Doctor Who Season 11: Doctor In Bereavement

The story so far: the Third Doctor has outlasted the First Doctor and Second Doctor, at least in terms of numbers of season (though his seasons are half as long), having endured three seasons in exile and one season of freedom. Behind the scenes, Terrance Dicks has been script editor throughout Pertwee’s tenure, and Barry Letts was producer for all but his first story; by now a stable cadre of writers has been established. For a while, this stability led to consistency, but last season we saw signs that it risked leading to gradual stagnation, with the pool of ideas beginning to dry up.

Trouble is coming, though. In between the production of the first and second stories this season, Roger Delgado will be involved in a terrible accident whilst filming a TV drama about a vintage motor race; he and the technicians in the car with him die when the car plunges into a ravine. The tight-knit family around the show has been disrupted terribly. Can the gang pull it together and help Pertwee go out on a high? Or will the awful bereavement leave them barely able to string together an entertaining story?

Pertwee got a new intro sequence for this season – it’s kind of a rough draft of the intro Tom Baker would have for most of his run, and debuts the iconic diamond-shaped logo which the show’s recently reverted to an updated variant of. The season opener, The Time Warrior by Robert Holmes, opens in the medieval era, taking us back to the historical past for the first time in the Pertwee era. (The Time Monster goes into the past, of course, but it’s a fanciful depiction of a Minoan-like Atlantis, not anything historical.)

Of course, this isn’t a pure historical by any means – soon enough an alien has landed and made contact with a band of baffled human warriors, who are astonished to witness it claim Earth on behalf of the Sontaran Empire. Yes, that’s right – Doctor Who‘s potato-headed answer to the Klingons make their big debut here! Soon enough, the Sontaran in question – Commander Linx (Kevin Lindsay) – is offering high-tech weapons to the locals and cooking up nefarious schemes.

Back in the present, the Doctor is helping out UNIT still. The fact that he’s doing this at all – despite having a working TARDIS and Jo no longer working with him – is perhaps a little stretch, but we can perhaps attribute it to a combination of his friendship with the Brigadier and the fact that Lethbridge-Stewart’s current problem is close to the Doctor’s heart – someone’s messing with essentially peaceful scientists, and the Brigadier is worried about the disappearances and is attempting to provide protection.

It turns out that Linx is using a time machine to abduct them to the past, so he can use them to advance his own plans. When Linx performs his next time-kidnapping, the Doctor is able to get a trace and pursues him in the TARDIS. Meanwhile, feminist journalist Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) has infiltrated the centre where the Brigadier has sequestering scientists believed to be at risk, using her aunt’s invitation for her cover. When the Doctor takes the TARDIS on his pursuit of Linx, he doesn’t realise Sarah Jane has snuck onboard…

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Yep, this is the debut of not only the Sontarans but Sarah Jane herself – one of the most beloved Doctor Who companions ever, to the point of being the subject of not one but two spin-offs, K-9 and Company (which did not get beyond a pilot episode) in the early 1980s and The Sarah Jane Adventures as a kid-oriented side project of the revival series, just as in parallel Torchwood was a more adult-oriented side project.

It took a little while to cast her; initially, April Walker was given the role, but it quickly became apparent that she and Pertwee weren’t gelling and she was let go. (A rumour circulates – not to Pertwee’s credit – that Pertwee got grumpy about Walker being taller he preferred his companions to be and urged Letts to fire her.) Sladen and Pertwee got on well from the start, though, and Sladen is able to make an instant impression here, both off the back of a great performance and Robert Holmes stepping up to the challenge of writing a strong female character when back here in 1973 examples of such in science fiction were thin on the ground.

Take the first interactions between the Doctor and Sarah Jane: he suggests that she will be handy to have around to make the coffee. Whereas Jo inviegled herself into his affections by doing so and then making herself useful in more active ways, Sarah Jane immediately tells him off for it – at which point he doesn’t apologise as such, but pops into the TARDIS to make himself some coffee, suggesting that he’s realised that he’s taken the wrong tack and accepts that he can’t expect Sarah Jane to do such chores for him. Likewise, when she refuses to be fobbed off with a glib answer when she asks about the Doctor’s equipment, so he then gives her a full and complete answer.

In other words, she might be written as a stock “angry feminist”, but Sladen plays her annoyance at just the right level – she’s not ragingly angry, but she does get justifably annoyed when the Doctor acts in a way which is, in fact, annoying – and Pertwee seems to have found a way to respond to her which doesn’t compromise the Third Doctor’s authority but at the same time doesn’t suggest he is annoyed by her reactions or thinks she is being unreasonable.

Sarah Jane’s initial reaction to time travel is great – she’s bemused by the TARDIS apparently teleporting but doesn’t realise she’s gone back in time (having stowed away without the Doctor’s knowledge), and so when medieval warriors come running at her she assumes that it’s some kind of LARP or tourist trap. Linx is weirded out when he sees her and talks up how the Sontarans have eliminated sexual reproduction as inefficient in favour of mass cloning – though, of course, since the Sontaran culture seems a bit dystopian and Linx is ultimately defeated by Sarah and the Doctor working together, his claims are thereby undermined.

As far as the reaction of the medieval folk to Sarah Jane, they are varied – medieval England was a society with well-established, firmly enforced gender norms, and so some regard her as mad, especially among the bandits working for Irongron (David Daker), the warlord that Linx has allied with. Others, like Irongron’s foes Edward of Wessex (Alan Rowe) and Lady Eleanor (June Brown), regard her as an oddity and probably the product of a strange and foreign culture, but precisely because of her oddity regard her as a strange exception to the usual rules, and since she’s able to rescue their agent from Irongron’s castle come to trust her.

This plays in to by far the cleverest thing Holmes does with the plot here. You see, not only is the Doctor unaware of Sarah Jane infiltrating the TARDIS, he doesn’t become aware of her for the entire trip back – after all, there’s plenty of space to hide in there. This means he’s initially unaware of her, and she investigates separately from him after they make their repsective exits from the TARDIS. As a result, he is the only time traveller she becomes aware of – Linx being somewhat hidden away in the bowels of the castle for the most part – which means that she draws the incorrect but completely understandable conclusion (especially since she doesn’t know the Doctor works for UNIT yet) that it’s the Doctor who is responsible for the time-abductions, and spends about half the serial convinced he’s the villain and working against him.

