Tag Archives: Elisabeth Sladen

Doctor Who — The Hand of Fear (1976, directed by Lennie Mayne)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The TARDIS materializes in a quarry and, for once, it’s an actual Earth quarry and not just an alien plant that looks like a quarry.  An explosion both knocks Sarah Jane Smith out and also exposes a fossilized hand that has been hidden away under the rocks for centuries.   The hand belongs to an executed alien was criminal named Kastrian Eldrad (Stephen Thorne, playing yet another Doctor Who baddie).  When the hand is found, it starts to search for sources of radiation so that it can fully regenerate back into its original form and then seek revenge on its home planet.

The Hand of Fear would have been a standard Doctor Who adventure, except that it ended with Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) announcing that she can no longer handle the death, violence, and occasional mind control that goes along with being the Doctor’s companion.  She asks the Doctor (Tom Baker) to return her to South Croydon.  The Doctor reluctantly agrees.  While Sarah is packing her things, The Doctor suddenly gets a telepathic message telling him to come to his home planet of Gallifrey and he realizes that, even if Sarah wasn’t leaving, he would not be able to take her with him.  When The Doctor tells Sarah this, it upsets Sarah.  Even though she impulsively decided to go home, it’s obvious that it’s not really what she wants.  When The Doctor drops her off on Earth, she tells him not to forget her and we know that he never will.  As the Doctor dematerializes, Sarah looks around and sees that she’s on Earth and probably in England  but nowhere close to South Croydon.Plenty of companions had come and gone before this episode but none of them had quite the impact of Sarah Janes Smith.  Sarah was one of the few companions to actually be viewed as being an equal of the Doctor.  Even though she spent a lot of time doing typical companion things like being menaced by aliens and asking the Doctor to explain things, Sarah Jane still always projected a determination and inner strength that made her more than worthy to be traveling through time and space.  Even dressing like Andy Pandy during her final appearance couldn’t diminish Sarah Janes Smith as a character.

Elisabeth Sladen had the perfect rapport with both Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.  Sladen and Baker were apparently close enough that they improvised their final goodbye and the emotions in that scene feel very real.  For viewers like me, who were introduced to Doctor Who by PBS airing the Fourth Doctor’s adventures, Sarah Jane was the first companion that we met and her suddenly leaving came as a shock.  She just seemed as if she was meant to be a part of the TARDIS crew forever.

Sarah Jane Smith would return, of course.  There was K-9 and Company in 1981.  There were the Sarah Jane Adventures, which ran from 2007 to 2011.  Sadly, the wonderful Elisabeth Sladen passed away in 2011.  For many of us, it felt like losing a valued a childhood friend.

Doctor Who — The Seeds of Doom (1976, directed by Douglas Camfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Working on behalf of World Ecology Bureau (?), the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Slader) are sent to a remote research station in Antarctica where an expedition has unearthed two mysterious plant pod.  The Doctor recognizes the pod as a Krynoid, an alien that survives by laying its seeds in a host organism who is then slowly and painfully transformed into a plant.  One of the members of the expedition, Winlett (John Gleeson), has already been infected.  The infection is so bad that the Doctor is forced to say that there is nothing that can be done to save Winlett, other than amputating his arm to try to slow the infection.

While the Doctor and Sarah Jane try to deal with the Krynoid, a pant-obsessed millionaire named Harrison Chase (Tony Beckley) learns of the pod’s existence.  He sends two of his henchmen, Scorby (John Callis) and Keeler (Mark Jones) to collect it for him.  While the now fully mutated Winlett kills the other members of the expedition, Scorby and Keeler steal one of the pods.  Scorby blows up the base, killing Winlett and nearly killing the Doctor and Sarah Jane as well.

That’s all in the first two episodes of this six-episode serial.  The remaining four episodes find the Doctor and Sarah Jane (and eventually UNIT) invading Chase’s estate and trying to destroy the Krynoid before it grows big enough to destroy all animal life on Earth.  Chase becomes possessed by the Krynoid, Keeler turns into fungus, and several people are strangled by plants.  There’s even a death by mulcher.

The Seeds of Doom is one of those serials that has really stuck with me.  I think it’s because of how desperate the Doctor gets once he realizes that he’s failed in his mission to keep the Krynoid from escape Antarctica.  Tom Baker was usually known for being the funny Doctor but, in this episode, he’s almost an action hero, smashing through windows, beating up numerous henchpeople, and maybe snapping one man’s neck.  (It’s hard to tell if the Doctor killed him or just rendered him unconscious.)  It’s a different side of the Doctor but it’s appropriate because, for once, the Doctor isn’t one step ahead of everyone else.  There’s no time for fun and games when the Krynoid has already taken over Chase’s entire estate.

