Doctor Who Season 7: Doctor In Exile

The story so far: after William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton had fronted Doctor Who throughout the 1960s, 1970 saw sweeping changes come to the show. Incoming producer Derrick Sherwin and Peter Bryant (the previous producer prior to Sherwin) had selected Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, and had a bold new plan for shaking up the show – bring it down to Earth for an extended period and not only do you freshen up the concept, but you also help save some of the budget which might otherwise go on unusual costumes or unique sets. The length of seasons would also be slashed to 20-something episodes per season (which would last all the way through season 21), leading to a much less arduous production process than the 1960s seasons, and the show would go out in 625-line colour, rather than the 405-line black and white format it originated in back in 1963.

There’d also be a new logo; indeed, this is arguably the first time the show had an actual logo, rather than just the name “DOCTOR WHO” written in a generic font.

We kick off with a brand-new Doctor, brand-new title sequence visuals (though still with the classic music), and an iconic story – Spearhead From Space, penned by Robert Holmes and the shortest tale this season at 4 episodes (the other serials this season are all 7-parters). England is undergoing a heatwave, UNIT’s picked up something strange flying down to earth in formation, and as for the Doctor – well, the Time Lords didn’t like him so they exiled him from pace. As well as forcibly regenerating him and dispatching him to Earth, the Time Lords have broken the Doctor’s TARDIS and excised key bits of knowledge from his mind to prevent him fixing or circumventing their sabotage.

However, in the Doctor’s trial he did persuade the Time Lords that Earth needed an eye keeping on it – so they exile him to Earth and ends up picked up by UNIT. The Brigadier isn’t sure of him – having not yet experienced his regenerations – but soon is convinced of his credentials, and makes him an offer: work in conjunction with Cambridge academic Liz Shaw (Caroline John) as a scientific advisor to UNIT and he’s welcome to have room, board, and a workshop to tinker on the TARDIS in. The Doctor is not sure about this, and Shaw is initially not keen on the job either – but when they come up against the Nestene Consciousness and its plastic puppets, the Autons, the Brigadier’s point is made: Earth has made itself known to the wider galaxy, and we’d better expect visitors.

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Like Rose at the start of the 9th Doctor’s era – which also featured the Autons – Spearhead From Space has the job of essentially starting the show afresh, kicking off a brand new approach. Here, the concept is that the Doctor’s stuck on Earth, time and space travel in the TARDIS is not an option, and UNIT is relying on the Doctor to provide Quatermass-esque consultancy work. That’s no coincidental parallel; the formula was specifically inspired by Quatermass, and Derrick Sherwin has claimed that the BBC had considered simply shuttering Doctor Who and bringing back Quatermass in its place. The latter plan was scuppered by Nigel Kneale being disinclined to come back for it, and I suppose it was a logical call for Sherwin to make the case that there was no need to appease Kneale or otherwise set up a whole new team to do Quatermass when the existing Doctor Who team could do something Quatermass-like just fine.

The shift to colour means a big shift in how the show comes across, and the sense that we’re in a new era is exacerbated by the fact that the story is shot entirely on location – the BBC studio technicians were engaged in industrial action and so location work was the only option. This ends up making a virtue out of a constraint – it makes everything feel a bit more real and immediate, less artificial, less stage-y, which is a big help to establishing a more down to Earth and less whimsical style for the show. The locations are used to excellent effect – with a creepy sequence in a doll factory prefacing the eventual unveiling of the Autons themselves.

Liz Shaw is a big part of the shift to the serious – being a grown-up academic with settled opinions and attitudes of her own, not a wide-eyed young adult spirited away by the Doctor. She and the Doctor are both competent scientists; his advantage over her is in his specialist knowledge of offworld matters and in some quirks of Time Lord physiology, making her much more of an equal than we have ever seen before. She’s initially sceptical – the Yeti and Cyberman incursions having been covered up – making her a sort of proto-Dana Scully.

She’s also not 100% averse to mischief – the Doctor nudges her into trying to get the TARDIS key from the Brigadier, suggesting that there is equipment in the TARDIS he can use to help identify the Nestene probes, and she’s willing to just swipe it off the Brigadier’s desk. That would seem foolish (the Doctor just wants to take the opportunity to abscond with the TARDIS), except there’s two things which exonerate her here. The first is that the TARDIS doesn’t work – the Time Lords broke it pretty well. The second is that Liz doesn’t believe (yet) that the TARDIS is a space/time teleportation device, so she has no reason to think he’ll use the opportunity to escape, but she thinks he might have useful stuff in there so she may as well get him the key.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think the Brigadier or the regular UNIT troops in this one count as companions – Benton and Yates are more like companions to the Brigadier – but I think Liz Shaw absolutely counts (on grounds that had the TARDIS got fixed during her stint, she’d have absolutely gone on adventures with the Doctor in it), and she will pioneer a one-companion-only model which the series will follow all the way through Pertwee’s run.

