dialogue that reminded those of us American watching on PBS that, in Doctor Who, the entire universe was British.

Though it led to the show being forever banned in my friend’s house, The Daemons is a Doctor Who classic.

Doctor Who — The Daleks (1963-1964, directed by Christopher Barry and Richard Martin)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s easy to forget that Doctor Who was originally meant to be an educational show for children.

When the BBC’s Head of Drama, Sydney Newman, first developed Doctor Who, he envisioned it as being a show in which an eccentric old man known as the Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan, would travel to past eras and meet actual historical figures and witness great events firsthand.  Accompanying them would be two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, who would make sure the kids at home understood what they were watching.  While Newman allowed that, in order to keep the kids watching, there would be occasional episodes that would focus more an adventure than learning, he also said that the show would not feature any “bug-eyed monsters.”

The first serial, An Unearthly Child, stayed true to Newman’s concept.  After stumbling across the TARDIS while investigating the homelife of their newest pupil, Ian and Barbara found themselves traveling to pre-historic times with The Doctor and Susan.  Susan was played by Carole Ann Ford while Ian and Barbara were played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill.  Playing the role of the Doctor was veteran actor William Hartnell.  Hartnell was 55 years old when he first played the Doctor but he looked and came across as being much older.  He played the Doctor as being a crotchety old man, one who resented being saddled with two new companions and who could be quite rude to those he considered to be his inferior.  This was early in the series so there was no talk of Time Lords or anything else that Doctor Who fans now take for granted.   Susan even took credit for naming The TARDIS, the Doctor’s time machine that, on the outside, appeared to be a blue police call box.

An Unearthly Child introduced the UK to the Doctor.  It got respectable ratings and reviews.  Viewed today, it’s also pretty boring and it’s easy to see the limitations in Newman’s original concept.  Hartnell plays the Doctor as being so ill-tempered that it was a surprise that he didn’t just jettison Ian and Barbara into space.  (I used to watch Doctor Who on PBS with my father.  The first episodes that we got were the Tom Baker years, followed by the Peter Davison and the Jon Pertwee episodes.  It was only then that PBS started showing the Hartnell episodes.  To go from Baker, Davison, and Pertwee to the grouchy Hartnell was indeed jarring.)  If the show had continued in the style of An Unearthly Child, it probably would not have lasted for more than two series.

Fortunately, the second serial changed everything.

Written by Terry Nation and originally called The Mutants, the second serial introduced The Daleks, the shrill-voiced cyborgs whose cries of “Exterminate!  Exterminate!” made them almost as popular as The Doctor himself.  Squid-like creatures who lived in tank-like robotic shells and who spoke in electronic voices, the Daleks lived on the planet Skaro.  Centuries of nuclear war against the Thals had left the Daleks mutated and trapped in their shells but they were still obsessed with exterminating all of the Thals and eventually conquering the universe.  With their robotic exteriors, the Daleks were bulky and often moved awkwardly.  (The recurring joke is that all the Doctor has to do to escape the Daleks is find a staircase.)  But because the Daleks were so relentless and so determine to exterminate everyone who wasn’t a Dalek, they were still intimidating.  Writer Terry Nation based the Daleks on the Nazis, a comparison that was undoubtedly easy for British audiences in 1963, less than 20 years after the end of World War II, to see.

A seven-episode serial, The Daleks premiered on December 21st, 1963 and ran through February 1st, 1964.  While the serial was airing, word spread about The Daleks.  The first episode was watched by six million viewers.  The seventh and final episode was watched by ten million.  Four million people were brought to the show by The Daleks.  Sydney Newman may not have wanted bug-eyed monsters on Doctor Who but no one could argue with ratings like that.  While the First and the Second Doctor would still have a few strictly historical adventures, The Daleks paved the way for the future of the series.  The Daleks would return many times.  The cavemen from An Unearthly Child were never seen again.

The Daleks opens with TARDIS materializing on the planet that will later be identified as Skaro.  The Doctor and Susan want to explore.  Ian and Barbara are upset because they want to go back to 1963.  (Ian and Barbara always annoyed me but, of all the companions on the original series. they probably did have the most realistic reaction to being swept up in the Doctor’s adventures.)  The Doctor flat-out lies about needing to get mercury to repair the TARDIS and uses it as an excuse to explore a nearby city.  Soon, The Doctor, Ian, and Barbara are the prisoners of the Daleks while Susan meets the peaceful Thals in the forest.  The Daleks and the Thals have been at war for centuries and it has destroyed their world.  The Doctor tries to broker a peace, which just leads to the Daleks killing even more Thals.  The Doctor can be excused because this was his first meeting with the Daleks.  The Thals should have known better than to trust the people who specifically decided to become cyborgs because they didn’t want to ever have to stop fighting.

Seen today, The Daleks holds up fairly well.  At seven episodes, it runs a bit long and, for those of us who grew up with Tom Baker and Peter Davison in the lead role, William Hartnell’s Doctor takes some getting used to.  The nonstop bickering between The Doctor and Ian gets old quickly.  The Thals are almost too naive to be believed.

But the Daleks themselves remain a brilliant creation and, even when seen in grainy, black-and-white, it is easy to understand why they became a phenomenon.  Their relentless determination to destroy and exterminate make them intimidating but what really stands out about the Daleks is how forthright they are about what they want.  It’s not just that the Daleks want to exterminate you.  It’s that they’ll tell you that they want to exterminate you, as if it’s the most reasonable desire that any creature could have.  (One reason why The Thals are so unsympathetic is that they keep falling for Dalek tricks, despite the Daleks being pretty honest about their hatred of the Thals.)  From the minute that the Daleks make their first appearance, cornering Barbara in their city, they give Doctor Who a jolt of energy that it very much needed.

This serial ends with The Doctor convinced that the Daleks have been destroyed and will no longer be a threat.  Of course, The Doctor had never been so wrong.  The Daleks would return and Doctor Who would never be the same.