Tag Archives: Terry Walsh

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 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.

Doctor Who — The Sea Devils (1972, directed by Michael Briant)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Having been captured by UNIT at the end of The Daemons, the Master (Roger Delgado) is now a imprisoned on a small island in the English channel.  He claims that he is reformed and he now spends most of his days watching the BBC.  (Has he not been punished enough?)

When the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Jo Grant (Katy Manning) visit the Master to try to learn the location of his TARDIS, they come up empty.  They do, however, learn that several ships have gone missing and, understandably, they suspect that the Master is involved.

They’re correct.  The Master has duped his warden, Trenchard (Clive Morton), into helping him steal electrical equipment so that he can contact The Sea Devils, a race of bipedal reptiles the live under the sea.  The Sea Devils, much like their cousins, the Silurians, were the original inhabitants of Earth.  They’ve now woken from hibernation to discover that mankind — who they last knew to be a collection of barely evolved monkeys — have taken over the planet.  And they’re not happy about it.

The Silurians and the Sea Devils appeared in three serials during the original run of Doctor Who and all of them followed the same basic plot.  The Silurians or the Sea Devils woke up from their hibernation.  The Doctor tried to broker a peace with humanity.  Humanity reacted by blowing them up.  The Sea Devils were usually more reluctant to make peace than the Silurians.  In The Sea Devils, the Doctor himself is forced to sabotage their base to keep them from attacking humanity but that’s nothing compared to the atomic bomb that the British government wanted to drop on them.  Whenever a Silurian or a Sea Devil shows up, it means that the Doctor is going to disappointed in humanity once again.

The Sea Devils is a serial of which I have fond memories because Malcolm Hulke’s novelization was the first Doctor Who book that I ever read.  (Malcolm Hulke also wrote the serial itself.)  I read the book before I even saw the show.  The novelization was my introduction to the Doctor, UNIT, and especially the Master.  Hulke was one of the best writers of the Doctor Who novelizations, taking the time to add depth to the characters.  This was especially true of Trenchard, who is portrayed far more sympathetically in the novel than he was on the show.

The Sea Devils also features one of Roger Delgado’s finest turns as the Master.  This was the Master’s first appearance during the ninth season of Doctor Who and Delgado shows that, even when imprisoned, the Master never stops manipulating and scheming.  This episode shows why Delgado’s Master was such a classic villain and truly a worthy opponent of the Doctor.  Delgado does such a good job in the scenes where The Master pretends to be reformed that it’s easy to understand how he managed to trick Trenchard.  At the end of the serial, The Master makes another escape, again by fooling the humans around him.  Delgado made The Master into a magnetic and compelling villain.

Roger Delgado appeared twice more as the Master before his untimely death in an auto accident.  Jon Pertwee later said that Delgado’s death was one of the reasons that he decided to step away from the role of the Doctor.  The Master would eventually return and he would be played by several different actors.  For me, the true Master will always be Roger Delgado.