Masterpiece Theatre: The Space Pirates

Masterpiece Theatre

Number 7: The Space Pirateszzzzzzz

The Space Pirates is the first story in Masterpiece Theatre that is completely new to this reviewer. Its reputation is pretty poor. It placed 195^th in Doctor Who Magazine’s 2009 Mighty 200 Survey, sixth from bottom, making it the lowest ranked story we have looked at thus far. Nobody really seems to remember much about it apart from the fact that it is slow and dull.

It would be unreasonable then to expect anything particularly stunning. However it would be reasonable to hope to be entertained. Sadly any such hopes were not just dashed, but thrown bodily from a cliff and impaled on the rocks below before being pecked apart by seagulls.

My God, The Space Pirates is boring. It’s quite possibly the dullest Doctor Who story ever filmed, and that says a lot when I’ve sat through Colony in Space and The Mutants. It starts badly. We spend what seems like hours with the dullest Space Corps in the universe, watching as the same raid on the beacons is carried out by the titular space pirates THREE times. The man in command, General Hermack, is possessed of a theatrical voice, an ever-changing accent and no personality. He makes no command decisions of worth in the entire story, and just chases shadows throughout the six episodes. The Doctor never meets him, yet we spend what seems like more than half the 150 minute running time in his excruciating presence.

As for the Doctor, he doesn’t turn up for the first fifteen minutes of episode one, as if he knows that this is going to be bad and therefore wants to keep his presence in the tale as brief as possible. Behind the scenes we know that the regulars, Patrick Troughton in particular, was unhappy with the amount of lines he had to learn and the lack of time he was given to do it. So The Space Pirates becomes a ‘Doctor-lite’ story in a similar vein to The Keys of Marinus and Blink, but without the quality of supporting characters and strength of idea to hold the interest. The TARDIS team enliven the tale every time they appear, but that is more to do with the sheer banality of The Space Pirates than anything Jamie, Zoe and the Doctor actually do. In fact all they seem to do is find themselves trapped in enclosed spaces while the story happens around them, until eventually they are trapped in one of those enclosed spaces with a character who is at the centre of the plot.

I ought to make a confession here; Science fiction – hard science fiction – does nothing for me. Star Cops, Outcasts, Arthur C. Clarke, and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith – all dull. My efforts to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey always go like this; watch some monkeys fight each other, watch a spaceship spin, watch some people in zero-gravity, watch the insides of my eyelids and snore gently. Sci-fi works best when it assumes the trappings of other genres. Star Wars is terrific because it’s a pulp serial like Flash Gordon. Aliens is wonderful because it’s an action film. Alien and Event Horizon are horror movies. I love Deep Space Nine because it’s a seven-series war film. And Doctor Who is a fantasy adventure series that uses sci-fi as a platform for its stories. What do you get when you try to make Doctor Who realistic? You get Attack of the Cybermen with Lytton’s crushed hands oozing blood, because Eric Saward says that’s what would have happened.

So in a way, The Space Pirates and I were never going to get along. The admittedly admirable attempts to show space travel in a realistic way mean that we are subjected to a bomb countdown sequence that starts at fifty-five minutes, which is not exactly going to have the audience on the edge of their seat biting their nails. Endless, repetitive sequences of docking and launching spaceships don’t help either, unless they are Vipers in the original Battlestar Galactica or the Scorpio in Blake’s Seven that at least launch in an arresting visual style, even if it is the same effect every single time.

The story has clearly been stretched beyond breaking point to fill its six-episode allocation, and that’s one of the biggest problems. It is my opinion that six episodes is too long for any story, and that there has never been a totally successful six-parter in the history of Doctor Who. Oooh, controversial, aren’t I? I mean, we’re lumping The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Genesis of the Daleks in with that sweeping statement, aren’t we? But the main problem with six-part stories is that the pace has to be slowed down to allow them to last the two-and-a-half hours running time. Talons, whilst utterly brilliant and patently one of the best Doctor Who stories of all-time, relies on its villain misplacing his time cabinet for the first four episodes before he can actually become a proper threat to more than just kidnapped prostitutes. In fact, Talons follows the best structure of a six-part story, which is to break it down into a four-part, then a two-part, usually in a different environment. This works well for The Seeds of Doom, The Invasion of Time, Utopia/ The Sound of Drums/ The Last of the Time Lords and less successfully for The Time Monster and Planet of the Spiders. Stories like The Space Pirates or Frontier in Space, where that doesn’t really happen because the writer is showing space to be a rather large place, tend to drag as a result.

But there are a lot of scenes of padding in all six-parters which slow the pace down. Genesis rattles along very nicely indeed, but the characters spend whole episodes travelling between the Kaled and Thal Domes. It’s a classic story, but just think how good Genesis would be with all of the fat stripped away. Modern Doctor Who writers are told to take out all extraneous scenes and plot threads until the story runs as fast as it possibly can, and I think this partially explains why Doctor Who is so popular nowadays. The scene before the titles in the modern incarnation is the equivalent of episode one of a classic adventure. Thirty seconds to set the scene is infinitely more preferably to twenty-five minutes to do the same job. Purists may argue, but Doctor Who is driven by the plot and character interactions. World-building occurs anyway when the story is well-written.