That means that once she gets Sir Edward onside and blags her way onto a raid on Irongron’s castle to deprive Irongron of the Doctor’s aid (on the very good grounds that only she knows what the Doctor looks like), she ends up capturing the Doctor – gaining a power over him no companion has ever enjoyed before. The Doctor is able to swiftly and efficiently get her onside – in part because Sarah glimpses Linx during the raid and realises quickly that he doesn’t belong in the medieval period either – but this still means that she spends half the serial working at cross-purposes to him, gets the upper hand, and then adjusts to work with him once he levels with her and offers information she hadn’t had previously.

This is a total, fundamental change from the way almost every previous companion has met up with and interacted with the Doctor in the past. Almost all of them have either been friendly from the start or neutral parties that the Doctor wins over in the course of the story in which they were introduced; the major exceptions would be Ian, Barbara, and Sara Kingdom, all of whom were initially suspicious of the First Doctor when they encountered him, none of whom actually managed to outmanoeuvre him the way Sarah Jane does here. She then saves his life multiple times in episode 4, securing her spot in the TARDIS wonderfully.

Linx is nicely realised here – his big potato face may be a little silly, but his space armour manages the trick of simultaneously looking like futuristic protection whilst still having enough signifiers of “armour” for it to make sense that the medieval warriors take him as being a strange knight from beyond the stars. The Sontarans have become slightly comedic figures in more recent iterations, partially because they look doofy when they aren’t wearing their helmets, partially because Star Trek (via Worf) did a fine job of playing “proud warrior from a culture built around warfare” as a semi-comedic archetype, and partially because there’s a grim sense of humour about how Holmes depicts Linx here.

Klingons are fine, but are they delicious baked in the oven and slathered with butter and grated cheese? No, clearly not.

It’s not so much that he is clownish so that his society’s dedication to war verges on the parodic, and because ultimately his meddling with medieval history is basically a bit of fun on his part – something to entertain himself with and to keep paying for his room and board with Irongron whilst he repairs his ship. As a result, what seems to us to be the most relevant and impactful aspect of his intervention, the meddling with our history, is basically an irrelevant side-effect to him, an angle which I don’t think we’ve seen Doctor Who take before, having erred more towards temporal meddling or alien invaders with a particular agenda in mind for the Earth. We’d see the series come back to this sort of thing later – it’s a good basis for a quasi-historical story – but Holmes deserves the credit for pioneering the approach.

Something which Elizabeth Sandifer pointed out in her article about this story is that this was produced at the end of the season 10 production block, and filming on it wrapped mere days before the tragic death of Roger Delgado – something which massively demoralised a swathe of participants in the show who’d worked with him regularly, Pertwee in particular. This perhaps casts a pall over the rest of season 11 – Pertwee apparently no longer found the role fun or rewarding after this, and so perhaps if we find shortcomings in his performance in the remainder of his stories, that is a reason why.

Next up is Invasion of the Dinosaurs by Malcolm Hulke, where the Doctor and Sarah Jane return to the present, only to find that London is curiously deserted. As the serial’s title implies, dinosaurs have invaded – but why? Clearly some more time travel shenanigans have taken place, and the dinosaurs can’t have taken themselves forward in time.

This was one of the last serials to have any of its original episodes deleted by the BBC (the policy stopped before any Fourth Doctor episodes got wiped), and also the last one where the recovered episode is a bit shaky – whereas most of the wiped Pertwee episodes have been recovered from the archives of TV stations around the world, and therefore were in good quality, the only source found for episode 1 of this six-episode serial was a janky black-and-white print held by private collector, superfan, and consultant to the Nathan-Turner era of the series Ian Levine (an individual who I will likely end up mentioning later). It’s been recolourised, partially manually and partially through the chroma dot method, so we can’t judge its visuals too harshly – but even there, special effects shortcomings are apparent, with at least once instance of a soldier “firing” his submachine gun by sort of just waving it slowly and gently in the air, no blanks or other effects, no attempt made to mime any sort of recoil. It’s pathetic, and pathetic on a level well beneath the show’s usual standards by this point.

From episode 2 onwards, the visuals are pristine – wherein lies much of the rest of the problem. See, when it comes to the actual dinosaur action this was Doctor Who‘s attempt at a kaiju story, except it seems like the production team had no idea how to tackle such a project. Godzilla had been out for some 20 years at this point and had been a global hit; Doctor Who had been rolling out monsters in rubber suits for close to a decade. It should have been entirely viable to put some people in Tyrannosaurs costumes or similar and have them stomp around on a model set and produce something which, if not on the level of full-budget kaiju movies, at least passed muster for the purposes of this serial.

Alas, no. Whilst I’m not usually one for ragging on Doctor Who for bad special effects, I think it becomes fair game when the show is trying to something which it should have been able to do entirely viably with the resources it had at the time and craps the bed. The Tyrannosaurus costume is entirely too stiff and inflexible for the poor performer inside it to do very much at all – there’s shots where I couldn’t work out where it was bad costume work or bad puppetry or bad stop-motion, the movements are so stiff. The Colour Separation Overlay special effects are unusually janky even for an era which was constantly trying to push the technology further than it was really happy with.

Smaller-scale dinosaurs fare little better; Pertwee has rarely seemed more bored with the show than the bit in episode 4 where he has to fend off a rubbish Pterodactyl puppet with a mop. That’s not the only respect in which Pertwee and most of the other regulars seem to be off their game. Sladen is giving it 100% (and Sarah Jane gets some moments of being right on the ball), but Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin, and John Levene seem subdued and not entirely into it. Once you know this was the first serial produced following the death of Roger Delgado, it’s hard not to speculate that this might have had an impact – and, for that matter, might have prompted Dicks and Letts to half-ass the script editing and production side of things.

Franklin being off his game is particularly unfortunate, because this script makes the error of giving an unusually prominent role to Captain Yates – he’s in on the conspiracy to bring the dinosaurs back, and ends up working to sabotage the Doctor’s efforts to solve the crisis. He’s deeply ambivalent about doing anything which will harm the Doctor, which raises the question of why he’s fine with collaborating with a plot to cause massive death and destruction by invading London with dinosaurs with the intent of clearing humanity away from the range of the timescoop, so it can be used to project a select elite (some witting, some unwitting) into the distant past, prior to the rise of humanity, so they can give the whole “human race” thing another go.

