The Androids of Tara (The Key to Time Part 4)

Four Episodes
Aired between 25th November 1978 and 16th December 1978

Written by David Fisher
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Michael Hays


Synopsis

The Doctor decides he's fed up of being a pawn in an intergalactic chess match and goes to an Earth-like planet: Tara, to do a spot of fishing, leaving Romana to go off on her own and find the next segment of the Key to Time.

Romana finds the segment relatively easily (it's disguised as a statue), but is captured by Count Grendel, a noble who is seeking to claim the throne of Tara for himself.

He mistakenly believes that Romana is actually a princess on this planet called Strella.  He has both of them locked up when he realises the truth and is going to use an android copy of Romana to try and assassinate the Prince, Reynart as he turns up to lay his claim on the crown.

The Doctor meanwhile is captured by Reynart's men and taken to the Prince.  He is asked to help repair an android copy of the prince that they will use as a diversion for the real Prince to sneak into the throne room and claim the crown.

The Doctor manages to keep Reynart alive, until Grendel storms their hideout and kidnaps the Prince too, injuring him and leaving him to die slowly in his dungeon.

There's lots of back and forth with the Doctor enlisting K9's help to try and rescue Romana and Prince Reynart from Grendel's dungeons, which he ultimately does.

He faces off with Grendel and the two fight with swords until the Doctor bests him.  Count Grendel dives into the moat and swims away into exile, leaving Prince Reynart to claim the kingdom.

The Doctor and Romana recover the segment and go back into the TARDIS with K9.

Trivia

• Let's get the pretty obvious one out of the way.  This story is near enough a remake of the Prisoner of Zenda, just on another planet

• The fishing rod the Doctor used was actually an expensive antique, and it got lost in the water when Tom Baker accidentally dropped it in. The production staff had to go into the lake and get it before anyone knew what had happened to it!

• The ending was supposed to be much grander and have a lot more fighting, but filming was cut short as the location was used as a last minute site for some Middle East peace talks

• The fat guy who delivers a message to the Doctor as a trap, is the same guy who played the original Jabba the Hutt in the scene cut from the original Star Wars movie

• Mary Tamm had ridden horses for thirty years but she refused to do a stunt in this show without a helmet as she didn't know how the horse would react

The Review

Now and again throughout this re-watching of Doctor Who, I come across a story that fills me with dread. I have distantly recalled nightmares of the terrible slog it is to go through the 90+ minutes of pain that are these episodes.  In those instances, I try to be objective and give the story a fair shot as if I were watching it for the first time.  The Androids of Tara was a story I was dreading.

Now that I've watched it and it's fresh in my mind though, it's not as bad as I remember it to be.  It's not in the same league as some of Tom's earlier work, and I can't imagine it getting on many popularity lists, but because this is a remake of a classic, it carries with it some hint of appeal.

The first and most obvious is the humour that Tom Baker has been falling back on more and more as the season progresses.  The line "if you don't stop burning my scarf, you'll have to kill me" is absolute gold, and it's not on it's own.  He does the witty one liners all the way through and this story is fairly camp anyway, so much so that it boarders on farce, so it never feels too out of place.

The plot to assassinate the Prince is a little complex, and it's regrettable that Count Grendel falls back on a Bond-Villain mentality by leaving people alive and in escapable situations for no reason. That's a shame, because as a villain, he is good, charming and charismatic. He has character that we want to see more of, and even has a love interest which is unusual for a Doctor Who  villain.

It wasn't until the back end of episode 3 that things started to get repetitive and dull.  The escape / capture / negotiate schtick all starts around then and drops the intrigue like a lead weight until it ends in a very drawn out swashbuckling sword fight.  Some people like it I guess, but for me Tom Baker isn't Jon Pertwee and it just gets yawn-worthy towards the end.

This story has a few more highlights than the others of this season, but overall I think it's just too long and could do with the ending to episode 4 editing onto the back half of episode 3.

