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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 Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood, The Androids of Tara, The Power of Kroll, The Armageddon Factor

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The sixteenth season of Doctor Who featured the usual six serials but, for once, they were all a part of a much bigger story.  Season 16 would open with the Doctor being assigned to find the six segments of the Key of Time and it would end with an appearance from Lalla Ward, who would not only play one of the Doctor’s companion but who would (albeit briefly) become a companion to Tom Baker himself.

The Ribos Operation (1978, directed by George Spenton-Foster)

The Ribos Operation begins with the White Guardian (Cyril Luckham) materializing in the TARDIS.  He has come to give the Doctor (Tom Baker) and K-9 (voiced by John Leeson) a mission.  The balance of the universe is maintained by the White Guardian and the Black Guardian.  The balance is at risk of collapsing unless the Doctor can track down the six segments of the Key of Time.  Each segment has been hidden on a different planet, disguised as something native to that world.  The White Guardian gives the Doctor a locater to help him find each planet.  He also gives the Doctor a new assistant, a Time Lady named Romanadvoratrelundar (Mary Tamm).  The Doctor calls her Romana.

And so stars the Key of Time saga.  As played by Mary Tamm, Romana was a new type of assistant for the Doctor.  As a fellow Time Lord (though referred to as being a “Time Lady” because this serial was filmed in 1978), Romana has just as much knowledge as the Doctor and she does not view him with the awe that other companions viewed him.  The sophisticated and almost haughty Romana is not with the Doctor for adventure.  She is there to complete their assignment.

Their first mission takes them to the icy planet Ribos and finds them getting involved with a scheme by a human named Garron (Ian Cuthbertson) to sell the largely worthless planet to an exiled tyrant named Graff Vynda-K (Paul Seed).  (In this case, “operation” means swindle.)  When Graff discovers that he’s been cheated, he comes after both Garron and the Doctor.

The Ribos Operation is an enjoyable story.  Graff is a great megalomaniacal villain and I liked the idea of trying to trick him into buying a worthless planet.  It was the future equivalent of selling swampland.  Mary Tamm also makes a strong impression as Romana.  The Key to Time saga got off to a good start.

As for the first segment of the Key to Time, it was a piece of the fake crown jewels of Ribos.

The Pirate Planet (1978, directed by Pennant Roberts)

The Doctor and Romana are next directed to a planet called Calufrax that is known for being cold and boring.  When they land, they find themselves in an apparent paradise.  It turns out that they are actually on a hollowed-out planet called Zanak that materializes around other planets and, in the style of Galactus, plunder their resources.  Zanak is apparently controlled by the one-eyed Captain (Bruce Purchase) but the Doctor and Romana discover that it is actually the Captain’s nurse (Rosalind Lloyd) who is calling the shots.

The Pirate Planet is famous for being one of the serials written by Douglas Adams.  The loud but stupid Captain and his long-suffering assistant, Mr. Fibuli (Andrew Robertson), certainly do seem like they would be at home in one of Adams’s novels and the story overall has more humor than even the typical Tom Baker episode.  It’s a clever script, though and both Purchase and Robertson give good performances as the two pirates.

The entire planet of Calufrax turns out to be a segment of the Key to Time.  When I first saw this episode as a kid, that struck me as being very weird.  It still seems weird but that’s Doctor Who.

The Stones of Blood (1978, directed by Darrol Blake)

The Doctor, Romana, and K-9 are brought to modern-day Cornwall, where Prof. Emilia Rumford (Beatrix Lehmann) and her friend Vivien Fay (Susan Engel) are studying a stone circle.  For the first two episodes of this serial, it appears that the main villains are going to be a group of modern-day druids but it turns out that the stones are actually aliens who feed on blood, and Vivien Fay is a galactic war criminal named Cessair and that she has stolen the Great Seal of Diplos, which also happens to be the third segment of the Key of Time.

This serial sees the Doctor returning to Earth for the first time since Image of Fendahl.  The first two episodes have an almost gothic horror feel to them before the serial heads in a different, more intergalactic direction during its second half.  In a clever twist, it turns out that the “stones of blood” were actually just red herrings.  After spending four episodes convincing the viewers that the key would be one of the stones, it instead turned out to be the Great Seal of a planet that no one had ever heard of.  This was another enjoyable serial, featuring a memorable villainess and a clever story.

The Androids of Tara (1978, directed by Michael Hayes)

Romana finds the next segment within minutes of landing on the planet Tara but the Doctor wants to take a break and do some fishing.  While he is doing that, Romana is attacked by a bear and rescued by Count Grendel (Peter Jeffrey).  Grendel takes Romana back to his castle, where he soon reveals that he’s not as kind as he seems.