In other words, this is the serial where Captain Yates turns out to have become an ecofascist, having been troubled by the events of The Green Death and utterly lost any grasp of his moral compass. As important as ecological issues are, planning to wipe out the vast bulk of humanity (which is what this time travel plot ultimately entails) to ensure the survival of an elite few is outright fascism and genocide however you cut it – as morally appalling as, say, the plot outlined in The Waters Rising. Part of this plot involves Hulke riffing on the “people stuck in a confined space and lied to about the outside situation” angle from The Enemy of the World – almost certainly deliberately since the architect of the plan, Professor Whitaker, is named after David Whitaker who wrote that story. In this case, the dupes believe they are on a colony ship to the stars, not in a nuclear bunker – this presumably being to trick them into thinking they are colonising a remarkably Earth-like planet, not Earth in the past.

It’s a nice twist which helps perk things up a bit in the latter half, but there’s a raging problem here – namely, Yates’ involvement. For one thing, it’s an utter character assassination of him – it’s just bizarre that after all his experiences with the Doctor he’d end up being so callous, and the idea that he’d only get qualms about all this once people he knew and liked became victim makes him seem a morally vacuous hypocrite. The one thing which stops it being a complete inversion of his characterisation to date is that he hasn’t really had much characterisation to date for this to contradict.

The other issue is that Richard Franklin either lacks the range as an actor to pull this subplot off or, if we’re being more generous to him, was perhaps not up to the challenge during a difficult time for the tight-knit regulars of the UNIT era. When he is having it out with his co-conspirators about the Doctor being endangered, the whole thing comes across more like a petulant schoolboy complaining to his peers about not having ice cream for dessert than a morally outraged man objecting to the direction the plan has gone.

What’s even worse is that by the end of the serial, Yates doubles down to the point where he pulls a gun on the Brigadier, Benton, and the Doctor, showing every intent of using it, and has to be wrestled into submission by Benton. He does not back down even a second. His character arc this serial essentially has him on the precipice of going full ecofascist, and then concludes with him embracing it, and in a scene which could only be more of a betrayal if he’d said in the midst of his villain speech “Oh, by the way: Jo Grant was rubbish and Bessie is a stupid name for a car.”

“Sorry, Brigadier, I’ve been reading Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and I’ve decided Hitler had some good ideas.”

At the end, the Brigadier allows him to take sick leave and then quietly resign his commission, in light of his service history, but this is ridiculous: the dude joined a conspiracy to exterminate the vast majority of the human race and, eventually, became willing to threaten lethal violence in the continuation of that conspiracy, and you’re going to let him run around free? At least the Master was obliged to contrive an escape attempt rather than being let go after being told how disappointed everyone was in him. (Terrance Dicks was apparently intending for Yates to be killed off outright in this story, but was overruled by Barry Letts; I suspect Letts might not have been able to stomach depicting the fictional death of a regular supporting character immediately after the real death of a supporting actor.)

More generally, if you are going to denounce ecofascism, you need to make it clear that the problem is the fascism, not the ecology. I am not sure the serial manages this, brief speeches at the end about the necessity to make the best of the hand we are dealt on Earth rather than harkening back to a fictional golden age aside. Among the folk on the fake spaceship is Lady Ruth Cullingford (Carmen Silvera), a toff and politician who takes a leadership role among the colonists. She pointedly includes “usury” among the evils of human industrial civilisation, and is quick to advocate that Sarah Jane be re-educated or, if that fails, killed when she refuses to go along with the colonists’ misanthropic attitudes towards the remainder of humanity, and initially I thought she’d prove to be one of those fully in the loop about the plan – a ringer planted among the dupes to keep them in line.

However, that isn’t how things pan out – once Sarah Jane reveals the deception, Ruth turns against Whitaker along with all the other colonists, which in turn suggests that the New Earth plan wouldn’t be all that bad if it had just involved a bunch of elitists mouthing antisemitic dogwhistles going into space and abandoning the rest of humanity to die of ecological collapse for real. As such, the serial not only fails to tease apart the ecology and the fascism, it doesn’t even seem to think a lot of the fascism is that bad, with only the wiping out of human history in total being regarded as beyond the pale.

The fake spaceship sequence does at least give Sarah Jane a chance to be awesome and competent by deducing that the spaceship is a fake and proving it to the others even before the Doctor and Brigadier are able to mount a rescue. Nonetheless she’s more or less the only character who comes out of this serial better-served than when she went in; everyone else looks faintly rubbish. The Doctor even loses Bessie, having had her replaced with a crappy car that looks like something out of some cheesy 1950s space opera, not a vehicle for him to use in the UNIT era – which this serial is, by and large, a pretty sorry example of. If ever there were evidence needed that the time was coming to give UNIT a rest, this is it.

This was Malcolm Hulke’s last TV serial written for the show – Elizabeth Sandifer has written interestingly about how he shifted after this into handling novelisations. Hulke’s departure is something of a watershed – after helping out on The War Games he’d had one serial per season for the entire Pertwee era, and his stepping down from writing new stories perhaps helped catalyse the cycling-in of new writers as the Fourth Doctor era dawned.

Sandifer makes particularly good points about how the central conspiracy plot here has aged like milk – “ecologically-minded scientists are faking an emergency to reshape society” being an all too familiar right-wing denialist talking point these days, one which has every capacity to kill us all. But even at the time, this story clearly doesn’t measure up. It’s rubbish in execution and tells a story whose thematic implications are at best muddled, at worst irresponsible. Not only is this bad, but it’s bad in a way which falls catastrophically short of the standards the show set for itself. Bar for further establishing Sarah Jane as a badass investigator who absolutely deserves to inherit Jo’s mantle and go travelling through time and space with the Doctor, it is utterly worthless.

Next up is Death To the Daleks by Terry Nation. The Doctor has convinced Sarah Jane to come with him on a holiday to a luxury beach planet, but the TARDIS suffers a mysterious energy drain, causing it to land on the planet Exxilon. It turns out there’s a bizarre city on the planet that’s causing it – a relic of a bygone age, a self-sustaining, artificially intelligent complex that the advanced ancestors of the local Exxilons created only for it to run out of control, with the result that the Exxilons have have descended into a new stone age in which they worship the city as a god.