It falls to Pertwee to add a note of the mercurial in his performance, but this is more of a subtle twinkle in the eye (a la Hartnell) than the more overt clownery of Troughton. He’s also less prone to panic, and a bit more sure of himself – Troughton had this fine line in having sudden moments of panic and worry, but Pertwee’s Doctor is more sure of himself, in line with the suave characterisation he goes for. He shows slightly Austin Powers fashion sense but he can pull it off without making it look utterly weird or goofy just fine.

It takes a while before we get to see much of his personality, mind – most of the first episode is spent following both UNIT and the Nestene Consciousness’s agents reacting to him falling to Earth, with him only having one brief conversation with the Brigadier to establish that he recognises Lethbridge-Stewart. Indeed, arguably it’s the Brigadier who’s the lead character for the first episode and the first half of the second – it’s him who’s trying to figure out what is going on with the Doctor, it’s his men who foil the plot to kidnap the Doctor, it’s him that Liz Shaw is acting as an advisor to, and it’s him that is trying to convince Liz Shaw that aliens are real and Earth is vulnerable to invasion.

There’s even a nice bit when a General from the regular army shows up and talks about the Brigadier being lucky to have a pretty face around, and the Brigadier says “She’s not just a pretty face, sir…” in a way which suggests he’d prefer to tell the General to go fuck himself, but instead is biting his tongue. There’d been a few sexist moments in The Invasion, but it seems that at least in this story the Brigadier has learned his lesson. The Doctor is also keen to collaborate with her from the get-go – quickly establishing a rapport, asking nicely before he addresses her in less formal terms than “Miss Shaw”, engaged with the problem she is working on, and the only time he does act tetchy it’s because he is dissing the technology available on Earth at this time, not her.

Exactly what time this is proves a problem. The “UNIT dating controversy” is an infamous stumbling block to any attempt to set an exact chronology on Doctor Who, based largely around the fact that stories before, after, and during the Pertwee era establish sufficiently contradictory details that there is simply no way to exactly say when the Doctor’s exile on Earth takes place. Ultimately, it is probably best to simply assume that the stories take place in an undefined period close to the present, far enough ahead for some dangerous scientific breakthroughs to take place. Then again, it’s just a show, so we can just relax and accept that it’s the not-too-distant future, next Sunday AD and have done with it unless we are trying to write a Doctor Who story tied to a precise date, which many of the writers were sensible enough not to do.

Speaking of writers, Robert Holmes is really coming into his own here. He cut his teeth last season, writing a story in a well-worn Who style (The Krotons) and something which was a novel experiment with some issues (The Space Pirates), but he is on absolute fire here, not only capably handling the delicate task of introducing a new Doctor and a new companion and a new status quo all in one episode but also coming up with a story that really helps set the tone for the new era.

That tone, inspired as it is by Quatermass, is not merely science fiction – it’s clearly gunning for elements of horror harder than any serial since The Tomb of the Cybermen. The Dalek Invasion of Earth happened safely in the future, and even in The Web of Fear or The War Machines or The Invasion we didn’t really see much in the way of ordinary London pedestrians being killed off by Daleks or WOTAN or Cybermen. Here, though, you get the iconic sequence where a host of shopkeeper’s mannequins turn out to be Autons, burst through shop windows into the street, and start gunning down passers-by. It’s more directly threatening than the show has ever been before – it’s never really made you feel like you might meet a Dalek the way it makes you feel here that you might meet an Auton.

The way their hands flip open is especially upsetting.

We’ll see tonal shifts like this happen again from time to time over the series’ run – the Cartmel Masterplan of the late Seventh Doctor era was a push for a darker, edgier Doctor Who, Eric Saward’s handling of the script editor job saw him anging for a darker, edgier Doctor Who, Philip Hinchcliffe’s run as producer saw him offering a darker, edgier Doctor Who the Virgin New Adventures novel line offered a darker, edgier Doctor Who, and the new show goes to the well a fair bit too.

That isn’t to say that this was a one-way street, mind – between each of those pushes there’d be a push in the opposite direction. Nor is this the last time we’d see it – John Wiles tried for a darker, edgier Doctor Who during his run but that was derailed by resistance from the cast and a lack of support from BBC management, with the darkness only perhaps fully coming out in The Dalek Master Plan and The Massacre. “Let’s make it darker, edgier, and less aimed at children” has been a recurring thing over the franchise’s existence, and a lot of the interesting creativity in Doctor Who comes when people manage to balance the tension between that and the opposing “isn’t this meant to be fun for all the family?” impulse; a lot of the show’s oddest creative cul-de-sacs and biggest failures arise when that tension gets mishandled.

