Doctor Who Season 6: Doctor In Triumph

The story so far: with the Hartnell era concluded, Patrick Troughton has spent a season bedding in and a season largely assisting Bases Under Siege. His tenure in the role has thankfully avoided the backstage drama that derailed the mid-to-late portions of season 3, and the show is going from strength to strength – and now we’re in the last season of the 1960s, and the most complete season we have had for quite some time. In fact, only two of the serials here are missing any episodes, so unless I specify otherwise you can assume the stories under discussion are fully intact.

We kick off with The Dominators, by a mysterious man called Norman Ashby. In fact, it’s Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who wrote The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear – but this serial got caught up in rewrites, and Haisman and Lincoln were so upset with the changes made to it that they asked for the Alan Smithee treatment. Specifically, it was originally being written as a six-episode serial, but Peter Bryant decided that it was running too long, so Haisman and Lincoln were told to down pens and Derrick Sherwin as script editor rewrote episode five to conclude the story there. This reflects a change in approach – aside from Tomb of the Cybermen, season 5 had followed a six episode-per-serial pattern, but for this season Bryant and Sherwin were happy to let serials run longer or shorter as needed, which is probably the sensible way to do things.

The titular Dominators are humanoid alien invaders given to padded shoulders, because they’re power dressers just like they’re power trippers in many other spheres. The Dominators show up on the planet Dulkis for the sake of blowing it up to get rare resources, with their robotic agents, the Quarks (think refrigerators on legs), as their main source of labour and muscle. The peaceful Dulkians need the Doctor to help, and what follows is an exercise in anti-colonialism featuring toyetic robot adversaries which feels very much like a throwback to the Hartnell era.

“Help, we’re being oppressed by a vending machine!”

There’s some interesting stuff going on here. As in The Rescue, the Doctor’s showing up on a world he’s visited before, and loved it the first time around, to find that things are awry; in this case, the Doctor appreciated the utter ban on warfare and weaponry the Dulkians enforced while he was there, and is perturbed to learn that since his last visit they’ve developed nuclear weapons – though this is explained as a by-product of the development of atomic energy, prompting the Dulkian Council to immediately forbid further research along those lines once the destructive potential was apparent.

This sort of sense of an entire alien world with an entire history of its own was the usual way the Hartnell era established a sense of place, created a little society for us to visit, and generally do worldbuilding – so far, the Troughton era has resorted to the Base Under Siege format to do this. Perhaps after season 5 was the right time to do a mild throwback story like this – both to test if the series could still tell this sort of tale, and also to see how subsequent production techniques and refinements could be applied to it.

Doctor Who Season 5: Doctor In a Base Under Siege

The story so far: William Hartnell had a good run, until his health collapsed and he needed to be written out. The process was complicated by the fact that John Wiles, who had replaced Verity Lambert as producer of Doctor Who, managed to alienate BBC management and the cast of the show alike, so the problem caused by Hartnell’s decline was not able to be addressed until Innes Lloyd, Wiles’ replacement, had been able to mend bridges and get his agreement to stand down. This led to season 4, in which Patrick Troughton stepped into the role and was a fantastic breath of fresh air straight out of the gate. The season ended with the Doctor and Jamie adopting a brand-new companion, Victoria Waterfield, and heading off on new adventures with her – and I was so enthused by it I blitzed season 5 almost immediately.

After two seasons which are mostly incomplete, at least in terms of their visual footage (audio of all episodes exists), we’ve now got past the hump – this is a 40 episode season of which only 18 episodes are missing. We actually have a couple of fully intact serials, would you believe it – and several other serials are almost complete bar for an episode or two. We’ll still need to resort to animations or audio reconstructions from time to time, but the end of all that is in sight.

We kick off with one of the intact serials – The Tomb of the Cybermen, written by Kit Pelder and Gerry Davis, and wouldn’t you know it – we’re in a quarry!

Look! A quarry! We’ll see a ton of these from the 1970s onwards but for the 1960s show they’re a rarity.

That’s right, “outdoor” scenes in pokey little studios with painted backdrops are no longer the invariable rule, now we get an outdoor sequence set in on the planet of Telos, where an archaeological expedition is unearthing an ancient alien settlement (spoiler: it’s the titular tomb, which is full of Cybermen and horrible traps). It’s a little hard to say, due to how many lost episodes we’ve had, but I think this is the first time we have an old quarry somewhere standing in for an alien world; some shots are composited in or were otherwise clearly done indoors, but some were very clearly shot on location, so what would eventually become a Doctor Who cliché (once they had the budget and technology to do more quarry shoots) was born right here.

The serial is also a landmark because it’s the first one to be produced by Peter Bryant – Innes Lloyd hadn’t stepped down, he just let Bryant have a go at producing this one (with Victor Pemberton taking on Bryant’s usual script editor role for the serial) as a test run for him later taking on the job full time midway through this season, with Lloyd and Bryant resuming their producer/script editor roles after this.

The Messianic Muddle of Plantard the Pretender

The Messianic Legacy, at least in the edition I own, boldly declares itself to be “the controversial sequel to the bestselling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail“, and it is very much a sequel: it makes some fumbling attempts to cobble together some novel thesis and contribution of its own, but all it succeeds in doing is ploughing deeper into the intellectual cul-de-sacs that authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln had wander off down in the course of compiling the previous book. Having already become lost in the deep weeds, The Messianic Legacy marks the point where the start floundering.

Although I went over the background already in my review of the previous book, I think it is worth restating here in order to understand the context The Messianic Legacy exists in. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, Bérenger Saunière was the local priest of Rennes-le-Château, a picturesque hilltop village in the Languedoc region of France. It is generally accepted that Saunière was running some sort of Mass-by-mail-order scam which earned him an unusual amount of money, to the point where the Church authorities got wind of it and suspended him from his ecclesiastical duties.

Some time later, in the 1950s, restauranteur Noël Corbu had come into possession of Saunière’s home, the Villa Bethania, and turned it into the hotel. To drum up business, Corbu began circulating a rumour that Saunière’s wealth was in some respect related to mysterious documents he had discovered in the local church. In the early iteration of the story, the concept was that there was great treasure hidden in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château, perhaps part of the lost horde of Blanche of Castile, which Saunière had discovered a portion of. This snowballed into a treasure-hunting fad centred on the town, and in the 1960s it came to the attention of a group of hoaxers, perhaps the most significant member of which in terms of his commitment to the joke and the way he inserted himself into the story was one Pierre Plantard.

The Hotel Hoax and the Wholly Fooled

Infamously ripped off wholesale by Dan Brown for The Da Vinci Code, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a comfortingly silly work of conspiracy theory. The book has its roots in the work of actor and Doctor Who screenwriter Henry Lincoln, who on holiday in France in 1969 came across Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château, a book by Gérard de Sède discussing an enigma surrounding a small town in the Languedoc region of southern France.

Fascinated, Lincoln would go on to produce three documentary films for the BBC’s Chronicle strand discussing the mystery – The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem? in 1972, The Painter, the Priest and the Devil in 1974, and The Shadow of the Templars in 1979 – with these films being the first time the English-speaking world was exposed to the mystery. Each time, Lincoln would revise and deepen his proposed answer to the enigma, as he perceived yet further hidden depths to the story. Joined by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, his investigations would eventually see the release of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982.