An Earth party has come here from the Marine Space Corps, seeking a rare chemical which is the key to curing a plague, only to fall prey to the same energy drain. They sent a distress signal, but no human source picked it up – instread, a Dalek ship arrives, and promptly suffers the same fate. It seems that the humans and Daleks must end up working together if they are to survive. But does this meeting of forces mean extinction for the Exxilons, horror for the humans, or Death To the Daleks?

This story is shit.

Moving swiftly on, the next serial is The Monster of Pela–

OK. OK. I’ll talk about this story: it’s an absolutely rubbish story which comes across as though Terry Nation handed in a first draft and then Terrance Dicks just didn’t make any effort to whip it into shape. The pacing and editing is outright awful; there’s way too many instances of the characters just meandering around in limp action sequences with no or minimal dialogue, sometimes without even any background music or sound effects; if you wanted to see plenty of dull shots of the Doctor or Daleks strolling around somewhat dull, featureless corridors that have been half-assedly knocked together by the set department, this is your jam.

(Note that Robert Holmes made uncredited script editing contributions here, serving a sort of apprenticeship under Dicks in preparation for taking over the role. I guess the lesson Dicks wanted to impart here was “Look here, Robert, this is what happens when you let Terry Nation get lazy and submit hackwork.”)

Episode four is absolutely interminable in this respect – it’s a long, boring dungeon crawl through an astonishingly dull dungeon, mostly consisting of bare green walls. To give you an idea of how bad the dungeon is, just inside the entrance is a room full of skeletons the skeletons of people too stupid to solve an utterly simple maze puzzle of the sort that you usually get on the kids’ menus at fast food restaurants. I believe this is the moment where you can see Pertwee going from being tired and bored of the show to actively resenting still being part of it, and I was tickled when, after I watched the serial, I checked out Elizabeth Sandier’s article on it and find that she’s also picked that as a likely moment Pertwee chose to quit. It’s a monumentally goofy moment.

The stuff that happens away from the dungeon is little better. Despite having ample access to a perfectly good quarry, way too many outdoor scenes are shot on soundstage sets which would have seemed drab and low-effort even in the First Doctor era. That quarry, incidentally, looks distressingly like the same quarry where The Dominators was filmed. It isn’t, but the idea of there being one cursed site where horrible Doctor Who stories go to die is compelling. (The stories even have a “baddies compel locals to do digging work in the quarry” angle in common.)

The sloppy pacing and editing extends to the cliffhangers, all of which are rubbish. The third episode cliffhanger is justifiably infamous; apparently episode 4 overran, so they had to transfer some material to that to episode 3, shifting the cliffhanger away from its intended position into an utterly mundane moment, though episode 4 drags so much that it seems astonishing that they wouldn’t have been able to trim it back instead just by cutting back on the drab corridor scenes. The first cliffhanger is another victim of bad editing: the Daleks show up (an utter non-surprise because we have all seen the episode title), declare they’re just going to murder the humans plus the Doctor, and fire away. Now, obviously, the power drain has affected them too and their weapons are useless – but the end of the episode lingers entirely too long on their gun mechanism operating, long enough to make it utterly blatantly obvious that they’re just mashing the mechanism and nothing is happening.

Really, that should be it for the Daleks: after all, if their weapon systems are affected, all their technology working off static electricity should, so they should be stuck inside their mechanical carapaces unable to move or YELL IN THAT AN-NOY-ING STAC-CAT-O. But they stick around to be really, really rubbish allies – unable to do much beyond wobble about, yell unhelpfully, and get helplessly zerg rushed by the locals, whilst a cadre remains behind in the Dalek ship to develop alternate weaponry. The Doctor mentions at one point that they can still work because the Dalek organism inside can use psychokinesis to move around and SHOUT AN-GRI-LY, which is not just a retcon but an absolutely blatant patch to the story that exists solely to explain why this contrived situation onworld that Nation has devised doesn’t leave the Daleks helpless.

I guess Nation wanted to do a “the Doctor and the Daleks are forced to work together against a common threat” story, but this is pretty weaksauce stuff and he perhaps sensibly gives up on it fairly soon. Ultimately, if you want to make that sort of story work, you first need to have a crisis which feels big enough to justify it, and you need to actually make it the focus of the whole serial, rather than just a brief angle that gets dispensed with after a desultory attempt to make it work.

“WE ARE ON STRIKE!” “TELL TER-RY NA-TION WE ARE GOING BACK TO OUR TRAIL-LER!” “WE WILL NOT PER-FORM IN ANY MORE SCRIPTS WHICH MAKE US LOOK RUB-BISH!”

Other bits of the writing fare no better. Nation shows no command of Sarah Jane’s character, gaining the dubious distinction of writing the first script where she really spends a lot of time screaming, crying, and getting captured like threat-bait companions of the past. (She’s also unpleasantly xenophobic when she meets a friendly alien towards the start of episode 3.) The Doctor is more infuriatingly paternalistic towards her than he has at any point so far this season, and whilst Pertwee tries his best to sell it, Elisabeth Sladen can’t quite go along with it and I honestly can’t blame her.

Oh, and despite trying for a stock anti-colonialism story, Nation ends up throwing in some utterly needless racism by having the ancient Exxilons turning out to have built the pyramids of Peru. Yes, he goes full Von Daniken here, and in the most offensive way possible by having the Doctor blithely declare that no “primitive people” could possibly make a pile of rock in a pyramidal shape.

If you squint very hard and are a big Blake’s 7 fan, you can sort of spot areas where Nation seems to be batting about very fuzzy, rough, early versions of ideas later implemented much better in that show. The Earth crew wear badges which look like sideways version of the iconic Starfleet logo from Star Trek – and just such a sideways logo is used in Blake’s 7, albeit rotated the other direction. There’s a Jill Tarrant here (played by Joy Harrison), Blake’s 7 has a Del Tarrant. Perhaps most significantly, the second in command of the Earth group, Dan Galloway (Duncan Lamont) agrees a deal with the Exxilons and Daleks to kill the Doctor and Sarah Jane and genocide a group of dissident Exxilons who aren’t keen on the whole “worship a society-destroying city” thing in return for the help of the Exxilons in accessing the special mineral both the Daleks and Earth folk want, which is very Blake’s 7-ish.