Harrison Chase was one of the best of the Doctor Who one-off villains.  Tony Beckley gave a great performance as Chase, playing him as someone who was an evil fanatic even before his mind was taken over by the Krynoid.  By the end of the serial, as he rants while bullet fly around his estate, Chase has become a truly wonderfully loathsome character.  Watching him, it’s easy to imagine Tony Beckley playing a minor villain in a James Bond movie.  (Sadly, Tony Beckley died just four years after playing Harrison Chase.)

Still, the moment that has always stuck with me is Sarah Jane discovering Keeler, covered in spores and grasping onto his last strands of humanity before becoming a Krynoid.  There was always considerable debate over whether or not Doctor Who was too scary for its target audience.  That debate usually seems pretty dumb but I imagine The Seeds of Doom inspired more than a few nightmares.

The Seeds of Doom brought the 13th season of the classic series to an impressive end.  The Doctor and Sarah Jane decided to take a vacation.  They had earned it.

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 — Pyramids of Mars (1975, directed by Paddy Russell)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Did you ever wonder who built the pyramids of Egypt?

It was the aliens, of course!

In 1911, Dr. Marcus Scarman (Bernhard Archard) excavates a pyramid.  When he enters a room that has the Eye of Horus over the doorway, he is hit by a beam of light.

Months later, The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Slader) materialize at the Scarman Estate in England.  They run into Dr. Scarman’s friend, Dr. Warlock  (Peter Copley).  (Dr. Warlock?  Really?)  Warlock explains that Scarman has been missing every since he went to Egypt and that his estate is now occupied by a mysterious man named Namin (Peter Maycock).

Namin is eagerly waiting the arrival of Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf), who Namin thinks is an ancient Egyptian god but who is actually the last-surviving member of the Osirian alien race.  The Osirians imprisoned Sutekh on a temple on Mars but Sutekh has taken over the body of Scarman and is using him to construct a missile that will free Sutekh from his Martian prison.  The possessed Scarman returns his estate, kills Namin, and gets to work.

Pyramids of Mars takes the usual Doctor Who themes of aliens and time travel and mixed them with mummies and ancient Egyptian curses.  This serial doesn’t skimp on the horror.  Sutekh tries to strangle almost everyone he meets and, once the Doctor and Sarah reach Mars, there’s plenty of scenes of mummies come to life and stalking pyramind to appeal to the most discerning of viewers.  Pyramids of Mars is one of the Doctor Who episodes that is perfect for October!

Doctor Who — The Ark In Space, The Sontaran Experiment, Genesis of the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen, Terror of the Zygons

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The 12th season of Doctor Who got off to a shaky start with Robot, a serial that was ultimately distinguished only by the introduction of Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor.  The best thing about Robot is that it ended with The Fourth Doctor peeking out of the TARDIS and inviting Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) to join him on his further adventures.  By inviting them, he was inviting the audience as well.

The remaining episodes of the 12th season not only established Tom Baker as the Doctor but it also reestablished Doctor Who as being a show about an alien who could travel through time and space.  After several seasons of The Third Doctor largely staying on Earth and in the present, the 12th Season reminded everyone that the Doctor could turn up anywhere.

The Ark In Space (1975, directed by Rodney Bennett)

The first place that the Doctor takes Sarah and Harry is to Nerva, a space station that floating above the Earth.  The time is 10,000 years into the future.  Forced to flee the Earth due to solar flares, the crew of the space station has spent a millennia in suspended animation.  During that time, the space station has been invaded by the Wirm, a space insect that has laid its eggs in some of the crewmen.  When everyone is revived, the infected crewmen are transformed into creatures that are half-human and half-insect.

The Ark in Space is a classic space opera.  When I was a kid and our PBS station first started to broadcast Doctor Who, they started with a four-hour bloc, which included Robot, The Ark In Space, and The Sontaran Experiment.  After Robot, with its basic plot and bad special effects, it was a relief to then see The Ark In Space, a serial that lived up to all of the Doctor Who hype.  Not only did Tom Baker fully step into the role of the eccentric Fourth Doctor but this serial also featured Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter in active roles as well.  This serial said that the days of the passive companion were (temporarily) over.

