The Doctor has regenerated, to the mild consternation of his UNIT colleagues and companion Sarah Jane Smith. This new Doctor is less wedded to Earth and his work with UNIT, and is eager to resume his adventures in time and space. But a demonstration of the TARDIS to UNIT surgeon Harry Sullivan sets in motion a chain of events that'll see the Doctor and his companions marooned on different planets and in times without the TARDIS to rely on. It's going to be a long trip home.
The twelfth season of Doctor Who marked a significant change in the show's production. The team that had guided the show for the five previous years - star Jon Pertwee, producer-showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks - were all moving on. Philip Hinchcliffe came on board as the new executive producer, whilst veteran Who scriptwriter Robert Holmes was promoted to script editor and head writer. Letts and Dicks stayed on for the first story of Season 12 and to help cast the new Doctor, but then moved on.
For the new Doctor, the BBC had a quandary that the higher-profile actors they'd sought in the past were getting higher pay in film and on stage then the BBC could realistically afford, and Jon Pertwee in particular had felt that the show's gruelling production schedule and action made it a tough proposition (albeit not helped by fifty-something Pertwee insisting on doing many stunts and action scenes himself). One idea had been to return more to the familial setup of the show's origins, with an older Doctor dispensing wise advice, a female companion to act the audience surrogate and ask important questions, and a younger male companion to handle the action. To this end writer-actor Ian Marter, who had already impressed as a different role in Carnival of Monsters, was cast as UNIT surgeon Harry Sullivan. Subsequently Barry Letts decided to cast Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor after seeing him in the film The Golden Voyages of Sinbad, and with Baker only being ten years older than Marter this rationale disappeared.
Hinchcliffe and Holmes decided to take the show in a consciously "darker", more adult direction. Holmes in particular decided the show had gone as far as it could whilst taking into consideration six or eight-year-olds might be watching, and informally decided that the minimum age for watching the show should be ten to twelve, capable of handling more adult subject matter. He also wanted to make the show genuinely scary again and to get kids hiding behind the sofa, something he felt had not been the case during the avuncular Pertwee era. This would eventually become highly controversial, with their run (Seasons 12-14) attracting fierce criticism for violent and disturbing content. However, their run would also be hugely critically acclaimed, generating at least half a dozen stories that could all credibly do battle for the title of "best Doctor Who story ever."
Season 12 demonstrates this starkly: there is a massive shift and tone from the first story, Robot (the last produced by Letts and Dicks) to the second, The Ark in Space (the first under the Holmes/Hinchcliffe regime). Season 12 is even sometimes cited as the show's best season not because of the quality of all five scripts (at least three of which are mediocre, at best) but because two scripts stand head-and-shoulders above the rest of the season and much of the rest of the entire franchise.
This season is also unusual in being the second (after Season 8, the "Master Season") to have an ongoing metaplot that spans the season. This is lower in profile, but the idea was to remove the formidable resources of the TARDIS from the crew; they lose access to it in the second story and then move through time and space via other means (transmats, time rings) before finally reacquiring the TARDIS in the final story of the season. Each serial also has a cliffhanger directly leading into the next one, something that had not been seen regularly since the black and white seasons of the 1960s. Season 12 was also notable at the time for being the shortest season of Doctor Who to date, with just 20 episodes (albeit of around 20-25 minutes once recaps and credits were removed, so a lot less than half the length of modern episodes) compared to the then-standard 26. Subsequent seasons returned to the standard length.
Things kick off with Robot, the swansong of the Dicks-Letts-UNIT era. The newly-regenerated Doctor is erratic, with Harry Sullivan assigned to keep an eye on him. Tom Baker's debut as the Doctor is remarkable; whilst it felt like Pertwee took a few episodes to settle into the role, Baker arrives almost fully formed, with his sonorous voice, wild staring eyes, immense reservoirs of charm and formidable moral intelligence evident from his first appearance. Tom Baker immediately is the Doctor and lets everybody know it.
The story itself is somewhat pedestrian: an amoral scientific research organisation, "Think Tank" (referenced recently in Series 15 of Modern Doctor Who) is planning to trick the world into nuclear war and then ride out the aftermath in bunkers before taking control of the rebirth of civilisation. Somewhat randomly, they decide to ensure their success by building an over-emotional giant robot who exists in a near-permanent state of existential panic. This results in one of the oddest Doctor Who stories, with the creeping threat of fascism arising in Britain being genuinely chilling at times (helped by a coldly ruthless performance as Patricia Maynard as Miss Winters) being somewhat undercut by scenes of Sarah Jane Smith helping a giant robot to explore its guilt complex. The finale, where they say sod it and just have the robot become absolutely massive and start smashing up a British town (the vfx team again making promises they couldn't quite deliver), is entertaining nonsense, but the tonal imbalance of the story makes it hard to recommend. A shame as it has a huge amount of promise.