That mineral, incidentally, is called parrineum, which unfortunately is pronounced exactly like “perineum”, AKA the taint. However, as I have hopefully made clear by this point, this is far from the biggest problem in this serial. If anything, it’s a lifeboat – something to cling to to get some semblance of amusement out of the whole thing, because goodness knows it won’t entertain you otherwise. This is terrible – terrible. Easily the worst Doctor Who story encountered in this review series so far, and it isn’t even close, and that’s kind of incredible because it’s stealing a crown that Invasion of the Dinosaurs would have had a lock on had it not been for this story.

Nation is just tired out as a writer here, at least when it comes to Dalek stories. He’s just run out of stuff to do with them and is constantly repeating himself. Unfortunately, we’ll have another one next season. What’s it called again? Genesis of the Daleks? Ugh. On the basis of this and Planet of the Daleks, I see absolutely no reason to expect that will be any good at all.

Anyway, as I was saying: the next serial is The Monster of Peladon. It’s fifty years since The Curse of Peladon and Queen Thalira (Nina Thomas), daughter of King Peladon, now reigns. The Federation is at war with Galaxy 5, who are presumably a whole notch higher on the asshole scale than the folk of Galaxy 4. Trisilicate from mineral deposits discovered on Peladon may turn the tide – but the locals are superstitious and mistrustful of new mining technology. Part of the problem is that when they try to take new sonic tools down into the mine, an apparition of Aggador appears and causes a miner to evaporate. Obviously, since it’s well within living memory since the last time someone tried this scam, so nobody is fooled and the serial ends without incident.

No, no, sorry, I wish that were the case. Object permanence and institutional memory are apparently alien to the culture of Peladon, so it works a charm. Oh well, at least the Doctor and Sarah Jane are here to team up with Alpha Centauri, who’s still green and turgid after all these years.

This was Brian Hayles’ last serial written for the show, and that may be connected to this being the last significant appearance of the Ice Warriors in the classic series, who fell by the wayside due to lacking an enthusiastic creator fighting their corner. That may be for the best, because Hayles uses this serial to horrendously invert the moral of the Ice Warrior arc in Curse. In that serial, the Ice Warriors are suspected by the Doctor but prove to have turned over a new leaf since the Second Doctor’s encounters with them. Here they turn heel again, completely undermining their prior face turn. Sure, in-universe fifty years have passed – but only two seasons and zero Ice Warrior stories have gone by for us and so rolling back the face turn is not only an unimaginative use of them, but also mars Curse of Peladon in retrospect.

Likewise, after spending the whole former Peladon serial trying to make the face that Federation membership needn’t mean Peladon gets ruthlessly exploited for resources, this serial depicts how it means exactly that, with the aristocracy utterly failing to pass on the benefits to the common folk, with the result that the miners have become violent rebels, anti-alien racists and, even worse, Brexiteers. Produced in the context of real-world industrial action by miners, depicting a bunch of working-class miners as a rabble of superstitious rubes is a great example of the sort of blithe elitism which stoked the fans of Brexit in the first place.

So far as I can tell, Hayles seems to broadly understand how a failure of the benefits of Federation membership in the story (or EU membership given the allegory he was developing in Curse) to percolate down to everyone would lead to a collapse in popular support for membership – but still seems to feel unable to side with the miners in any but the most patronising way by depicting them as easily-bamboozled superstitious dupes. Easily-bamboozled superstitious dupes were, of course, involved in Brexit – but they’re distributed throughout society.

Now, it’s one thing to do a story about how the victories of a previous tale become eroded and worn away by greed and short-sightedness over time and must be reaffirmed, but this goes beyond that and feels like a statement that the Doctor did more harm than good in Curse of Peladon, that the isolationists in that story were right after all, and we were fools to cheer last time. The plot point about the villains betraying the Federation to Galaxy 5 is also unhelpful – it shunts away all the questions about whether Federation membership is really worth it by blaming a lot of the excesses on Peladon on the traitors deliberately stirring shit.

Perhaps the worst aspect here is the way Alpha Centauri – one of the few points of continuity – keeps calling the folk of Peladon primitive barbarians. The violence of the miners perhaps reinforces this view, but if you’ve been here for fifty years and have been subjected to so much violence that you have to rely on absurdly harsh security measures to get by, that’s not membership of a Federation, that’s occupation. It’s also in strikingly harsh contrast with Alpha Centauri’s far more diplomatic view of them in Curse, giving rise to the impression that Alpha has come to this view after fifty years of residence, so it’s an attitude born of experience, not ignorance.

Sarah Jane and the Doctor suffer the traumatic mental effects of being in season 11.

The problems with the script are not limited to the core conflict. Hayles is absolute dogshit at writing Sarah Jane, having apparently decided that she’s just grumpy and horrible and bossy most of the time and easily startled by unfamiliar aliens. (Admittedly, Alpha Centauri showing up in full glory will startle anyone.) He apparently got the memo that she’s a feminist, so he has her give the Queen a version of Baby’s First Feminism Lesson, but it’s pretty shallow, weaksauce stuff. And the Doctor dragging her into the TARDIS at the end by her ear like she’s a naughty schoolboy is a low point for both characters.

The second cliffhanger is rubbish. Oh no, the Doctor and Sarah are confronted with the real Aggador! How will they get out of it? Well, the Doctor will probably hypnotise Aggador like he did last time. Nobody who remembers the last serial would find that cliffhanger at all tense, and anyone who doesn’t remember the previous Peladon story has probably already tuned out at this point, since this tale is so dependent on that.

So once again we have a weak script, and once again it’s paired to a fairly lacklustre production. Very occasionally you can see the foot of Stuart Fell, who puppeteers Alpha Centauri’s body, poking out from under the hem of the costume. Some of the sets are fine because they’re just reused ones from the original story, but the fancy new control room used by the Federation representatives is a pretty unimaginative effort. The Third Doctor talks up how pleased he is to be back on Peladon meeting old friends and making new ones, but Pertwee just looks like he is going through the motions. But why shouldn’t he be tired? This is a two to three episode concept dragged out to six.