The plot of The Ark in Space does have some similarities to Alien, which came out for years later.  I think that’s probably just a coincidence.

The Sontaran Experiment (1975, directed by Rodney Bennett)

Having defeated the Wirm and saved the remaining colonists on the Ark, The Doctor, Harry, and Sarah transport down to Earth to repair a receiver terminal.  They discover that the Earth is not as deserted as they assumed.  A group of human astronauts returned to the planet earlier but they were captured by Styre (Kevin Lindsay), a Sontaran who has been sent to Earth to prepare it for an invasion so that the Sontarans can use the planet as an outpost in their never ending war with the Rutans.

This serial was only two episodes long but The Sontarans were always good villains.  They’re relentless, destructive, and very, very stupid.  This story featured one of Tom Baker’s best moments, when he convinced Styre to throw away his weapon because it made him look weak.  Styre fell for it because Sontarans will fall for anything.

Genesis of the Daleks (1975, directed by David Maloney)

This is it.  This is the first true classic of the Tom Baker era and also the best of the classic Dalek stories.  Terry Nation was invited back to Doctor Who to write about his most famous creations and he created one of the show’s most enduring villains in the process.

A Time Lord appears to the Doctor and his companions and tells them that they need The Doctor to change history.  (This goes against all Time Lord law, which is why they gave the job to a known renegade like The Doctor.)  The Daleks have been determined to be too much of a threat.  The Doctor is to go back to the time of their creation and “interfere.”

The Doctor, Harry, and Sarah Jane find themselves on Skaro, where the war between the Thals and the Kaleds have left the planet ravaged and inhospitable.  The Thals and the Kaleds each live in a domed city and spend their days shooting missiles at each other.  Terry Nation often said that the Daleks were meant to be a stand-in for the Nazis and he makes that clear in this episode with the Kaleds wearing SS-style uniforms and spouting theories about racial superiority.

In this episode, Nation introduces Davros (Michael Wisher), the horribly scarred and crippled scientist who will ultimately be responsible for transforming the Kaleds into the Daleks.  (The Kaleds who don’t want to be Daleks are wiped out by those who do.)  Davros would appear in every subsequent Dalek episode of classic era Doctor Who and his effectiveness would be diluted by repetition.  In his first appearance, though, he immediately establishes himself as a frightening and truly evil Doctor Who villain.  If their first appearance suggested that the Daleks retreated into the shells for survival in their nuclear-ravaged world, this episode shows that it more about Davros wanting to play God.

A six-episode serial, Genesis of the Daleks more than justifies its epic length.  The heart of the serial is a moment when the Doctor, on the verge of wiping out the Daleks forever, stops to wonder if he has the right to do so.  This was a key moment in the development of The Fourth Doctor.  The Fourth Doctor may have been an eccentric but he was an eccentric with a conscience who realized that even the worst creatures deserved a chance at redemption.  In the end, The Doctor does not destroy the Daleks, though he does set back their evolution by an undetermined number of years.  As the Doctor explains it, good will always rise up to counter the evil of the Daleks.

This episode features the apparent destruction of Davros but you can never keep a good villain down.  Both Davros and his creations would return.

Revenge of the Cybermen (1975, directed by Michael Briant)

After a classic Dalek story, I guess it was inevitable that Doctor Who would feature a Cyberman episode.

Following the events of Genesis of the Daleks, the Time Lords return The Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Harry to the Nerva space station.  They arrive several centuries before the events in The Ark In Space.  Without the TARDIS (it’s traveling back through time to meet them), The Doctor and his companions discover that the majority of Nerva’s crew is dead and that the remaining members are using the station as a space beacon to warn people about a drifting planetoid.  The planetoid is made of gold and the Cybermen show up at Nerva because, being uniquely vulnerable to gold dust, they want to destroy it.

If Genesis of the Daleks re-imagined the Daleks, Attack of the Cybermen proves to be just a typical Cybermen story and a disappointing one.  The best thing about this episode is that it gave Tom Baker a chance to once again prove his Doctor bonafides by defeating a classic Doctor Who villain.

Terror of the Zygons (1975, directed by Douglas Camfield)

Terror of the Zygons was the first seral of the thirteenth season but, since it’s also Harry Sullivan’s final appearance as a regular member of the TARDIS crew (though he would return in a later episode for a one-off appearance), it still feels like a twelfth season episode.