What was magical when watching/ listening to The Space Pirates was the fact that it was there at all. This is a story that was ostensibly destroyed around forty years ago, yet someone recorded the soundtrack off the telly and others spent considerable amount of time reconstructing the soundtracks and adding pictures and subtitles to explain the action, with no sense of profit or personal gain. No other series inspires such loving devotion. Maybe no other series deserves it. But my thanks go out this time to Loose Cannon Productions for their excellent version of this story. All Loose Cannon’s reconstructions are done for the fans, with no monetary compensation even hinted at. The images were clear and the sound was crisp, and the subtitles helped me make sense of all those scenes with the warbling space lady on the soundtrack and the unintelligible conversations between Milo and Dom Issigri. A truly excellent piece of work – visit their website at www.recons.com for more information. Thanks Loose Cannoneers! By the way, I’ll be covering The Savages, Galaxy Four and The Underwater Menace at some point in the near future, if you’d like to send me copies of the reconstructions for those stories (he says cheekily)!

All this talk about six-parters and reconstructions has successfully stopped me from having to talk too much about The Space Pirates, and maybe that’s the way it should be. However, as forgettable as much of the story is, there are still several reasons why every Doctor Who fan worth his or her salt should give it a try at least once.

Ten Reasons The Space Pirates steal the glory

1.       Major Ian Warne, a man who has nothing better to do than follow General Hermack’s orders and sit in a space chair staring directly into the camera. He does this so well that he manages to disguise the fact he appears to be wearing an Ice Lord’s helmet. Plus he’s played by Donald Gee, who was so excellent as Eckersley in The Monster of Peladon, where presumably he sheepishly returned his pilfered Ice Lord helmet to Commander Azaxyr. I like to think he took on an entire Ice Warrior phalanx single-handed and defeated them all, so his helmet was a trophy of battle. That’s why General Hermack calls him by his first name; the theatrical General with the many accents is scared of him and with good reason. The man’s so hard he defies the first rule of television in that no character may have the name of a previous character.

2.       I wrote here that Rohm Dutt was the father of Stotz from The Caves of Androzani. Well, here in The Space Pirates we have what must be Stotz’s grandfather in Caven. He is the original gunrunner, and his DNA carries right through the years until finally it reaches a character worthy enough. My favourite line? ‘If he can walk, get him out of here. If he can’t, leave him.’ Still not entirely sure what happens to him at the end of the story though – I presume he is blown up along with his crew by super-hard Ian Warne.

3.       Thunderbirds had been showing for nearly five years before Doctor Who finally jumped on the bandwagon and showed proper spaceships in flight. We have gotten so used to good special effects nowadays in Doctor Who that it is easy to forget just how weak some of the model effects were at times, or even how often no exterior was ever shown. The Space Pirates’ minnow ships wear their Anderson influence with pride, and the fly-by shots of Hermack’s ship are impressive for such an under-budget programme as Doctor Who was at the time, and are certainly better than the Hyperion III in Terror of the Vervoids for example, seventeen years later.

4.       The Space Pirates boasts the first truly off-kilter performance in Gordon Gostelow’s Milo Clancy. It would have been too easy to have played him as another Steven Taylor type, but instead we get a Wario-lookalike from Super Mario dressed as a cowboy. Clancy’s southern drawl and lackadaisical approach to space-travel is a refreshing change to the overload of earnest characters in the story, and there are echoes of the Doctor in his attempts to keep his spaceship, the Liz-79, in something close to working order. Even Jamie questions the safety of travelling in the Liz, and he’s recently seen the TARDIS explode. Sure there are times when you cannot understand a blimmin’ word Clancy says, but he spends the entire story defending his skewed outlook on life and you’ve got to like him for that.

5.       After falling down a hole during the cliffhanger to episode three, the TARDIS team land unscathed (Who’d have thought that would happen?) apart from the Doctor who makes noises of pain. His companions show concern until the Doctor pulls a battered packet of drawing pins out of his pocket where they have been sticking into him. Zoe looks at him in puzzlement, asking ‘What have you got drawing pins for?’  The Doctor replies in a defensive voice: ‘I like drawing pins. Usually...’ This is perfect pure Troughton, and for me the best moment in the entire story.

6.       The story lifts every time the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe appear, which in the early episodes in never enough. Their banter is easy and funny, but when the situation turns desperate the Doctor immediately tells his friends the truth. There is a level of trust and affection there that few TARDIS teams can match.

7.       Trapped in yet another locked room, the Doctor attempts to use a tuning fork to open the door as in the future doors are locked by keycards possessing a resonating note. He fails miserably until Jamie, having failed too, chucks away the tuning fork in disgust. When it lands it of course hits the perfect note and the door slides open. It’s a brilliant slapstick moment.