At this point, something has to give, so thank goodness the season finale – Planet of the Spiders, penned by Robert Sloman and Barry Letts as the final story either man would write for the show – is here to shake things up. It’s Terrance Dicks’ last story as script editor, Barry Letts’ penultimate story as producer, and Jon Pertwee’s regeneration story. Genocidal ecofascist and ex-UNIT agent Mike Yates has gone off to a meditation centre where middle class English guys appropriate Buddhism en mass in order to detox from being a genocidal conspirator, only to discover that the Buddhists are using a mandala in the basement a bit like Satanists use pentagrams in horror stories – to summon dark forces. Sarah Jane Smith decides to visit him, because she is unusually forgiving of people being members of genocidal ecofascist conspiracies which tried to kill her specifically and an eye-wateringly large percentage of humanity in general, and discover that these people are misusing Tibetan techniques to summon horrid spiders to Earth.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Brigadier are going to some sort of variety show, where the Brigadier is quite taken with a belly dancer and proposes to get some of the men at UNIT to adopt her exercises. The Doctor, you see, has become interested in one of the performers – not the belly dancer but a stage magician, Professor Clegg (Cyril Shaps) that the Doctor believes is using actual ESP. Clegg allows the Doctor to test out his skill at psychometry, reading the psychic impressions of objects – but suffers a fatal heart attack when the Doctor tries it with a blue crystal he recovered from Metebelis 3 during The Green Death, which Jo Grant has posted to UNIT from her expedition in South America, since apparently local shamanic practitioners find it disturbing and want it away from them. Is there some sort of connection? It’s down to the Doctor, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane, and genocidal ecofascist Mike Yates to find out!

The bizarre depiction of Buddhism in the serial may have been motivated by Barry Letts’ interest in the subject, but it’s frequently on the same level of the utter tosh offered up in The Abominable Snowmen. It includes just as much racist casting as that story too, with the “refugee Tibetans” played by Westerners in Tibetan cosplay, and it includes just as many Dennis Wheatley-isms as The Dæmons, but this time targeted at a real religion. (At least that story drew a distinction between actual neopaganism and the nonsense the Master was up to.) It certainly doesn’t help that we get all sorts of New Agey stuff going on with the crystal dimension to the story.

This isn’t the only way in which the serial is clumsy and offensive. One of the meditation centre residents is Tommy (John Kane), a broad stereotype of a developmentally disabled person, for the sake of a low-grade Flowers For Algernon subplot. The “Two-Leg” culture of humans on Metebelis 3 who are oppressed by the spiders all dress in a quasi-Native American fashion – or, if you are feeling more generous, like US hippies appropriating Native American culture. Sarah Jane largely screams helplessly and gets into trouble, Letts and Sloman showing no idea how to handle the character. (Indeed, this season only Robert Holmes and Malcolm Hulke really get her right.) Oh, and it casts genocidal ecofascist Mike Yates in a heroic role, to the point where Abbot K’anpo (George Cormack) states that Yates was shielded from the spiders’ Force Lightning by his “compassion” – ah, yes, the compassion which prompts people to become genocidal ecofascists.

Letts seems to have intended this as his final major statement of his tenure as producer – he’d direct this one too, and he’s gone out of his way to crowbar in appearances from Bessie, the Brigadier, and Benton, a shout-out to Jo Grant, and gives a lot of time to genocidal ecofascist Mike Yates, the one member of UNIT who least deserves the time both in terms of moral fibre and in terms of being at all interesting to watch. However, in execution everyone just seems to be going through the motions – limping, along with Pertwee, towards the end of his era so that other hands can rebuild the show, just as the current team largely rebuilt the show back in season 7.

No, this is a dull, drab story, taking place largely in drab surroundings – indeed, the spider city is, like the city in Death To the Daleks, a fairly dull, bland affair, all minimally decorated corridors ad nauseum. “Oh dear, this is getting monotonous!” says the Doctor when he gets captured by by some of the spiders’ human guards; he is correct. There’s some more lively moments, but they come across less as psychedelic flourishes and more like incoherent babble. Fandom seems to like Planet of the Spiders a bit more than the preceding three stories, but I suspect people are being over-generous because it’s a regeneration story and so ends on what is both a big moment (Tom Baker’s coming!) and a blessed relief (this miserable story is over!).

It’s worth noting that Pertwee’s Doctor is the first to die from an act of self-sacrifice; the Second Doctor tried to flee after calling the Time Lords rather than stoically facing the music, the First just got old and collapsed; that, at least, feels like a good call. (The serial seems to understand this, by making a thing about how it was important that the Doctor face his fear of dying as his last act as the Third – something which perhaps gives him a clinching sign of moral development over the First and Second.) The serial also makes an attempt to develop the idea of regeneration a little, and add more mysterious complexities to the Time Lords – it gives it the term “regeneration” in the first place, and the sting is taken out of the casting of the “Tibetans” a bit when it turns out that they are not Tibetans at all, but exiled Time Lords, or rather two iterations of the same Time Lord – the Doctor’s old mentor and a tulpa of his next regeneration (this latter idea perhaps being revisited when it was Tom Baker’s turn to regenerate, but much more effectively and with less in the way of goofy cultural appropriation). I have to say I do prefer regeneration as this mysterious, esoteric process over it being some kind of scientific process that works more or less the same way each time; the revived series’ regenerations are all a bit too samey for me. (And too sanitised – the Doctor always regenerates standing up now, like it’s a sneeze. Give me a Doctor who’s lying down feeling the life drain out of them before they regenerate, come on.)

The crystals’ radiation will not only kill the Third Doctor, they also make the CSO effects look unusually rubbish. It’s worse when the Doctor is in motion – the perspective is utterly mismatched between foreground and background.

The six episodes preceding that climax, however, are right in the doldrums with the rest of season 11 post-The Time Warrior. There’s some more grandiose moments, like the action-packed sequence when Lupton (John Dearth), puppeteered by a spider, steals the Whomobile – the Doctor’s new car from Invasion of the Dinosaurs – prompting the Brigadier and Benton to give chase in Bessie whilst the Doctor flies a one-man aircraft around, and dragging the serial into a long, sustained sequence of interminable vehicle chases. It’s an empty spectacle – the sort of thing which has been done with far more flair earlier in Pertwee’s run, but at the end of five seasons of this sort of thing it seems old hat. This may have been thrown in to give Pertwee a treat – he always quite enjoyed the James Bond side of things – but compared to the chases in, say, The Ambassadors of Death or The Sea Devils this is just grim and miserable.