Rating

5 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

5 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

The Reign of Terror

The Crusade

The Massacre 

The Ribos Operation

The Awakening

The Kings Demons

The Stones of Blood (The Key to Time Part 3)

4 Episodes
Aired between 28th October 1978 and 18th November 1978

Written by David Fisher
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Darrol Blake

Synopsis

As the Doctor and Romana retrieve the second segment of the Key to Time, the White Guardian issues a reminder to "beware the Black Guardian".  This warning prompts the Doctor to let Romana in on the whole premise, and warns her that the Black Guardian can look and sound like anything or anyone.

They put the ominous threat to one side and find the coordinates for the third segment - it's on Earth. 

Once they arrive, they find themselves in Cornwall, near a section of standing stones known as the nine travellers. 

The stones are of local interest, not only to the archaeologists Professor Amelia Rumford and her colleague, Vivien Fay;

but also to a local sect of druids that seem intent on using the stones to sacrifice animals and worship their deity, a crow god named Cailleach.

Intrigued about the sacrifices, the Doctor investigates the druids and nearly gets himself sacrificed,

whilst Romana is drawn to a cliff edge by someone who looks just like the Doctor.  Once they reunite, they discover that the myth of the moving stones is real after all, and that the stones have moved to Boscombe hall and killed the druids.  It becomes apparent that the stones are actually silicone based life forms that feed on blood and whomever is controlling them, has the third segment of the key. 

As they investigate, Romana stumbles upon the revelation that Vivien Fey is in fact behind the druid sacrifices, but she is transported into hyperspace before she can tell anyone. 

The Doctor too discovers that Vivien Fey is not human, and has been hanging around the area for 4,000 years, protecting the circle of stones.  He finds a way into a mysterious ship in hyperspace via the use of a ray gun he builds and he eventually frees Romana,

along with a set of judicial robots that are very eager to charge him with a crime and kill him.

The Doctor is forced to conduct a trial for his own life, and using his wits, manages to determine that the ship in hyperspace is a prison ship that was sent to find and bring the criminal: Cessair of Diplos to justice. 

The problem is that the justice robots have no way of knowing who Cessair is, but the Doctor helps them by getting them to read Vivien's mind as she is knocked unconscious.

The robots sentence Cessair to an eternity of imprisonment and turn her into a stone,

but not before the Doctor can retrieve the Seal of Diplos (the item she stole to warrant charges against her in the first place). 

The Doctor escapes his own punishment by banishing the robots back into hyperspace and together, he and Romana return to the TARDIS with the third segment.

Trivia

• This is the one hundredth Doctor Who story! To mark the occasion, there was a scene proposed where Romana brings out a cake for the Doctor's 751st birthday, and gets him a present of a brand new scarf, but Graham Williams forbid it, so it was never shot.

• The exterior shots were recorded on Video Tape, just like The Sontaran Experiment, this was purely a Director's choice

• Tom Baker was supposed to lead Romana to the cliff edge at the end of episode 1, but he refused, stating that it would frighten the kids too much

• In the outdoor scenes, the voice for K9 was fed through a two way radio, with John Leeson talking from the confines of a nearby van.  On breaks, Tom would surprise onlookers by doing the Times Crossword as he always did, but in partnership with his trusty robot dog, who's voice remained in character during the process!

• It was around this time that Mary Tamm started to become weary of the role of Romana.  What at the start promised to be an interesting foil for the Doctor had been diluted down to a run-of-the-mill companion who asked questions that should be obvious to her and was frequently locked up, left behind or put into perilous situations (this story being a definite case in point).

The Review

Given that this is Doctor Who's 100th story, it seems fitting that we get a yarn that is in the groove of what made it so popular in the late seventies: gothic horror.  Believe it or not, this is the last almost-gothic story of Doctor Who (at least until 1988 if you count Ghostlight).

