The Doctor's exile on Earth continues, to his consternation. A new threat arises with the arrival of the Master, a fellow renegade Time Lord but one who bends his skills towards conquest and destruction. UNIT, the Doctor, and new assistant Jo Grant have to take on the Master in a series of battles with the fate of Earth hanging in the balance.
The seventh season of Doctor Who saw an improvement in the show's fortunes, which had been looking dicey as the 1960s came to an end. The show moved into full colour with a new Doctor, a new companion and a whole new paradigm, along with more action, explosions, stunts and gadgets. Season 8, airing in 1971, saw the production team refusing to rest on their laurels and changed things up again, though a bit more modestly this time around. They decided to make five stories rather than four, meaning they could drop the episode count per serial. The three seven-part stories in Season 7 were a bit on the long side. Season 8 would instead have two four-parters, two-six parters and, splitting the difference, a five-parter.
The decision was also made, for the very first time in Doctor Who history but certainly not the last, to have a season-spanning arc, revolving around a new Time Lord nemesis called the Master. The Doctor had previously - twice! - faced off against an antagonistic Time Lord called the Monk (in Season 2's The Time Meddler and Season 3's The Daleks' Master Plan) but the feeling was that he was more of a bumbling comedy foe than a serious threat. The Master was conceived of as a Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes, his direct nemesis and counterpart on the side of evil. Not only was the decision made to introduce the Master, but to have him in every story of the season, with a loose linking storyline with the Doctor trying to capture his foe whilst he in turn is trying to escape Earth (after the Doctor inadvertently traps him there in the first story of the season). Roger Delgado plays the Master with absolute charm and relish, and sparks off Jon Pertwee most excellently.
Things kick off in Terror of the Autons, a direct sequel to the previous season's excellent Spearhead from Space. The alien Nestenes are once again planning to invade Earth with their plastic-controlling powers and Auton warrior-constructs. The Master joins forces with them, but the Doctor is alerted to his presence by the Time Lords, who are concerned about the Master's level of threat to them and to innocent lifeforms. The Doctor also has to join forces with a new companion, UNIT assistant Jo Grant (the splendid Katy Manning) after the somewhat abrupt, off-screen departure of Liz Shaw. The resulting story is a bit overstuffed - it has multiple guest stars, the first appearance of the Time Lords since the Doctor's exile started, and also introduces Richard Franklin as UNIT Captain Yates - given its runtime. It also has some of the less effective vfx of the season, such as the character killed by an inflatable sofa and the ugliest murderous doll known to man. It's entertaining but not a patch on Spearhead, though at least Roger Delgado gets a good workout from carrying the serial on his shoulders.
The Mind of Evil makes better use of its greater episode count to incorporate more characters and tell a bigger story. The Master plans to use a mind-control machine, disguised as a way of curing career criminals, to help him start WWIII by sabotaging a peace conference between the United States and China, which the UK is hosting. This plan involves taking over a prison and capturing a passing biological warhead (as you do). Oh, and he also needs to recover his missing TARDIS dematerialisation circuit, so has to lure the Doctor into a trap.
The result is a surprisingly pacy story with lots gong on, with returning writer Don Houghton employing some of the same techniques that made Inferno such a success in the preceding season (sadly, this would be Houghton's last script for Who). The segues from diplomatic thriller to prison break-out drama to action movie as UNIT storms the prison are well-handled, and the guest cast is great. The story even manages to be pretty good (by early 1970s standards) at how it handles the China subplot, employing actors of Chinese origin and having a minor plot point revolve around being able to speak Hokkien rather than the more common Mandarin (we'll assume the TARDIS was totally offline in this story, so its translation circuits were not working...I'll get my coat). Jo is also on great form here, using her UNIT skills to single-handedly stop a prison riot in its tracks and constantly working to undermine the Master's plans. Throw in some decent action sequences and you have a reasonably entertaining story, though not as good as Inferno.
The Claws of Axos is the most disappointing story of the season, despite the presence of a respectably gargantuan frog. It has a terrific opening as UNIT is collaborating with British and American forces on how to find the Master, only for an alien spaceship to arrive on a collision course with the Earth. Cue fusillades of defensive missiles, the Doctor arguing with a bloodthirsty-but-dim British politician as only Pertwee can, with the Brigadier caught in the crossfire. Things improve as we find out the Master is a prisoner of the Axons (putting him on the same side as the Doctor and UNIT from the off, for once) and the humanoid Axons are terrifically realised, with some great prosthetics work and eery performances.