Longer stretches of the serial – dragged out to six episodes that the story doesn’t merit – are bogged down in tedium. The plot with Lupton bickering with the renegade spider he’s collaborating with is in principle fun, but descends into farcical moments like Lupton having a telepathic duel with an astonishingly cheap puppet. An allegedly dramatic moment in episode 2 involves the Doctor simply sitting still and looking very tired, and it feels like that’s a mood that Pertwee is exactly in the right place to nail at this point. He is done. So very done. He’s stayed on for a season longer than he really should have, and he knows it, but the finish line is in sight so he just has to soldier on for a few more (slow, lumpen, padded-out) episodes and then Tom Baker can take over, to the relief of Pertwee and us viewers alike.

So ends the Pertwee era – with one of the worst seasons of Doctor Who we have seen so far. Unlike with Hartnell, who clung on a little too long in retrospect, the decline here really doesn’t seem to be Pertwee’s fault, or at least not exclusively – his performances after The Time Warrior feel like they lack enthusiasm, but how could anyone be enthusiastic about this sort of material after the glory days of seasons 7-9? Moreover, Pertwee’s tenure was only long in the sense of the passage of time and the number of seasons – when it comes total episodes and total stories, his run is smack in the middle between Hartnell and Troughton.

Perhaps the problem wasn’t Pertwee hanging around too long – though he’d have to go eventually – so much as Pertwee and Letts and Dicks hanging around too long. Shaking things up with a change of producer, or even a script editor with different sensibilities, could be just as reinvigorating as changing a Doctor. We’ve seen how such changeovers could cause havoc during the Hartnell era, but they seemed to work fine in the Troughton era.

As it stands, the Pertwee era, like the Hartnell era, has the indignity of puttering out rather than going out on a high. The best thing about season 11 is Sarah Jane Smith; Elisabeth Sladen does her absolute best with the character here, but she’s faced with terrible material and the terrible fact that her most significant onscreen and offscreen colleagues are all grieving Roger Delgado. I can only assume that if he were around that season 11 would have been at worst patchy but enjoyable, at best a rousing finale – but as it is, season 11 is exactly what you’d expect from a bereaved family inexplicably still expected to produce a full season of television. It would have been wiser and kinder for the BBC to let them delay production on this – perhaps running a season of repeats of the best Master stories before coming back with The Time Warrior and a brace of really fresh, tight stories once everyone felt better. Alas, the demands of the BBC schedules did not work like that, so we got this. What an absolute shame.

Best Serial: Oh, The Time Warrior by an absolute mile. This isn’t even close.

Worst Serial: Death To the Daleks, but crikey it’s got stiff competition. It’s the worst Doctor Who story we have seen so far, but at points all the other stories in this season save The Time Warrior make a bid for that crown.

Most Important Story: Pertwee was always going to leave sooner or later, so whilst Planet of the Spiders‘ conclusion is important, it was also a done deal. Sarah Jane being as cool as she was, on the other hand, was unexpected – and we also get the diamond logo, a new TARDIS key design which would have a long tenure, and our first Sontaran story in her debut. This is clearly going to belong to The Time Warrior.

Least Important Story: The Monster of Peladon, because nothing further came of it. (Well, it’s the last Ice Warrior story of the classic series. But the Ice Warriors just were never a big deal.) Invasion of the Dinosaurs at least saw the exit of genocidal ecofascist Mike Yates from UNIT, taking a big axe to the formerly cozy character chemistry there and outright ruining his character into the bargain by making him a genocidal ecofascist. Death To the Daleks had the side effect of the production team turning around to Terry Nation and saying “Yeesh, could you try something different for once?”, which apparently yields something called Genesis of the Daleks next season, an obscure and unremembered story which I am sure will not be important but eh, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt.

Season Ranking: Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Just look at this:

1. Season 7.
2. Season 6.
3. Season 4.
4. Season 8.
5. Season 9.
6. Season 5.
7. Season 2.
8. Season 1.
9. Season 10.
10. Season 3.
11. Season 11.

9/10 tier: Rank 1.
8/10 tier: Ranks 2-7.
7/10 tier: Rank 8-10.
4/10 tier: Rank 11.

Yes, not only is season 11 the worst I’ve covered yet, but it’s so much worse than season 3 that I’ve had to invent several new tiers between seasons 3 and 11, because the quality gap is so wide that it’s entirely likely that a merely mediocre season could slot into the intervening tiers. This is absolutely risible stuff, the Pertwee/Letts/Dicks period lurching into self-parody, right down to an over-reliance on CSO and Venusian kung fu (which the Doctor is freer with this season than he has ever been before).

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Doctor In Dissection: Jon Pertwee

Cadaver is a male Time Lord, weighing in at 24 stories. Cause of death: radiation exposure.

There’s an extent to which every new actor playing the Doctor – bar William Hartnell, who originated the role, and Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston, who both had the luxury of picking up the role after it had laid fallow for a while – has ended up reacting a bit against their immediate predecessor’s take, carving out a niche for themselves by establishing some clear water between their interpretation and what has come directly before them.

Troughton’s genius was observing how Hartnell’s Doctor had this air of dignity about him which was masking a puckishly anarchic streak, but sometimes seemed to be genuine stuffiness, and in devising a Doctor who wasn’t stuffy at all – the Second Doctor as a Doctor free of the pretensions and gravitas of Time Lord culture, embracing a side of himself the First Doctor had regularly flirted with but never totally embraced, and ceasing to worry about being all smartly turned out and allowing himself to be a bit of a slouch and a slacker when it came to his appearance.

Pertwee cranked the dial all the other way. The Third Doctor is all aristocratic charm and wise Time Lord gravitas. He’s not an agent of chaos at all – one could imagine a reading where he’s deliberately on his best behaviour and has embraced a version of himself which matches how a Time Lord is “supposed” to be in order to work through his exile, and now can’t get unstuck from it. Whereas the First Doctor’s moments of affronted dignity felt like a mask over an inner absurdity, the Third Doctor walks the walk and talks the talk; he is every bit the paternalistic sage he presents himself as being. The sagaciousness is welcome, the paternalism is a problem, even more so because Letts and Dicks don’t seem to have spotted that it is. That isn’t to say that the Third Doctor is completely humourless – he’s not – but it does mean that the Third Doctor is never the butt of the joke the way the First or Second was.