The story begins well, setting up some decidedly creepy threads of sacrifice, and dark pagan gods on the moors of England.  Professor Amelia Rumford looks like a good stand in for Mr Scarman from Pyramids of Mars, and all seems to be going well...but... a lot of these story lines are totally abandoned in favour of something far less exciting or interesting.

As early as the end of episode 2, we are thrust into a totally new premise of a secret prison ship in hyperspace, and an alien convict. Aside from the ship itself, the effects are pretty awful, enough for you to find it hard to suspend your disbelief.  For example, there's a reason why monsters are humanoid looking (beyond people fitting into the costumes).  It's because we need something to identify.  Even in the works of HP Lovecraft, monsters have identifiable features such as tentacles, eyes and mouths. The reviews I have read for this episode have speculated that even with a million pound budget, and Stanley Kubric directing this story, he would be very hard pressed to make the stones scary at all.  And with the exception of the small cut scene of some campers getting killed, I have to agree.  The stones look cumbersome and there's nothing identifiable as scary about them. They look like the polystyrene they are.  And it doesn't get better with Vivien Fay either. 

Despite the flaws, I want to like this story, but there's too many obstacles to me doing that.  Even if you put the effects aside (which I generally do), the warning from the Guardian is redundant (it could be the Black Guardian that pushed Romana off the cliff, but the story makes it out like it was Vivien Fay instead), and there's no reasoning as to why an escaped convict such as herself would stick around in the area of the stones when she could tootle off anywhere in the world and be scott free.  She's been there for 4,000 years.  She could have shaped nations, ruled empires...but she decides to look after a bunch of stones instead.

This story has much to lament, because the threads it set up could have lead to one of the better gothic stories in the entire run of Doctor Who, but as it is, it feels like two half stories, bungled together, purely as a backdrop for Tom Baker to be larking about shouting at K9 and having Mary Tamm ask all the dumb companion questions.  It could have been great, but instead it's "meh" at best.

Rating

5 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

5 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Daemons 

• Pyramids of Mars

• The Hand of Fear

• The Image of the Fendahl

• Any of the Trial of a Time Lord stories

• The Pandorica Opens (Doctor Who, Series 5)

The Pirate Planet (Key to Time Part 2)

4 Episodes
Aired between 30th September 1978 and 21st October 1978

Written by Douglas Adams
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Pennant Roberts

Synopsis

The Doctor and Romana are looking for the second segment of the key to time.  Using their trusty detector, they discover that the segment is on the desolate planet of Calufrax, but when they travel there, they inexplicably find themselves on a different planet.

The TARDIS dematerialises with some difficulty, and the Doctor finds that they're in the city of a planet called Zanak.  This city happens to have incredibly rare or valuable minerals just abandoned on the footpaths, a by-product of the "new golden age of prosperity" that the Captain, the city's leader declares.

The Doctor and Romana begin investigating, and soon discover that the Captain is a cyborg pirate captain that runs the planet from a large control tower known as the "Bridge" .

From this bridge, the Captain can teleport the planet across the universe and swallow other planets, mining their surfaces from within the core of Zanak.  The people are mostly ignorant of this, except for a small bunch of awakened telepaths known as the Mentiads.

The Doctor and Romana try to help these telepaths stop the Captain, and in doing so, learn that the true evil on this planet isn't the Captain, but his trusty nurse, who is a projection of a former evil queen of Zanak known as Xanxia,

 Her real body is trapped in a time bending field that slows down the last seconds of her life, making her effectively immortal.

Finally, the heroes work with the Mentiads to stop Zanak from materialising around Earth, and convince the Captain to try and stop Xanxia.  Whilst he fails and is killed by the evil queen, his sacrifice does allow the group to blow up the bridge and destroy her.

In the end, it turns out that the second segment of the Key to Time is the actual planet of Calufrax.  It is recovered from being shot off into the time vortex when the bridge was destroyed, and the Doctor and Romana can go on their way.