The Spearhead From Space shift is perhaps the most notable time the tactic has worked. The story burned itself on the cultural imagination – among British viewers who remember this era, even among non-fans, “the one with the dummies” and “the one with the maggots” (The Green Death) are enshrined in the imagination. As scary as some of the previous stories have been, this is the beginning of the real “hide behind the sofa” era, with the air of whimsy of the First and Second Doctor gone, and with it any sense of distance or protection.

This does not solely arise from the writing, or from the realism offered by location shooting; it’s also the result of notably tuned-up production standards. Everyone jokes about Hartnell’s “Billy fluffs”, but the fact is that the odd botched line was a constant all through the 1960s – the show was being produced at a frantic rate, to satisfy a ludicrous number of episodes per season, and there was simply no time for retakes unless a take was utterly unusable. This time around, it’s a bit smoother; there’s clearly been the time to shoot retakes where it would be useful, to edit with a more artful eye, and to generally turn in a superior product, and the production team has made use of that time. As a prospectus for the new era of the show, it’s fantastic; as a continuation of the 1960s series, it’s obviously a big step forward, and one which is fairly respectful of what came before whilst staking out new territory. (The Doctor at the end even gives “John Smith” as a pseudonym to go on paperwork – which is one he used in the late Troughton era, after the pseudonym was bestowed on him by Jamie, which is a nice shout-out to the departed companions and to Troughton himself.)

Derrick Sherwin had planned to hand production duties back to Peter Bryant at this point – but the two of them were sent by the BBC to take over the production of Paul Temple instead, ending a team which had ensured that the tail-end of the Troughton era and the start of Pertwee’s run was a smashing success. Barry Letts was picked out by the BBC to be the new producer, and once Letts was bedded in, the series would witness perhaps the longest period of stability the classic show ever enjoyed.

Specifically, the trio of Pertwee, Letts, and Dicks would be the longest-running team-up of Doctor, producer, and script editor the show ever had; even though Tom Baker would last longer as the Doctor than Pertwee, he’d see a modest churn of producers and script editors during his tenure. By comparison, even as Pertwee was able to set the tone of how the Doctor would be presented on-camera, Letts and Dicks were able to shape their own vision for the series behind the scenes, initially constrained by the back-to-Earth structure set up by Sherwin and Bryant but finding novel ways to expand it, work around it, and eventually resolve it.

However, the BBC decision was so abrupt that Letts wasn’t able to contribute much time to the next story, The Silurians by Malcolm Hulke, on which he was producer in name only – in effect leaving Terrance Dicks as script editor and other production team members to muddle along without a showrunner for a serial, leading to errors like the internal production name Doctor Who and the Silurians being used for the title captions without the Doctor Who being trimmed off, as was standard practice.

This sees the debut of Bessie – the Doctor having enjoyed stealing a vintage car so much in Spearhead that he makes getting a nice one of his own a condition of his employment by UNIT, and there’s a touch of almost Second Doctor-ish whimsy early on when he’s tuning up Bessie, who he seems to have invested with a bit of self-motivation. Matters get more serious fairly quickly when he and Liz are summoned to an underground particle physics research facility, which has been beset with strange faults and power losses – the latter being particularly troubling since they risk the built-in nuclear reactor going critical. It’s the Silurians, of course – the heat from the facility has woken them up after millions of years in slumber, and they are annoyed that their nice planet is now infested with talking apes.

This season of Doctor Who has been accused of outright plagiarising Quatermass, but I don’t think it’s quite doing that so much as it’s responding to and commenting on Quatermass, which is a somewhat different prospect. For instance, Spearhead From Space took a Quatermass concept (mind controlled humans assisting an alien invasion) and added a compelling twist to it (the aliens can control plastics and have made plastic automata and replica people as part of their plot) which changes the story into, in part, a criticism of our own commercial products and materialism (our shop dummies and toy dolls turn against us, the greed of someone who finds one of the Nestene meteorites leads to tragedy).

By comparison, The Silurians takes another Quatermass concept (humans did not always rule the Earth) and inverts it – whilst in Quatermass and the Pit the Martian settlers of earth were cruel and horrendous and digging their relics up risks destroying all the progress we have made, here the Silurians are, whilst certainly prone to ruthlessness, basically an indigenous population whose home has been colonised and whose position is not without its sympathetic aspects. Exposure to the Silurians causes humans to have atavistic reactions, but unlike in Quatermass and the Pit this is not ancient mental conditioning being restimulated but a resurgence of the instincts of the proto-mammals that existed at the time of the Silurians.