The Ark in Space marks the arrival of a new era more emphatically (at least tonally) than almost any story before or since. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah arrive on a space station in the remote future, learning that it carries the last surviving few thousand humans from Earth, ravaged by solar flares, in suspended animation. But alien insectoid creatures, the Wirrrn, have infiltrated the station and are turning the frozen colonists into both food and incubation chambers for their offspring. The Doctor and co have to convince the reviving colonists they are friends and then work out how to defeat the Wirrrn, who can absorb the intelligence and knowledge of the species they consume, making them a formidable foe.
The Ark in Space is hands-down one of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time. The production design is brilliant, the space station is tremendously well-realised and its sleek minimalism feels like the Apple Mac has shown up a decade early. The Wirrrn themselves are an ambitious design that perhaps feels a bit too clunky, but still impressive; the scenes of human crewmembers being consumed by Wirrrn grubs and stumbling around in a half-consumed state are much more effective, as well as being more disturbing. This is definitely Doctor Who aimed at an older audience, the effects may look ropey to us now (the Wirrrn grubs are heavy on repurposed green bubble plastic) but the idea of humans being consumed as hosts for alien creatures is straight-up terrifying, and one wonders if Ridley Scott - who nearly worked on Doctor Who as a production designer in the 1960s - was sitting at home watching and taking notes (although the script for Alien was already doing the rounds in Hollywood at this point).
The weakest link in the story is probably guest actor Kenton Moore as Noah, who goes from chillingly threatening to hammy over-acting a bit too readily (sometimes in the same scene). More impressive is the supreme performance by Wendy Williams as Vira, who is chilly and efficient but remains sympathetic. Williams sells the idea of humans from tens of thousands of years in the future who have developed their own, peculiarly different culture and cultural idioms compared to modern humans. There's generally much more attention paid to detail, worldbuilding and dialogue (which was already pretty strong in the Pertwee era), which makes the story a constantly rewarding delight.
Elisabeth Sladen and especially Ian Marter are given much stronger material here as well, with Marter in particular impressing as Harry's bumbling chauvinism is overruled by a formidable sense of bravery, action and resolve. Sarah's claustrophobic mission carrying cables through a tiny service shaft surrounded by Wirrrn is also outstanding.
But it's Tom Baker who bestrides the story like a colossus, getting some of his best-ever lines, easily his best-ever speech (and maybe the Doctor's best-ever speech about humanity across the entire franchise), and tackling each problem with intelligent resolve. Any lingering doubts that Tom Baker is the Doctor were firmly laid to rest here.
After that masterpiece it's down to Earth with a bump - literally - for The Sontaran Experiment. The first two-parter since Season 2's The Rescue, and the last until Season 19's Black Orchid, this story is one of the few from the Classic era to match a modern single episode in length and pacing. So it's interesting to see how the Classic show handled having to tell a story in the same timeframe. Unfortunately, the answer is "not very well." To save money the two episodes were shot in a focused five-day period entirely on location, with the full use of video outside broadcast. Depending on your mileage, this either makes the story look weirdly unreal or a zero-budget film made by overeager students somewhere around 1987. The pressure also didn't help the cast very much: Tom Baker broke his collar bone during one shot and had to rush back to location to complete the shoot, his signature massive scarf hiding his neck brace.
The script is unremarkable, the guest cast undistinguished, and the main selling point - the return of the Sontarans after Season 11's brilliant The Time Warrior - becomes the dampest squib in the show's history. Returning actor Kevin Lindsay (justified as the Sontarans are all clones) is a good actor but his script here is just not on the same level as The Time Warrior, and Styre is an obstinate idiot compared to the magnificently scheming Linx. Given the superb quality of the Sontaran makeup in The Time Warrior, it's also odd that the prosthetics in this story are so poor by comparison. There's a lot of running around what appears to be the same rock formation on Dartmoor, there's a very stupid-looking robot causing havoc and the story arguably undercuts the premise of The Ark in Space, with it here being revealed that loads of humans have survived on remote colonies and even a few who've made it back to Earth itself. Very disappointing.
Any such feelings of disappointment are atomised by Genesis of the Daleks. The top-rated Classic Who story on IMDB, Genesis is routinely voted the best Doctor Who story ever made, the best Dalek story and the best Fourth Doctor story. It's also the story that gave Russell T. Davies the idea for the Time War in Modern Who, with the Time Lords firing a warning shot at the Daleks that would later lead to an all-out conflict spanning the entirety of creation. It certainly has competition (not least from the very recent Ark in Space), but its reputation is formidable and mostly well-earned.
Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, had returned to the show to helm some new Dalek stories, but his two previous scripts, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks had been small-scale and a bit repetitive, with Nation not shy about using stock ideas. The script proposal he sent in for Season 12 was so rote that it was rejected, but Letts and Dicks (commissioning the stories before Holmes and Hinchcliffe took over) masterfully suggested that Nation write a story exploring the very origins of the Daleks instead. Nation's resulting script, Genesis of Terror, was then thoroughly rewritten by Holmes, arguably Doctor Who's greatest-ever writer.