Trivia

• Okay, let's do the most obvious.  Douglas Adams is perhaps best known for Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  The story began originally as a radio play.  Adams managed to sell the story to the BBC in the middle of writing this story, and worked on both things at the same time.

• This was his first involvement in the show, and his original plot was far more complicated than what was shown

• As noted in The Ribos Operation, Tom Baker had a very obvious cut on his lip from a dog bite.  The scene where he bangs his lip on the console was put in to explain that.  You wouldn't have known otherwise, would you?

• Something you might not know, is that following Tom Baker's failed side project to get a movie - Doctor Who and Scratchman, he actually worked on another idea with Douglas Adams.  Tom loved Cricket and he was a Team Captain of a local side, and the plans were to bring the sport into the story in a big way (see all of the Fifth Doctor's episodes).  This new story was to be called Doctor Who and the Krikketmen.  Just as well it didn't get made

• Douglas Adams had some eccentric things that he "liked".  One was a love of towels, which made it into Hitchhikers, but another was Parrots, as can be seen by the Polyphase Avitron

The Review
One of the great things about Tom Baker's run on Doctor Who is his sense of humour.  The timing that Tom Baker has is impeccable, and that is an aspect that can be exploited in great ways by a comedy genius such as Douglas Adams.

The Pirate Planet is therefore a conundrum for me, because many fans love this particular story, but when I look at it, one of the only reason I can see to like it is the humour.  I mentioned in the previous story that Tom had been hanging out a bit with Eric Morecambe, and the feel of that style of humour has been taken by Douglas Adams and propelled to stratospheric levels.  There's nothing wrong with that, as some of the jokes and one liners are genuinely very funny, but it comes at the expense of the drama.

The premise of the story is interesting enough, with a mystery of a missing planet being presented in a unique way.  But any question posed is quickly overshadowed by the relationship between the Doctor and Romana, and the obnoxious threats banded about by the Captain.

Everything here is over the top, the squabbles, the jokes, the pirate themed death threats, the robots in the shape of exotic birds.  It's practically melodrama, but done in such a way that we really don't care about anyone in it. Case in point, by episode four, Douglas Adams has to resort to threatening Earth as a last desperate bid to make us feel something.

I think this story is one of the saddest ones to be made, because it has so much potential, but because of the style of the writer, characters and plot are diluted down to obvious, predictable elements that grow tiresome and irritating.  I would hardly be surprised if a few immature fart gags were thrown in for good measure.  Almost everyone laughs and enjoys toilet humour, but it's no good if you go into this looking for a good piece of family drama.

Rating

4 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

3 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Savages

• The Invasion of Time

• The City of Death

• Shada

• State of Decay

• The Mysterious Planet

The Ribos Operation (Key to Time Part 1)

4 Episodes
Aired between 2nd September 1978 and 23rd September 1978

Written by Robert Holmes
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by George Spenton-Foster

Synopsis

Travelling through space and time with only his trusty dog, K9 MkII, the Doctor is summoned by a powerful entity known as the White Guardian. 

He tells the Doctor that his opposite, the Black Guardian is threatening to overthrow the delicate balance of the universal values of order and chaos.  To restore this balance, the White Guardian tasks the Doctor with seeking and retrieving the six segments of the Key to Time, which are not only scattered across the cosmos, but also disguised as objects familiar to their environment. 

To help the Doctor in his quest, the White Guardian sends word to Gallifrey who assign a freshly graduated Time-Lady: Romanadevoratrelundar.

Romana (as the Doctor likes to call her) is quite aloof and likes to psycho-analyse people.  She thinks she has been assigned to help the doctor by the High Council of Gallifrey and has been given a divining rod to help her locate the segments of the key.  The rod can also be plugged into the TARDIS console to provide co-ordinates for the next segment.

After much arguing, the pair get after the first segment of the key, landing on a primitive planet known as Ribos.  After a lot of searching, they find the segment. 

It's disguised as a precious stone known as Jethryck. 