This leads to a fun cliffhanger at the end of episode 3, where the Doctor turns around as a Silurian creeps up on him, and then at the start of episode 4 the Doctor just says “Hello! Are you a Silurian?” and offers a friendly handshake – because, of course, hailing from Gallifrey the Doctor doesn’t have the monkey instincts which prompt a fear reaction on encountering Silurians. It also leaves him perfectly placed to try and negotiate a peace, which alas comes apart due to hardliners on both sides.

This “both-sides-ism” is perhaps somewhat problematic if you’re reading this as a story about an indigenous people trying to push back against colonisation, though since the Silurians have vastly superior technology to the humans the power disparity here does not play out as it did in any comparable historical conflict. Indeed, it can never do so, because here humans are just as indigenous as the Silurians are. Perhaps an alternate reading of the story could be about conflict between the generations, with the older generations – the Silurians – not seeing value in the products of the younger generations.

At the same time, though, the script is clearly cribbing notes from The Sensorites, the original anti-colonialist Doctor Who story – right down to the aliens having internal squabbles involving an anti-human hardliner seeking to overthrow a more moderate leader – and so by echoing The Sensorites, the story inevitably nudges anyone who has seen that serial into viewing it through a similar lens.

Perhaps Barry Letts wasn’t keen on the both-sides-ism either: he came back to the production just in time to impose a downer ending, in which after the Doctor dupes the Silurians to return to hibernation (by convincing them that the reactor is going to go into meltdown) the Brigadier has them all blown up. In some respects, this is a gutsy stab against gradualism and any attempt to wait out an unacceptable compromise for the sake of getting minor concessions from those in power – in keeping with Letts’ outspoken leftist views. (Again: if you think Doctor Who only became “woke” recently you’ve not been paying attention.) In other respects, it creates a huge problem for the UNIT era – the Brigadier just committed genocide, the Doctor recognises it as such, but he keeps working for UNIT anyway because….?

It would be possible to fix this if, say, at the end of this story the Doctor considered leaving but decided to stay because he realised UNIT would be more kill-happy without him – but made it clear to the Brigadier that the next time the Brigadier intends to do something like that, he should plan on blowing up the Doctor too. Alternatively, the beginning of the next story might have started with the Doctor handing in his resignation, only for the crisis that comes up there to be so clearly important that he agrees to rescind it, and by the end of that story realises that there’s dangers to Earth he can’t in good conscience ignore, and which he can’t counteract without UNIT’s support. Either of those would have been something – as it is, the ending would make a good way to conclude the UNIT era by prompting the Doctor’s departure, but is a bad choice for the start of it.

Speaking of Doctor Who eras – one point that is sometimes made about The War Games is that it’s an inverted Base Under Siege story, in which the War Lord’s HQ is the base and the Doctor, his companions, and the rebels are the invading force. This is that, but even more so: the Silurians are confined to their base for the most part, whilst the Doctor and his companions go off-base from time to time to chase up clues, do research, or towards the end quarantine the area to stop the spread of a Silurian-engineered monkey extermination plague.

The epidemic plot also includes a bit where absolute turboasshole Dr. Lawrence (Peter Miles), director of the research project, refuses to take his jabs, bellows conspiracy theories, and absolutely loses his shit, eventually dying of the disease out of his obstinate refusal to admit to what is going on. This bit lands somewhat differently after COVID, but comes across as perhaps more realistic now than it did then, and more broadly the episode does a grand job of giving a sense of a spreading epidemic on a modest BBC budget, with images of the Doctor and Liz tirelessly working to find a cure overlaid over images which I suspect were taken from some sort of mass casualty simulation exercise.

The face of a man about to yell nonsense about Ivermectin.

The monkey extermination plague, plus a harrowing sequence in which the Brigadier and other soldiers are trapped underground with air running out, plus a second time the Silurians attempt to genocide humanity (this time by destroying the Van Allen Belt, at the risk of destroying the ecosystem completely) offer at least some mild reason not to write off the Brigadier as a total moral vacuum after the end of this story. Yes, he commits genocide, but elements among the Silurians have specifically tried to murder him and more generally tried to genocide his species over the course of this episode, the latter twice. Moreover, the Brigadier has not been present for much of the Doctor’s diplomacy and so does not have direct experience of differing factions existing among the Silurians. His response might be grim, but it’s eminently understandable, and is born at least in part out of trauma.