In some respects, UNIT is the salvation of him. Yes, there are problematic elements to the Doctor working with military institutions. On the other hand, being obliged to work with them in order to both work on the TARDIS and protect Earth means that the Doctor has to dial back the paternalism a bit. He remains convinced he is the smartest man in the room, but he has the problem of explaining his smart conclusions to everyone else.

It is perhaps notable that he is more or less the only Doctor who has taken this route. The First Doctor had his goofy moments. The Second was goofiness unleashed. The Fourth onwards all have dimensions of goof to them. The Third Doctor is never a goof. Nor is he ever a nerd, dork, or weirdo. Even when he is talking about scientific technobabble, he does so with a tone which would be greeted with approving smiles and light applause in any posh club in London.

There is an extent to which this gives him a certain majesty, and it is certainly a more coherently realised vision for the character than Hartnell was able to express through the twin problems of the concept of the show changing about on him and his health failing. It also means he is less likeable than Troughton, near-inevitably. I find I root for the Third Doctor less than I did the Second – whenever the Second is onscreen I am usually 100% behind what he is doing, but the Third Doctor is as often someone I find reason to criticise as someone I want to applaud.

Of course, I don’t have to like all the characters in a story all the time, and flawed protagonists are often the most compelling. The Third Doctor’s era is at its strongest when the cast and crew all remember that the Third Doctor is, in fact, flawed. It’s often at its worst when it doesn’t allow him to be wrong, and has him wandering around issuing morals about what we’ve just seen, or solving kids’ menu puzzles and acting like it was a work of genius. He’s a compelling character – but I can see how he would be a tricky one to write for.

Best Serial: In The Dæmons you have the Doctor, Jo, and the Master at the top of their game, you have the UNIT regulars used about as well as they ever were, and you have the era’s sole really full-bore attempt to do horror – it’s fantastic.

Worst Serial: Death To the Daleks. It’s a tragedy that Pertwee never had a really solid Dalek story; he famously thought they were never especially interesting, and given the scripts he was handed who can blame him?

Most Important Serial: It’s tempting to give it to Terror of the Autons, for its importance to every single Master story that followed, but there’s only one story from this run which introduced a change to the program format which survived for the entire classic era and into the renewal – to the point where it’s easy to forget it didn’t exist in the First and Second Doctor eras. That, of course, is the end-of-episode cliffhanger sting, and so the winner this time is…

SYNTHESISER STING!

…The Ambassadors of Death. (It also deserves the nod for being the one story which really, fully managed to nail the conspiracy thriller/proto-X-Files side of the UNIT era.)

Least Important Serial: Probably Carnival of Monsters, a tale which does nothing especially new and doesn’t make any mistakes egregious enough to have prompted a change of course.

Best Companion: Not “Best Companion Lineup” this time, since Pertwee worked to a strict one-companion-at-a-time standard. (No. For the last time, the Brigadier, Benton, and Yates are not companions.)

All of the companions for the Third Doctor are great in theory, but are often let down by the material they have to work with, not least due to Letts and Dicks having somewhat simplistic ideas about what the role entailed. I might have to go with Liz Shaw for this one. The writers struggled to make use of her, but they did at least never forgot what she was competent at the way they often did for Jo, and they consistently allowed her to be competent (sometimes to the detriment of the Doctor, when he’s facing her Nazi version in Inferno). Notably, she was introduced under Derrick Sherwin, not Letts, and so had her parameters set before Letts could impose his views about the role.

Worst Companion: Jo Grant. I have nothing against Katy Manning, she did brilliantly with what she was given. What she was given, however, was often insultingly bad. Sarah Jane Smith’s first season is terrible aside from The Time Warrior, but at least she was never infantilised or rendered incompetent to the extent Jo was.

Best Season: Season 7. It’s a clutch of fantastic stories making excellent use of the show’s new premise and offering an absolute breath of fresh air.

Worst Season: Season 11. Aside from The Time Warrior – made on the previous production block – it’s a tired-out mess of a season which showcases a show in desperate need for a breath of fresh air.

Era Ranking: New category! This is where I will rank each Doctor’s era based on the overall quality of its material.

1. Second Doctor.
2. First Doctor.
3. Third Doctor.

If we judged the Pertwee era solely on the strength of its three seasons, it’d be at the top here – but the mild shakiness of season 10 drags the era below the Second Doctor’s, and the utter disaster of season 11 absolutely tanks the average.

We have had shaky stories before, of course, but in the First Doctor’s run this was usually the result of a new show finding its way and biting off more than it can chew. Here, however, we find the show attempting the type of story it really should have been able to adequately present – The Monster of Peladon cannibalises Curse of Peladon so much it is practically a remake as much as a sequel – but failing to pass muster. And that’s pretty hard to forgive. When it is on its game, the Third Doctor era is incredible. But when it is off its game, disaster results.

Doctor Ranking: Another new category! Here is where I will rank each Doctor based on who is my personal favourite, and it’s worth adding this at this stage because this is the first time where the Doctor Ranking and Era Ranking are going to diverge.

1. Patrick Troughton.
2. Jon Pertwee.
3. William Hartnell.

As I’ve mentioned, Pertwee was the first Doctor I saw any stories from – I was alive for Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy, but too young to be interested in seeking the show out, so it was a repeat of The Dæmons which was my first exposure to the show. I am pleased to find on this rewatch that he is still fun and intriguing to watch, but I find that he’s no longer “my Doctor”; as far as the Doctors we’ve covered so far go, he’s drifted down south of Troughton. Likeability isn’t the same thing as being a compelling character who plays the appropriate role to the story, of course – but if I am having to follow a character from story to story, making them likeable certainly helps, and Troughton has Pertwee and Hartnell beat on this front hands down. I prefer Pertwee to Hartnell, though, simply because Pertwee was able to remain fully engaged for his whole era and Hartnell checks out towards the end.

What we really need now is someone to bring back a revised flavour of that oddball flavour Troughton had – a Doctor who can snap at a moment’s notice from being serious and sagacious and wise to being an utter nerd and whimsical oddball. But how can we expect a team which just produced season 11 to choose a good Doctor? Unfortunately, it seems like Doctor Who has run its course and is about to be cancelled. It would take a truly legendarily good Doctor and some really top-class stories to turn it around at this point.