It turns out the Jethryk has been planted amongst the planets finest treasures by a couple of con-men, Garron and Unstoffe, trying to pose as businessmen to sell the primitive planet off to a warlord known as the Graff Vynda-K.

The con men's plan backfires and Garron is captured, with the Doctor and Romana getting mistaken as being part of it.  Unstoffe manages to get away and is forced to hide with the Jethryk / key.

With the help of the city's oracle, the Graff and his soldiers manage to track down Unstoffe to the catacombs. 

The oracle predicts that all but one dies in there, and the Graff does his utmost to ensure it's him that survives.  In the end, his men are killed by a cave in and he is blown up by a bomb that's planted on him.

The Doctor and Romana leave Garron and Unstoffe on the planet and the Doctor manages to use slight of hand to get the Jethryk off Garron before they take off.

Once inside the TARDIS, Romana touches the stone and it turns into the first segment of the key before they set off for the next segment.

Trivia

• Before the filming of this series, Tom Baker was attacked by a dog that jumped up and bit him, catching his lip.  The wound is far more visible in the next story, but there's occasions in this when it's there

• The Key to Time was Producer, Graham Williams' idea.  He'd wanted to do it since he started, and now was the perfect time.  He asked Liz Sladen if she wanted to come back, but she was still hesitant so he decided to go for something totally different and worked up a concept for Romana.  

• This was Stuart Fell's last outing in a Doctor Who monster costume.  He played the Schrivenzale that is kept in the treasury.

• Between filming this, Tom was hanging out a lot with Eric Morecambe.  Read "The Review" for why this is significant.

The Review

The Ribos Operation was the start of something big. The Jon Pertwee era saw the show re-designed and re-invigorated for a new audience.  The provision of an epic story arc was to be an attempt to do something similar. 

The whole premise is built around powerful beings assigning the Doctor a quest, but forgive me if I find the White Guardian somewhat lacklustre.  There's nothing there to help me believe this creature has god-like powers.  He interrupts the TARDIS in flight. So what?  Lots of things have done that in recent stories.  My guess is that this scene was filmed after the bulk of stuff on Ribos, so the budget was exhausted, but even so, I think that had the White Guardian appeared to any of the Doctor's before him, we'd have at least got some glam-rock style colour effects, or something like it.

The inclusion of Romana is quite a good thing however, it's been a long while since the days of Liz Shaw, with the Doctor having an intellectual equal, and the way that the Producer has made her very smart but very naive is a great trick, because she can know a lot of stuff when she needs to, but still ask questions to help give the audience a point of reference without it looking daft.  Romana's relationship with the Doctor is enjoyable to watch, and brings an element of light humour to the show which is pleasing for a while, although I personally feel that Tom Baker does try to put in too many laughs per minute in the first couple of episodes, until it ends up feeling like he's regenerated into Eric Morecambe.  Thankfully, he settles down from episode 3 and starts selling the plot to us as a serious situation.

The story as a whole is great.  As with all the best Doctor Who stories, the Ribos Operation has a rich setting, and is developed brilliantly.  The planet isn't just a cardboard cut out with one environmental condition (alright we only see it snowing in the story, but it does explain that the planet goes through half a year of snow, then half a year of sunshine).  Ribos has a culture, MULTIPLE cities,  history and religion.  This is an epic fantasy neatly packaged and never feeling like we're force fed massive info dumps.

The Graff is a superb character also.  Yes, he's a villain wanting conquest, but Paul Seed who played him, helps to really bring the character to life, assisted by a good backstory that almost shows him more as a victim.

One of the jewels in the crown of this story is the interaction between Unstoffe and Binro the heretic.  This is a lovely little arc that isn't needed for the story, but it provides a great bit of pathos, and a path of redemption for the kind heart'ed crook, Unstoffe.

Overall, the Ribos Operation is a great little story with a fantastic world built into it, an unusual plot, good characters and in places very funny.  The only thing that lets it down is that it fails to sell the threats to us.  I wasn't convinced that the Graff would really hurt you, more bore you to death with tales of how hard his life has been and the many wars he's been in; and as for the rubber-footed Shrivenzale....