Somewhat annoyingly, Liz is delegated in the early investigation to reviewing the personnel files whilst the Doctor addresses the actual science. In principle, this makes sense – Liz is connected to academia and so might recognise names or spot inconsistencies in people’s backgrounds (should the problem turn out to be human sabotage), which the Doctor hailing from offworld would be less well-placed to do. On the other hand, when Liz is also excluded from later expeditions into the caves, she directly complains that the Brigadier is being sexist and the Brigadier ends up backed up by the Doctor, which is less defensible, and starkly at odds with how Holmes had written the dynamic between the Doctor, Brigadier, and Shaw in Spearhead (in which the Doctor takes Liz directly into the main confrontation with the Nestene). Liz stands up for herself again in episode 4, and in that go-around the Doctor gives way, and she gets to do more sciency stuff for the rest of the saga – so at least the story course-corrects, but it’s still annoying that it does this early on.

(Oh, and for those keeping an eye out for fun crossovers, a fresh-faced Paul Darrow would get a small role as a UNIT captain here, some 8 years before his debut as Avon in Blake’s 7.)

On the whole, The Silurians is not a bad story, but it is perhaps a mishandled story, as you might expect given that it was made without anyone in the producer’s chair until the end. Barry Letts’ first full serial as producer is The Ambassadors of Death, which completes this season’s “commentary on Quatermass” trilogy by providing a take on the original Quatermass Experiment – the plot of both being “space mission comes home to Earth, it is questionable whether we actually got back the astronauts we sent up”. (One might also bundle in Contamination and Lifeforce into this microgenre.)

This was David Whitaker’s last story for the show, though he had penned it with the Second Doctor in mind and so Trevor Ray, Terrance Dicks, and Malcolm Hulke had to do an uncredited root and branch rewrite to take Pertwee and the Doctor’s exile to Earth into account. In this case, it’s a Mars mission which went eerily silent during its return from the red planet – an angle later taken by none other than Species II. (Some may perceive a continuity error here – where are the Ice Warriors? – but I don’t see that this is necessarily the case. For one thing, maybe Mars has multiple intelligent species living on it – for another, the aliens in question may be from offworld and haver an outpost on Mars or in orbit arouind it, rather than being local to Mars.)

However, as always there’s a major twist here that’s not in the original Quatermass story it’s riffing on; here, the extra wrinkle is that there’s a conspiracy on Earth which was fully expecting the aliens to meddle with the astronauts, and is intent on intercepting them for their own purposes. By the end of episode 2, it’s apparent that the human plotters have agents within the government – and in fact the plot may originate there, with other sections of the authorities kept out of the loop. This is Close Encounters of the Third Kind almost a decade early and the X-Files mytharc over two decades early, and it’s a gripping twist which had me hooked. The conspiracy thriller stuff in this serial is marvellously done – it does a better job of showing the internal working of the conspiracy than The X-Files did and has some masterful bits of misdirection, like the conspiracy having prepared a cover story and fall-back plans in the event that their first layer of security gets penetrated.

Some have regarded the conclusion to the story as anticlimactic, and initially I did, but the more I think about it the more it grows on me. Key to the ending is that the entire conspiracy on the human side, despite having done vile things and brought the world to the brink of disaster, has a profound moral compass steering it – it’s just that the compass has gone entirely faulty. So of course the problem is not to defeat the villain in a fight – it’s to put him in a situation where fighting clearly wouldn’t work and firmly put it to him that he’s gone astray.

In particular, the big bad seems to cave in psychologically right at the point when the Brigadier firmly tells him that he is under arrest – the implication here being that the Brigadier is someone the villain regards as “his” sort of person, a principled defender of the Earth, and so if someone like the Brigadier is seeking to arrest him, perhaps that means he really has done something criminal. This nudge to consider his actions outside of the light of the moral imperative he’d previously working under seems to be what the villain needed to collapse like a house of cards. Of course is defeat feels deflating – it inherently is when an essentially good man realises he’s become a monster.

Pleasingly, Liz Shaw is given stuff to do this time around. Right out of the gate, she’s able to ascertain that the space centre’s computer is giving wrong answers not because it’s faulty but because it’s been sabotaged, and she cracks the coded messages that are being sent between the conspirators and the space capsule. Later on, she is recognised as a capable scientist by one of the conspiracy’s collaborators (which sells the idea that she is a well-established researcher with a good professional reputation), the conspiracy considers her worth kidnapping to make use of her skills, and whilst she is in captivity she’s brilliant, keeping her dignity and taking every opportunity to seek escape and never once going into damsel in distress mode. By the end, after the Doctor has resolved the situation, Liz takes over the job of communicating with the ambassadors to allow for their safe return. On the whole, this serial is perhaps the high water mark in the show’s handling of her.