The Androids of Tara is an adventure story that takes place on a planet where a feudal society is matched with androids and electronic weapons.  This episode gives Mary Tamm quite a lot to do as she plays not only Romana but also the Taran Princess Strella and the android versions of Strella and Romana.  Grendel hopes to marry Romana-as-Strella and become the ruler of Grendel.  The Doctor, along with Price Reynart (Neville Jason) and the swordsmen Zadek (Simon Lack) and Farrah (Paul Lavers), works to rescue Romana.  The Doctor even fights a duel with Grendel.

The Androids of Tara is a bit silly but it’s all in good fun.  Tom Baker seems to enjoy playing the swashbuckler and Peter Jeffrey, a familiar character actor, is an appropriately melodramatic villain.  This serial allows Mary Tamm her chance in the spotlight and she makes the most of it, reminding us that Romana could be just as strong as the Doctor.

The Power of Kroll (1978-1979, directed by Norman Stewart)

The TARDIS travels to a swamp planet where a crew of humans are running a methane refinery and the planet’s inhabitants (called Swampies, by the humans) worship a giant squid named Kroll.  Kroll is giant because it ate a segment of the Key of Time.  Kroll attacks both humans and Swampies until the Doctor manages to extract the Key of Time.  Kroll explodes and, since Kroll was also the main source of methane on the planet, the refinery closes.

This serial made the mistake of focusing on Kroll.  Like so many Doctor Who giant monsters, Kroll is not at all convincing.  That and some poor acting from the guest cast and a largely humorless script all combine to make this the most forgettable part of the Key to Time saga.

The Armageddon Factor (1979, directed by Michael Hayes)

The search for the final segment leads the TARDIS to the warring plants of Atrios and Zeos.  Atrios and Zeos have both been scarred by nuclear weapons.  Princess Astra (Lalla Ward) of Atrios wants end the war but the fanatical Marshal (John Woodvine) is determined to continue the war.  A mysterious figure known as The Shadow (William Squire) steals the TARDIS and abducts Princess Astra, who is revealed to also be the sixth segment of the Key of Time.  The Shadow is working for the Black Guardian (Valentine Dyall).  In pursuing The Shadow, the Doctor meets yet another renegade Time Lord and classmate, Drax (Barry Jackson).

The Armageddon Factor is about two episodes too long and is often needlessly complicated but there were a few clever moments, like the discovery that Zeos was no longer inhabited by humans and that the missiles were being launched by a super computer.  (K-9 was able to communicate with it and broker a peace.)  For viewers of the series, The Armageddon Factor is best-remembered for introducing Lalla Ward.  Dissatisfied with the way Romana was developing, Mary Tamm announced that she was leaving at the end of the season.  When Romana regenerated in the following season, she ended up looking a lot like Princess Astra of Atrios.

Doctor Who — The Invisible Enemy, Image of the Fendahl, The Sun Makers, Underworld, The Invasion of Time

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Having survived the Horror of Fang Rock, the Doctor and Leela resumed traveling through space and time.  Along the way, they picked up a new companion named K-9.  Here is the rest of the fifteenth century, which began in a British lighthouse and ended on Gallifrey.

The Invisible Enemy (1977, directed by Derrick Goodwin)

This the one where K-9 makes his first appearance.

As a story, The Invisible Enemy is no great shakes.  The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) materialize on a spaceship that has been infected by a sentient virus.  Everyone, except for Leela, gets infected.  The virus wants the Doctor to lead an infection of the entire universe.  When the virus orders the Doctor to kill Leela, he breaks free from its control.  He and Leela go to a space medical center, where Prof. Marinus (Frederick Jaeger) uses Leela’s natural immunity to help create a cure for the virus.  At one point, the Doctor and Leela are cloned and the clones are injected into the Doctor to fight the virus.  It’s a fantastic voyage for all.

Prof. Marinus’s assistant is a boxy robot dog named K-9 (voice by John Leeson).  Since Marinus has to go back to Earth, he gives K-9 to The Doctor and Leela as a gift.

How you feel about K-9 says a lot about how you will feel about the remainder of Tom Baker’s time as the Doctor.  Some fans consider the introduction of K-9 to be the show’s jump the shark moment.  A lot more, myself included, have always liked K-9 and view him — along with the sonic screwdriver — as being an essential part of the original show’s charm.  Love him or hate him, K-9, who come figure out any puzzle and who could shoot a loser from his nose, became one of the most recognizable symbols of the Tom Baker years.