Rating

8 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

7 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Keys of Marinus

• The Curse of Peladon

• The Monster of Peladon

• The Masque of Mandragora

The Invasion of Time

6 Episodes
Aired between 4th February 1978 and 11th March 1978

Written by David Agnew
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Gerald Blake

Synopsis

The Doctor mysteriously makes an alliance with a malicious force of aliens and goes to Gallifrey.

 Once there, he demands to claim his right to the Presidency, despite objections from Cardinal Borusa.

The Doctor's claim is upheld and he is crowned, giving his mind access to the memories of past Presidents through the matrix.  The aliens and the Doctor are hoping to gain access to the Great Key of Rassilon, but it is an artefact long lost and every successive President has been given the mission to find the great key.

Through the Doctor's ruthless barking orders, Leela is banished outside the citadel of Gallifrey, and his room is decorated so that it's lead lined.

  Once inside, he finally tells Cardinal Borusa that the aliens, called Vardan's, are a race so powerful that they can travel along any wavelength and read thoughts.  He's had to shield his mind and act out his ruthless ways in order to lull them into a false sense of security.

As part of the Doctor's plan, he's filled K9 in on it, and sends the robotic dog off to blow up the machinery operating the Citadel's transduction barrier.

Leela, very confused at the Doctor's strange actions but convinced he's got good intentions, evades capture so that she can stay in the citadel and help him.  She meets Rodan, a female Time Lord who works traffic control.

Together, they are forced outside the citadel where they meet up with primitive Gallifreyan's and begin to form a fighting force to storm the citadel and rescue the Doctor.

Meanwhile, the Vardan's turn up as shiny tin foil ghosts, but are eventually convinced to materialise fully once the great key has been found and a hole in the Citadel's force field has been created.

The Vardan's it turns out are human.

Once they're fully materialised, it's a simple matter for the Doctor and K9 to use Gallifrey's technology to send them back to their home planet and stick them in a time loop.  The threat hasn't ended however, as the hole in the force field and the destroyed transduction barrier leads others to invade the planet, namely the Sontarans, led by Commander Stor.

The Doctor bluffs his way out of the panopticon and the Sontaran's give chase to him, Cardinal Borusa, Leela, the guard Captain Andred, and Rodan.

The chase takes them through the bowels of the TARDIS and the Doctor leads them off, leaving K9 and Rodan to use the Great Key of Rassilon to assemble a De-Mat Gun, a weapon of mass destruction.

Ultimately, the Doctor is forced to use the gun on the Sontarans, wiping them out and blanking his own memory in the process.

Everyone cheers now that Gallifrey is safe, and the Doctor goes to leave but Leela decides to stay with Andred, and K9 chooses her over the Doctor.  The Doctor's alright however, he simply pushes out a box from the backroom that contains K9 MII.

Trivia

• This was another story rushed into production at the last moment as David Weir who was due to write the season ending had a story idea that would require a blockbuster movie budget to realise.  A replacement was therefore written as a collaboration between Graham Williams, Antony Read and writer David Weir.  The Pseudonym David Agnew was used.

• If the relationship between Andred and Leela seems strange, it is.  Louise Jameson really wanted to leave the show, in big part because of her clashes with Tom Baker.  Graham Williams was confident he could talk her round to staying longer, so he left her fate a bit open ended in the script.  When he finally accepted that she would go, that's how they wrote her out. 

• The character of Rodan was in a way a prototype for Romana (see the next story).  For whatever reason, they decided to re-design the Time Lady, but that's alright because we get to see Mary Tamm for a full season

• The shots for the TARDIS interiors were filmed at an abandoned mental asylum.