“High water mark? In a serial where I nearly get knocked off a bridge into a river? Seriously?”

The Brigadier is somewhat redeemed in this one – the Silurian matter is not addressed bar a quick line at the start indicating that the Doctor is still grumpy with the Brigadier about the whole thing, but there’s a nice scene where the Brigadier goes out of his way to say goodbye to the Doctor before the Doctor goes on what is potentially a one-way trip up to space, suggesting a genuine friendliness, and Courtney more generally sells the viewer on the idea that Lethbridge-Stewart is genuinely worried about the Doctor, Liz, and everyone else who ends up threatened by the whole situation whilst maintaining his air of authority.

None of this undoes what he does (under orders) at the end of The Silurians, but it does at least suggest that the writing team has recalibrated and remembered to give the character the moral core he needs if he’s not going to be just an unpleasant military authority figure. What really helps is the fact that the conclusion finds him in conflict with army brass – to the point of firing on military intelligence personnel – and so he is depicted as bucking against orders when the consequences of obedience is unacceptable. It would have been good to get some sort of scene where he acknowledges that he was wrong to obey at the end of The Silurians, but it’s still a positive development.

(In other UNIT news, Benton is back after his first appearance in The Invasion, now in a Sergeant role; we won’t see Captain Yates until the first serial of next season, though.)

This serial sees a little experiment happening with the opening credits and end titles. The episode openings here begin with an abbreviated title sequence (wavy lines, Doctor’s face, show title), then cut to a little action (some establishing material for episode 1, then for episodes 2-7 a recap of last episode’s cliffhanger), then cut to the title sequence again showing the serial title, episode number, and so on. This is an interesting approach which was dropped after this serial.

What wasn’t dropped was the change to the end credits – for the title music at the end now starts with that iconic harsh synthesiser sting. Going forwards, the show would tend to play that sting over the episode-concluding cliffhanger, and it’s fantastic. Every single cliffhanger is made better by the sting; the First and Second Doctor eras are forever doomed to have cliffhangers slightly less effective than they might otherwise be due to the absence of the sting. It’s great and I’m so happy we’ve finally reached it; cliffhangers simply cross-fading into the end credits just cannot land as well as cliffhangers with a good sting on them. I mean, what is more dramatic out of these two options?

Option 1: “The space capsule has been tampered with by aliens!”

Option 2: “The space capsule has been tampered with…”

SYNTHESISER STING!

“…by aliens!”

It’s option 2, clearly. It’s particularly apt that it debuts here because The Ambassadors of Death has excellent cliffhangers all the way through, something the show would, ah, sometimes struggle with. Take this one from a few seasons’ time – it’s rubbish. The only thing which makes it even remotely dramatic is the sting itself – and that’s a sign of its power if ever there was one.

The season finale is Inferno, written by Don Houghton (the first of two serials he’d contribute to the Pertwee era). With no more Quatermass stories to riff on, Houghton had to come up with a new concept here – in this case, it’s a research project drilling deep into the Earth’s crust. There’s fatal flaws with the project, with nightmarish goop coming up from the drilling rig (shades of later controversies about fracking!) and causing bizarre transformations in those who it affects. The Doctor was on-site already, because he and Liz are piggybacking onto its excess power output in order to try and fix the TARDIS console. This goes wrong when on a test run the Doctor ends up propelled into a parallel universe. This turns out to be a dystopian place, where the Brigadier, Liz Shaw, and everyone else is present in distorted, evil versions of themselves…

Yes, this might not be a Quatermass riff, but we can’t 100% rule out there having been inspiration from Mirror, Mirror, the season 2 Star Trek episode. The BBC had started airing Trek by this point, and although Mirror, Mirror hadn’t aired yet, the BBC picked up the rights to all the episodes and were picking through them to select their own order to air them in, so it’s far from impossible that word of the Mirror, Mirror concept may have percolated through to the Doctor Who team at some point.

The parallel universe angle is arguably padding – without it, the serial’s concept is good for a three or four-episode Base Under Siege story and not much more than that. Houghton, however, is able to do clever things with it. The first couple of episodes, before the Doctor ends up in the mirror universe, allows Houghton to set up a lot of the characters and conflicts within the drilling project – which helps tease out the contrasts in the parallel world. Moreover, we don’t entirely lose sight of our familiar Brigadier and Liz Shaw – we get snippets of them holding down the fort in the main timeline whilst the Doctor tackles with the villainous Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart and Section Leader Liz Shaw.