Image of the Fendahl (1977, Directed by George-Spenton Foster)

The Doctor and Leela are drawn back to modern-day Earth, where scientists, witches, and cultists are all being influenced by skull that is estimated to be at least twelve million years old.  The scientists assume that the skull is human but actually, it’s the skull of a Fendahl, a race of psychic vampires who developed on the legendary “Fifth Planet.”  The Time Lords tried to destroy the Fendahl but one escaped in the form of a skull.  It first killed all the life on Mars.  (But what about the Ice Warriors and the Pyramids?  Doctor Who continuity rarely added up.)  Then it landed on Earth, where it influenced human evolution to create a race that it could use to its own advantage.

Image of the Fendahl feels like a spiritual descendant of The Daemons, with the same emphasis on rural British atmosphere and paganism (Leela teams up with a white witch) but without the assurance of UNIT waiting on the sidelines to take care of the threat.  Image of the Fendahl, with its suggestion that humanity was specifically developed to be food, is considerably darker than The Daemons and Tom Baker, so often criticized for playing up the humor of the Doctor’s character, gives one of his more serious performances.  When one of the scientists who has been possessed by Fendahl seeks to kill himself and bring an end to the threat, the Doctor hands him a gun.

Image of the Fendahl is yet another Doctor Who serial in which the main threat is revealed be the result of the Time Lords meddling.  The Fourth Doctor spent a lot of time cleaning up Gallifrey’s messes.

The Sun Makers (1977, directed by Pennant Roberts)

The Doctor, Leela, and K-9 materialize on Pluto, where they discover that colonists and workers are expected to pay exorbitant taxes to the Company or risk being exiled to the Undercity.  The Company’s tax collector is the Controller, who turns out to be a quivering mass of seaweed.

The Sun Makers is Doctor Who at its most satirical, poking fun at the British tax system.  Apparently, the original script was much more pointed in its attacks on the Inland Revenue services but the BBC, being the BBC, demanded that the script be watered down.  In human form, the Controller still clearly resembles Denis Healey, the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Sun Makers is Doctor Who at its most straight-forward, an enjoyable diversion from the more serious episodes.

Underworld (1978, directed by Norman Stewart)

The TARDIS materializes on the R1C, a spaceship that has been on a millennia-long quest to find a missing ship that was on its away to Minyos 2 and which contained the genetic files of the original Minyans who lived on Minyos 1.

This is another story where the Doctor has to deal with the bad decisions of the Time Lords.  Before adapting their policy of non-intervention, the Time Lords meddles in Minyan evolution and the end result was that the Minyans viewed the Time Lords as gods and the Minyans also used all of the Time Lord technology that they had been given to fight a civil war.  The Doctor feels a responsibility to help the crew of R1C complete their quest.

The R1C eventually ends up going through a space nebula and crashing into a planetoid, where they discover the ship they were searching for.  The crew of the ship is being used as slaves by the Oracle, a super computer.

Underworld is one of the more boring of the Fourth Doctor’s serials.  The story feels slapdash and the idea of a supercomputer was a well that the Doctor Who had already gone to far too many times.

The Invasion of Time (1978, directed by Gerald Blake)

The Doctor returns to Gallifrey and assumes his position as President of the Time Lords.  He also seems to go through a total personality change, exiling Leela and announcing that a group of psychic aliens known as the Vardans will be the new masters of Gallifrey.

Leela, even after being exiled, is convinced that this is all a part of some plan on the Doctor’s part and it turns out that she’s right.  The Doctor is only pretending to be allied with the Vardans so that he can discover the location of their planet and put them into a time loop.  What the Doctor does not realize is that the Vardans are themselves being used by the Sontarans, who are planning on invading Gallifrey.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the 15th season would end on Gallifrey.  It also seems inevitable that the Sontarans would eventually try to invade Gallifrey.  The main threat of the Sontarans has always been that they are so stupid that they will try to invade any planet.  The most surprising thing about this serial is that Leela stays behind on Gallifrey so that she can marry Andred (Chris Tanchrell), the head of the Citadel Guard.  The idea of Leela living with the Time Lords has been responsible for a lot of fan fiction and it does seem unfortunate that the show didn’t do more with the idea.

Louise Jameson had already decided to leave the show and originally, Leela was to die while fighting the Sontarans.  This was changed because it was felt Leela’s death would be too traumatic for younger viewers.  Instead, the younger viewers were traumatized by K-9 announcing that he would be staying on Gallifrey with Leela and Andred.  Luckily, for them, the final shot of the fifteen season was The Doctor looking at a crate labeled “K-9 Mark II” and smiling.

Little did the Doctor suspect that the quest for the Key of Time was waiting in his future.