• The Sontaran that goes flying when he jumps across the pool was a genuine trip, but they kept it in 

The Review

On the surface of it, The Invasion of Time has some pretty cool ideas.  Picture it, the Doctor has seemingly turned traitor to overcome his most powerful foe, an enemy that can be everywhere and can read your mind.  This could have been ingenious.  I feel what we get is a half hearted attempt at it.

Let's start with the Vardan's.  Even though they are human, they are one of the most powerful forces the Doctor has ever come across but yet no one has  ever heard of them.  Despite the immense potential we're told they have, they do nothing. Not one thing beyond yelling about needing discipline. They bring a battleship to Gallifrey, even though they don't need it to travel anywhere, and there's three of them.  Some invasion force.  

Once the Vardan's are gone, the Sontaran's arrive and act like they know all about the Vardans, almost like they were the little fish that lead the mighty Sontaran's to their destination.  But what the hell have the Sontaran's got that the Vardan's need, and why would they take orders from them?  Oh, and again, despite an invasion fleet turning up, only three or four Sontarans bother to come down to Gallifrey.  None of it makes sense: not the invasion fleets, not the de-mat gun, nothing.

If one thing could be taken away from this, then it's the start of Tom Baker's indulgence into comedy. Whilst there's been a quip here and there for some time, from this story on, there's a distinct realisation that Tom Baker has started to believe his own hype. Whilst some of the interactions are genuinely amusing, they get more and more and more "zany" with the effect of the viewer not being able to take the drama seriously because it's lead character doesn't.

The Invasion of Time is a barely bearable mess, with almost full episodes devoted to running through corridors.  It was a chore to watch and one that won't be watched again by me for a long, long time.

Rating

4 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

3 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Deadly Assassin

• The Invisible Enemy

• The Five Doctors

• The Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (Doctor Who, Series 7)

Underworld

4 episodes
Aired between 7th December 1977 and 28th January 1978

Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Norman Stewart

Synopsis

The TARDIS reaches the end of the cosmos and comes across a lone ship called the R1C.

Exploring the ship, the Doctor, Leela and K9 meet a band of humans from an ancient planet called Minyos. The planet was encountered some millennia ago by the Time Lords in a period before their rules of non-intervention.  The Minyan's took the Time Lord technology, forced them off the planet and eventually degenerated into a civil war that destroyed the planet.

The R1C is one of the only ships to escape the doomed Minyos.  It's crew: Jackson, Herrick, Orfe and Tala, have been travelling in space for 100,000 years looking for their sister ship the P7E that holds the Minyan race banks needed to rebuild their race.  They have regeneration machines on board that allow the crew to keep renewing their lives, but the ship has been steadily getting older and older.

With the help of K9, the crew are able to find P7E in the middle of a spiral nebula.  As they go into it, the cosmic forces nearly tear the ship apart, and massive gravity generated attracts large rocks to form around the ship.  They blast through them and escape but pretty much wreck the ship doing so.  They crash into a nearby planet, which luckily has a liquid surface and a rocky core.

There is life in the tunnels at the core of this world, and it happens to take the form of a dictatorship between the Trogs (the tunnel dwelling human slaves), and the Oracle.  The Doctor, Leela, K9 and the crew of the R1C get embroiled in the plight of the Trogs and have endless chases from the Oracles guards.

They eventually find their way to the core of the planet (where the Trogs claim there are fire breathing dragons, but are actually laser defences) and they discover that it is the P7E ship that had matter form around it, just like what happened to their ship.

They all escape except for Herrick, who is taken before the Seers, men who serve the Oracle that have evolved beyond human.

They decide to convince Herrick that they are unconcerned about the race banks and therefore aim to just give them up, in return for the crew of the R1C leaving the planet and never coming back.

The Doctor smells something fishy, and upon investigation finds out that the Oracle is actually the P7E computer that's gone stark raving mad.

He deduces that the race banks haven't been handed over at all, so he takes the real ones and goes to find Jackson and his crew.  He gets to them before they can take off and K9 identifies the cylinders Jackson has as fission grenades (that have the power to blow up the entire planet).  The Doctor swaps out the grenades for the race banks and then takes the grenades back, allowing himself to get captured and the fake cylinders returned.