And the alternate timeline stuff is fantastic. It’s certainly unsubtle – there’s Nazi-esque uniforms, 1984-style propaganda posters, and quasi-Nazi uniforms – but it gets the message across. Everyone is clearly having fantastic fun playing villainous versions of their mainline-universe characters – even the ones who are assholes in the main universe – with Nicholas Courtney offering a fantastic take on a mirrorverse Brigadier who, between his eyepatch and his scar, feels like he may have been an influence on the character of Travis in Blake’s 7. (Indeed, it’s a crying shame that, when Stephen Greif quit Blake’s 7 after season 1, they didn’t get Nicholas Courtney to play the role in season 2 instead of the rather underwhelming Brian Croucher.)

“Blake’s 7? Hmm, sorry, not interested.”

In terms of the supporting character, Olaf Pooley has a great turn as Stahlman, the head of the drilling project in both of his variations. Whilst in the mirrorverse he’s presiding over it as a “scientific labour camp”, in the main universe his management style isn’t much better, and pretty much everyone acknowledges it; the big problem is that he’s the person who’s been given authority, and unless someone can be prevailed on to overrule him the situation is just going to get worse and worse. It’s the sort of thing which seems unrealistic only if you haven’t experienced or heard any horror stories about toxic work environments, and feels all too plausible if you have. (His utter disregard for safety margins may have seemed unreasonable to some viewers, but in the wake of the Titan submersible disaster and the details of just how absurdly shoddy the vehicle was, it doesn’t seem so unrealistic now.)

This, alas, would be the last Liz Shaw serial – Barry Letts decided she was “too intellectual” as a character to make for a good companion and decided not to renew Caroline John’s contract. She gets no departure scene – in the next serial we’ll just get some dialogue at the start about how she quit her UNIT job and went back to Cambridge, and that’s it. On the one hand, this is a crying shame, and Letts’ stated reason for doing it is outright obnoxious – Liz was a wonderful character, never seemed out of her depth when tackling scientific enigmas, and was an outright style icon at that; one could absolutely imagine an alternate take on the Third Doctor era where Caroline John plays not Liz but the Third Doctor, and it would have worked great.

On the other hand, that’s perhaps part of the problem. The writers seem to have sometimes struggled to find much for Liz to do, and whilst unexamined 1970s sexism on their part may have contributed to this, another part of the issue is that her skillset overlaps with the Doctor’s too much – meaning that any time she is doing science, the Doctor could also be doing science, and because his scientific knowledge is much more advanced than any human’s can be in the 20th Century he can’t help but overshadow her there.

It is notable that the serial which used Liz best, The Ambassadors of Death, managed it by keeping her separated from the Doctor for a good chunk of it. Likewise, this story does interesting stuff with Liz by devoting a good chunk of its running time to the alternate Liz – Section Leader Shaw of the British Republic – and Caroline John actually says she found the parallel universe parts of this story much more fun than the mainline universe sections.

Barry Letts’ “too intellectual” opinion may be mildly appalling, but it’s sort of hitting on the issue – an intellectual companion would be absolutely fine, but the companion needs to be a sufficiently distinct type of intellectual from the Doctor to avoid constantly being overshadowed and rendered redundant. As it stands, Caroline John’s departure ended up being more amicable than it might have been – she’d already decided to quit because she’d become pregnant – but it still marks a deeply unfortunate moment in the show’s history, a squandering of the character’s potential. Maybe Liz didn’t quite fit the companion role, but that doesn’t mean she could not have been part of the fabric of the UNIT era going forward, providing scientific backup where necessary.

Elizabeth Sandifer argues that the parallel universe stuff is mere filler, and not important to the resolution of the story. However, I think that it does provide something important – an illustration that without people of good intentions around him, the Doctor can’t save the day, and a society which has been as fascist as long as the British Republic has (at least since 1943, based on some of the dialogue, so I think we are meant to assume that this is a Britain which fell to the Nazis) is going to institutionally craft people who will tend to be unable to act generously. In such a situation, personal survival is the only thing which can be achieved, and is a fairly weak achievement at that – but when Liz and others who recognise that Stahlman’s gone off the rails act in concert, things can be brought off the precipice.