Unfortunately the story goes for a bit of a wander, and the story feels more poorly-paced than Mind of Evil despite being an hour shorter. The conclusion to the story is unnecessarily convoluted as well, and Jo gets a lot less to do (though her single-handedly storming an alien spaceship to rescue the Doctor is kind of badass). Still, there's a lot of great ideas here, like the Brigadier having to reluctantly employ the Master as interim scientific advisor in the Doctor's absence, even if they don't entirely succeed.
Colony in Space is a test-run for the producers hoping to end the Doctor's exile on Earth, with the Time Lords reactivating the TARDIS and sending it (with the Doctor and Jo on board) to the planet Uxarieus in the year 2472 to apprehend the Master, although oddly the Time Lords don't actually bother telling the Doctor any of this, hoping he'll figure it out. On Uxarieus, the Doctor finds a group of peaceful colonists at odds with a ship from an interstellar mining corporation which is planning to strip-mine the planet, whilst the native inhabitants are either ignored or killed. This is a Malcolm Hulke (The Silurians) special, putting together some complex worldbuilding and dealing with themes like colonialism, corporate corruption and environmental devastation, but wrapping it in a lot of fistfights, gun battles and creepy aliens. The episode is let down by some terrible effects (the colonists being scared off by a back-projected image of an iguana is particularly dumb) but some very effective location filming in a quarry. The Master feels a bit shoehorned in and the six-episode length kills the pacing in the home run, with the colonists and mining corporation turning the tables on one another so often you often forget who's got the upper hand at any moment. The ending also feels a bit random. But, an entertaining enough story.
The season wraps up with The Dæmons, a story whose reputation has waxed and waned over the years. At one point it was considered the best Pertwee story and one of the best Classic Who stories full stop (top ten, certainly), but it then went through a lengthy period of derision. Watching it for the first time in around thirty years, I was relieved to find it's closer to the former than the latter. This is easily the best-written Pertwee story to date, with a witty script full of top banter between the UNIT crew and the Doctor. Captain Yates and Corporal Benton have way more to do than normal, including at one point flying into the threatened village in a helicopter hilariously emblazoned with G-UNIT on the side, with Yates wearing a most fabulous coat. Guest star Damaris Hayman destroys everyone else with her unhinged-but-upper-crust performance as a white witch (who 100% ruthlessly seduces Benton the second this story is over), and the Master as the leader of a sinister coven prone to saying things like, "so mote it be!" is 100% a brilliant idea.
The story also goes to some wild places, with the entire village sealed off from the entire world via a "heat dome" that will make you ponder if Stephen King and/or the writers of The Simpsons Movie watched this story at some point, and a tone that veers seamlessly from The Wicker Man to Hot Fuzz. The Brigadier unable to get into the village and having to work with his Doctor-from-Temu Sergeant Osgood (probably the father/grandfather/uncle of UNIT's Petronella Osgood from New Who's Series 7 through 9) is also comic gold. The only major weaknesses are that Jo really does get sod-all to do, and in fact is treated rather harshly by both the Doctor and Yates for no real reason, and the way the sinister Azal is defeated is a bit out of left field, likely a result of the last minute rewrite that saw the story move from a six to a five-parter.
Season 8 of Doctor Who isn't quite as accomplished as its predecessor, but is still an entertaining enough instalment of the show. Roger Delgado is charming, charismatic and occasionally menacing as the Master, but he's also overused here, with too many rapid-fire appearances diluting the character. The stories can also be a tad repetitive: the Master joins forces with the evil alien invaders of the week, only to realise they're going to double-cross him, so he then swaps sides and helps the Doctor defeat them instead, and manages a last-minute escape. The stories here - especially The Dæmons - thus benefit more from being watched individually than binged sequentially. Even in the weaker moments there's usually some good ideas going on. We also get a splendid new companion with Jo Grant, but she suffers from serious character decline over the season, with the effective UNIT agent trained in escapology, armed and unarmed combat of the first two stories replaced by a standard ditz-who-needs-constant-rescuing by the end. Still, future seasons offer opportunities for improvement.
The eighth season of Doctor Who (****) 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.
- 8.1 - 8.4: Terror of the Autons (***½)
- 8.5 - 8.10: The Mind of Evil (****)
- 8.11 - 8.14: The Claws of Axos (***)
- 8.15 - 8.20: Colony in Space (***½)
- 8.21 - 8.25: The Dæmons (*****)
No comments:
Post a Comment