The result is a masterpiece. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah are intercepted by the Time Lords and sent to Skaro, homeworld of the Daleks, to disrupt the Daleks' creation. The Time Lords are fearful that one day the Daleks could become the supreme force for evil in the universe and defeat even them. The Doctor, reluctantly, agrees. He finds Skaro ravaged by centuries of war, a war initially fought with advanced weapons but now increasingly being fought with knives, bows and clubs. The planet is divided between the Thals (whom we've met before in The Daleks and Planet of the Daleks) and the Kaleds, two humanoid species, possibly just different nationalities of the same species, but who regard the other as physically and mentally inferior. The Kaleds in particular are obsessed with racial purity. The planet has suffered nuclear, chemical and genetic catastrophes, resulting in the mutation of some Kaleds into horrible creatures.
The Kaleds' chief scientist, Davros (a magisterial performance by Michael Wisher), has accelerated these mutations and placed them in experimental travel machines, creating the Daleks we all know and love, but he's also stripped them of their pity, morality and sentimentality, creating creatures obsessed only with destroying the impure and ruling in absolute power. Davros is instantly a formidable foe, the Doctor powerless as his normal appeals to rationality, scientific fact and morals falling absolutely flat. Arguably the greatest moment in the story comes when the Doctor asks Davros if he would create a virus capable of annihilating all sentient species and Davros calmly and then excitedly says he would, the power it would give him would be like that of a god, and the Doctor's expression turning to horror as he realises he's dealing with someone whose amorality would even make the Master think twice.
This is also a somewhat pitiless story: characters are gunned down without warning, Sarah and Harry are both put through the wringer (culminating in both being tortured by Davros whilst the Doctor is forced to watch) and the Daleks have never been more implacably evil and relentless. Some fans have complained about the prominence given to Davros after this story, with the Daleks becoming less master manipulators in their own right but more slaves to his will, but it's undeniable that the choice works brilliantly in this story. Davros' prosthetics work is also utterly fantastic (the makeup team made it so that Wisher could eat, drink and even smoke without having to remove his mask). But the story also has rays of hope: right from the start, the Kaleds are divided over the morality and wisdom of Davros's actions, and the Doctor finds willing allies amongst both the Kaleds and Thals to end the senseless conflict pretty easily. There's a strong message of hope in the goodness of human(ish) nature here.
This is also, easily, Doctor Who's best six-parter. The pacing is superb, with a constant shifting of the storylines as new complications and opportunities emerge.
The season ends with Revenge of the Cybermen, another historic story as it saw the return of the Cybermen in full force since Season 6's The Invasion, seven years earlier, as well as their last appearance until Season 18's Earthshock, seven years later. The Doctor and co return to Space Station Nerva, thousands of years before The Ark in Space, now serving as the base for the investigation of Voga, an errant asteroid recently caught by Jupiter's orbit. The Time Lords send the TARDIS back in time to rendezvous with the Doctor, but in the meantime the TARDIS crew have to investigate a plague, the mystery of the new moon and, obviously, the Cybermen.
Revenge is a bit of a mixed bag. The first episode is easily the best, with the mystery of the plague being compelling. The Doctor is at his most deductive and reasoning, and he uncovers what's going on with pleasing speed rather than gawping like an idiot until the script lets him work out what's happening (as Classic Who does on a semi-regular basis). The plot is also pleasingly twisty, with double agents, overlapping agendas and political intrigue between people who are really on the same side. The serial has a reasonably strong guest cast as well, and the location shooting at Wookey Hole is eerily atmospheric, despite the infamous behind-the-scenes chaos (Elisabeth Sladen being involved in a motorboat accident that hospitalised a stuntman, an electrician breaking his leg, and everyone on edge as a diver had drowned in the caves a few weeks earlier). Inheriting the sets from The Ark in Space also allows the serial to have a larger array of locations for the story to take place in than normal. Unfortunately, the decision to make the Ark less advanced than in the earlier story meant making the formerly pristine sets look dirty and dingy, taking away their impact.
The biggest problems in the story are the Cybermen themselves. The Cybermen had been a massive hit through the Patrick Troughton era for their implacable, emotionless appearances, their remorselessness and their terrifying ability to turn humans into more Cybermen. The Cybermen in this story are strangely emotional, declaring that everything is "Excellent!" and talking with weirdly transatlantic accents. Firing energy bolts from their foreheads also looks odd, and they prefer to kill people rather than convert them (despite the premise being that the Cybermen have been defeated in a war and are few in number). The Cybermen are more comical than threatening in this story, which is not the impact anyone wanted.
Season 12 of Doctor Who (****½) is a bit of mixed bag, with three pretty middling stories propping up two of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever written. The season is certainly worth watching for those two classics, and seeing the changing of the guard as Doctor Who heads into a more adult, more accomplished but also more controversial era. But if you've ever wondered how this franchise has lasted so long and has so many fans, The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks will give you a good idea.
Indomitable!
The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
- 12.1 - 12.4: Robot (**½)
- 12.5 - 12.8: The Ark in Space (*****)
- 12.9 - 12.10: The Sontaran Experiment (**)
- 12.11 - 12.16: Genesis of the Daleks (*****)
- 12.17 - 12.20: Revenge of the Cybermen (***)
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