I also have to call out Sandifer’s assertion that the survival of the kindly Sir Keith Gold (Christopher Benjamin) is unimportant – when Sir Keith comes back he is able to call out Stahlman’s tampering with his chauffeur, which is an important contribution to the overall sense of social disapproval against Stahlman. Yes, it doesn’t prompt an immediate, direct cause-and-effect unravelling, but it is a penny in the scales, and it’s the accumulation of those pennies in the scales which Inferno is about in the end – the sense that it is not one single action which makes the difference between our world and the other one, but the cumulative effects of lots of small decisions. The decision to stop requires characters to break protocol, and it is not easy on them to do it. Eventually, the decision is made easy when Stahlman turns out to have turned into a Primoid horror – and that is perhaps the cautionary note to the story; everyone knew that Stahlman was in a meltdown, but everyone was being a bit too British and proper to step in until it became absolutely impossible to do otherwise.

Really, the only thing I have against Inferno is something which it isn’t fair to hold against the individual serial – it’s that, as Sandifer points out, this season has done three stories of the format “scientific institution has something going wrong, authority figures are interfering”, and something’s got to give. However, I think Sandifer is unduly unkind to this serial – which is disadvantaged by dint of coming third, whereas the first serial of this form (The Silurians) is the one which is outright dodgy.

Barry Letts probably realised that change was needed – certainly, Terrance Dicks did. Dicks had never been keen on the exile to Earth, and Malcolm Hulke took the view that the UNIT framework made it hard to come up with stories which were not either of the form “aliens show up” or “mad scientist does something inadvisable”. Nonetheless, just as season 5 did a fine job despite being mostly focused on Base Under Siege stories, this season manages to do fantastically within its constraints.

Still, pushing on further with this approach unchanged may have been too much. It was high time for a change, and that change didn’t include Liz Shaw – though fortunately, further tweaks were made. Firstly, Letts called time on seven-episode stories, and very sensible as far as I am concerned – despite Inferno and The Ambassadors of Death making decent use of that time, Inferno relied on the alternate universe trick to fill all seven episodes. Season 8 would see the show shift to a 4-6 episode per serial standard which would hold all the way through the Fourth Doctor era.

Season 8 also saw additional regular characters entering the mixture, Letts recognising the benefits of having familiar faces showing up from serial to serial. Along with Jo Grant, the Doctor’s new companion, the next serial would also see the arrival of Captain Yates, who’d establish a double-act with Benton in short order. More importantly, the season would consciously feature a recurring villain more heavily than the show ever had in the past. Yes, next article we’re going to see the debut of…

SYNTHESISER STING!

…the Master!

Best Serial: Holy shit, this season has some amazing candidates for this. Spearhead From Space, The Ambassadors of Death, and Inferno are all grand. Of those three, I think Inferno suffers a little from an ending which is a bit of a done deal; it could have more happily been a six-episode serial, with the parallel universe stuff tightened up and the plot developments of episode 7 stuffed into the back half of season 6. Spearhead From Space is alright, but a bit of a simple story once the palaver around the Doctor’s regeneration has been sorted out. So it’ll be The Ambassadors of Death as my pick this time.

Worst Serial: By contrast, this one’s easy – The Silurians has an interesting concept but a fairly weak execution.

Most Important Serial: You’d think this was a fairly obvious one – it would have taken something really major to shake Spearhead From Space from this slot, since that introduces us both to the UNIT era and the Third Doctor. However, The Ambassadors of Death debuts the cliffhanger synthesiser sting, something that will far outlast both the Third Doctor’s tenure and the UNIT era and play a small but significant role in the presentation of every subsequent episode (at least of the classic era, I forget whether new-Who has kept the sting). Moreover, Pertwee is much less present in Spearhead than he will be in subsequent serials, and UNIT already got its introduction in The Invasion. Therefore, the choice has to go to…

SYNTHESISER STING!

…The Ambassadors of Death.

Least Important Serial: Clearly it can’t be Spearhead From Space or The Ambassadors of Death, and The Silurians will get a sequel a touch later (and be further mined in the new series). That means Inferno takes this category by default – even though it’s the final Liz Shaw story, it doesn’t do anything with that, since her departure gets handled in dialogue at the start of the next serial.

Season Ranking: This season ends up benefitting a lot from brevity – both because there’s less individual episodes and less serials, it has less opportunities to trip over its own feet than any previous season, and aside from The Silurians all the serials here are top-notch. And that means…

1. Season 7 is my new pick for “best so far”.
2. Season 6 really is not far behind it, and perhaps would be ahead if Bryant and Sherwin had the luxury of a shorter season with less serials at the time – if they’d have been able to just decline to make The Dominators the show would have been in better shape.
3. Season 4 isn’t far behind though, and nor is…
4. Season 5, and nor is…
5. Season 2, rounding out the top tier.
6. Season 1 was another series where the show was trying to stake out a new concept, but had various disadvantages, not least the fact that the season 7 crew had the benefit of hindsight.
7. Season 3 remains the bottom of the barrel.