He escapes and convinces the Trogs to all get in the R1C as they take off.  Jackson doesn't like this and is prepared to leave them to go to find their sister planet Minyos 2 where they will rendezvous with the remains of their people but the Doctor insists that the Trogs are his people too.  Jackson relents and they all take off.

The Oracle enters the cylinders back into its machine and realises too late that they are the grenades.  The planet blows up and the Doctor ultimately leaves the Minyans to it.

Trivia

• This story was heavily based on the myth of Jason and the Argonauts.  The Doctor even spells it out at the end of the story to Leela (and thus to us all).  The P7E was Persephone, Herrick was Heracles, Orfe was Orpheus, Jackson was Jason, the dragons and the world tree were all part of the myth.  The race banks were of course, the golden fleece.  Don't know where the skeletons or Talos was though.

• As you can't fail to notice, this was a story mostly filmed with CSO.  The story goes that Graham Williams came off leave to find that the costs predicted for this story were three times more expensive than what they had budget for.  Norman Stewart said he could do it all with model shots and blue screen so Graham Williams let him try.  It was a huge success back then, because the story came in on time and budget, and paved the way for more shows to do this.

• We've mentioned Blake's 7 a few times now.  Just a quick one to say that the first episode aired a few days before Underworld started.

• Alan Lake who played Herrick was a bit notorious.  He was married to Dianna Dors who was very notorious herself for ahem, certain celebrity parties held at her home.  When Dianna died, Alan tragically couldn't handle it and after a phone interview a few weeks later, took himself into the bedroom and blew his own brains out with a shotgun.  

The Review

I admit it.  When I was thinking about writing this review the other day, I had to think really long and hard to find a positive aspect to start on.  I did eventually, but as with anything, you get doing something else and you hope that when you come back to it, all the witty, intelligence and relevant words will come flooding back to you.  Well, they haven't.

A lower mortal would blame the show for this, and I have to admit that I am such a mortal.  Looking at Underworld as a whole is hardly inspiring.  In fact, Underworld has about as much charisma and pizzazz as a wet fart.

First of all, ripping on the awful CSO lines around everything and the Ikea furniture for ship crash couches are a given.  As are the bulldog clips that you would get from any high street shop expecting to pass for electrodes that interface with K9 via his ears.  You don't have to look that far however to strike gold, and by gold, I do of course, mean crap.

The science behind a lot of it is total bonkers (the huge rocks gathering about the ship just because it's got gravity), the fact that the centre of the planet is zero gravity, but only it seems in one small elevator shaft and more.  Even the plot logic has shot off into the stratosphere.  I mean, what's the deal with making explosives that could destroy a planet look exactly like the race banks vital to the survival of an alien race?!!!!

Given that this is Jason and the Argonauts, we barely see Jackson (Jason) taking a worthwhile decision on his own steam, and the crew are, frankly put, annoying.  Even the Doctor is arrogant and overly bossy - it's like it was a lead up to a personality change we see in the next story without needing the reason they give for it in Invasion of Time.  There was a little bit too much of Tom Baker's ego showing through for this entire story.  If the Doctor's been acting like this for a bit, there's no wonder Leela P**ses off with a total stranger in the next story.

The plot is barely there and even in the bits that it was, I just couldn't bring myself to care about it.

The ONLY saving grace about this story is Louise Jameson's performance in part one, where we get to see her act a little bit more than she otherwise would.

This story has very little to offer a Doctor Who fan, and unless you're on a pilgrimage like me, I highly advise giving this one a miss.

Rating

2 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

2 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Ark

• The Mutants

• The Revenge of the Cybermen

• The Face of Evil

• The Sun Makers

• The Horns of Nimon

• Frontios

• The Doctor's Daughter (Doctor Who, Series 4)