Having been reunited with the TARDIS, the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Harry return to present-day Earth.  The Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) and UNIT are investigating attacks on oil rigs by a giant sea creature.  Sea Devils, again?  No, this time it’s the Zygons, who are far less sympathetic.

This was a typical UNIT story, the type of thing that Jon Pertwee did regularly.  Tom Baker’s more mischievous version of the Doctor feels slightly out-of-place with UNIT but it is still a pleasure to see Nicholas Courtney and John Levene again and this episode finally explains what everyone has been seeing in Loch Ness over the years.  This episode ends with Harry returning to UNIT while Sarah Jane and the Doctor returned the TARDIS.  Harry Sullivan was a strong character and producer Philip Hinchcliffe later said it was a mistake to write him out of the series.

Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan, continued to be associated with Doctor Who as one of the better writers of the Doctor Who novelizations.  He also wrote two stand-alone novels featuring Harry’s adventures without the Doctor.  Ian Marter died of a heart attack when he was just 42 but Harry Sullivan lived on, frequently being mentioned in both the classic series and the revival.

That’s it for the 12th season, the season that truly made Tom Baker the Doctor and which was one of the best of the classic series.  As these were the first episodes of Doctor Who that I ever saw, I have a lot of nostalgia for them.  The Ark In Space, The Sonatarn Experiment, Genesis of the Daleks, and even Terror of the Zygons still hold up well to this day.

 

Doctor Who — Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974, directed by Paddy Russell)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Fresh from defeating an attempt by a Sontaran to disrupt British history, the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and his newest companion, reporter Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), return to present-day London and discover that it has been transformed into a ghost town.  Dinosaurs are roaming the streets.  The Doctor teams up with UNIT to try to figure out who has been monkeying with time but what he doesn’t know is that the trusted Captain Yates (Richard Franklin) is working with the people responsible for the dinosaur invasion.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the second serial of the 11th season.  Like The Sea Devils, this was another case where I read the novelization long before I got a chance to see the actual serial.  Well-written by Malcolm Hulke, the novelization really got me excited to watch Invasion of the Dinosaurs.  It did not prepare me for how fake the dinosaurs would look.

It was to be expected, though.  Classic Doctor Who was never known for its wonderful special effects.  Instead, it was known for rubber monsters, torn costumes, and alien landscapes that were often made out of cardboard.  For many of us, that was a part of its charm.  The dinosaurs in this serial look like toys that have been unleashed on a still photo of London.  I’ve read that the serial was criticized for its bad dinosaur effects when it originally aired 1974 and that was long before Jurassic Park made everyone take the idea of seeing a realistic dinosaur for granted.

 

Despite the very fake dinosaurs, Invasion of the Dinosaurs still has one of the better scripts of the Pertwee era.  The villains aren’t the typical evildoers who usually showed up on Doctor Who.  Instead, they are people who have convinced themselves that the only way to save humanity is to dial back time to what they consider to be the “Golden Age,” before technology and industry blighted what they believe to be the ideal landscape.  Of course, they plan to take only the very best among the population to their golden age with them.  The villains are elitist environmentalists, convinced that they and only they know what is best.  This may be the first episode of Doctor Who where the main antagonist, Sir Charles Grover (Noel Johnson), is a member of Parliament.

Captain Yates’s betrayal of UNIT and the Doctor adds some emotional depth to this story.  While Yates was never as important a character as the Brigadier or Sgt. Benton, he was still present for almost all of the Third Doctor’s adventures and the small scenes where he would flirt with Jo Grant were some of the most awkward moments of the Pertwee era.  Captain Yates was a loyal member of the Third Doctor’s entourage and his betrayal was motivated not by greed or resentment but instead by a desire to make the world a better place.  The novelization made it clear that it was actually the terrible things that Yates saw as a member of UNIT that convinced him that time needed to be turned back.

This was the final Jon Pertwee story to be set entirely on Earth and, though Yates and the Brigadier would return for Pertwee’s final serial, it was the last true UNIT story of the Pertwee years.  Jon Pertwee had already decided that the 11th season would be his last.  The 12 season would feature a new Doctor.  And while the BBC considered actors like Graham Crowden, Bernard Cribbins, and Jim Dale for the role, the Fourth Doctor was ultimately be played by Tom Baker, an actor who was working as a construction worker when Invasion of the Dinosaurs first aired.

Doctor Who would never the same.