8.       Although he is a relatively poorly-drawn character in the early episodes, Dervish reveals himself as a man with a conscience who is doing the wrong things for material gains. What is interesting about him is that he questions Caven’s orders, especially when it will lead to someone’s death, but then he follows that order anyway. His instinct for self-preservation overrides his sense of decency.

9.       The Space Pirates obviously doesn’t exist in visual form anymore, apart from episode two, so it almost becomes a Big Finish production in that the only faculty we can use is our hearing and our imaginations have to do the rest.  However, it is all-too-easy to end up listening to the battle of the accents instead. We have Hermack, presumably of dubious American/ Germanic/ Russian origins, Ian Warne’s American accent, Clancy’s mumbling drawl, Madeleine’s over-enunciated speech and Dom Issigri’s barely intelligible noises. I’m not sure who wins, but I’m hard-pressed to think of another Doctor Who story with quite so many odd accents occurring at once, often in the same scene.

10.   The ingenious, almost MacGyver-esque manner in which the Doctor uses what little he has at his disposal to escape the endless series of locked rooms in which he finds himself.

The Space Pirates is hard work, make no bones about it. However, if you manage to get through the first episode and a half, the story does lift and there is enjoyment to be had. The story’s biggest problem is that everyone seemed to have their eye on the next story, The War Games, which would see the entire TARDIS team leave, and would in all likelihood be the final ever story. Mercifully things turned out differently, and if the cost of another forty-three years and counting was a weaker story, then we should forgive The Space Pirates for being the one that took the fall.

Next Time: Nightmare of Eden

It's a Beacon of Love

Today the Olympic Torch Relay passed through the town closest to where I live. I remember saying in my analysis of Fear Her that the crowd scene when the torch-bearer passes smacked of a lack of budget for extras. I wrote at the time that the crowd on the road was probably shy of a thousand spectators and today proved that I probably underestimated that figure by half. It seemed like the whole town turned up to watch, so proving just how impoverished Fear Her actually was. They couldn’t even afford to CG replica spectators into the scene like they did with the street party at the end of The Idiot’s Lantern. Also, never seen so many police vans in my life – maybe that was why they weren’t investigating the spate of child disappearances in the story. They were too busy waving at spectators along the route.

I stood and watched, and all the time in my head I could hear the stupid voiceover they forced on poor old Huw Edwards. I wanted to think of something profound and all I got was ‘It’s more than a torch now. It’s a beacon of hope and fortitude and courage. It’s a beacon of love’. Unfortunately it was a joke that nobody around me would get, so I stood quietly and giggled madly to myself. There are times when loving Doctor Who is a lonely business, and this was one of those occasions.

Sadly there was no Isolus spaceship flying into the flame either.

I wonder, though, just how many other Doctor Who fans in the last few weeks have watched as the torch relay passed them by, willing the runner with the torch to stumble so that they can pick it up and make some sort of David Tennant ‘Whooo-hoooo!’ noise. I’ll bet I’m not alone in that thought.

Masterpiece Theatre: Dragonfire

Masterpiece Theatre

Number 6: Dragonfire

Dragonfire was my favourite story of Season 24 when it was first broadcast in 1987, mainly I think because of Kane’s death scene at the end of it. As a teenager I was rather partial to a touch of gore, and who needs a logical plot and decent characters when the main villain does a Belloq and melts? And clearly I was not alone, as it won the 1987 Doctor Who Magazine Season Survey.

But time goes by and tastes change, and it seems that time has not been kind to Dragonfire. From its lofty position at the top of the Season 27 manure heap, the story finds itself lurking at a lowly 186 in the DWM Mighty 200 Survey. It’s still ahead of Paradise Towers, mind, which shouldn’t be the case at all. It has gone from being a harmless little adventure minding its own business, to an object of scorn.

The main fault that can be pointed at Dragonfire is just how cheap and tacky it looks. Clearly the budget for the season had been slashed just to keep it on air, but never before and never since has Doctor Who looked so cheap. The sets are uniformly ridiculously poor, and there is never any real sense that the walls are made from ice. Cellophane wrapping maybe, but never ice.

This sense of tackiness is exacerbated by some of the acting too. Tony Selby was fine as Glitz in The Mysterious Planet, as a man just about keeping his sociopathic streak under control. But by the time we get to Dragonfire, Glitz has been reinterpreted as an intergalactic Del-Boy and Selby has decided to deliver every single one of his lines like he is appearing in a cheap and cheerful children’s programme. Any edge to the character has long since been lost, and that’s shameful.  Irritating space-moppet Stellar and her imbecilic mother are equally guilty. Stellar’s mother appears to be utterly unaware of a massacre taking place around her, whilst her cutesy-blonde daughter for some reason takes centre-stage in the final episode. Still, reassuringly, Stellar may have the look of a cute little girl, but she has the heart of a cold-blooded killer, as she freezes her teddy to death without a thought. She’s the pre-teen version of Dexter. Maybe Kane should have offered her the coin instead. She would have brought him the Dragon’s head in no time at all, probably wearing its intestines as a scarf.

Then there’s the plot, or lack thereof. Dragonfire shows a staggering lack of thought in its world-building. Kane, stranded on Iceworld, appears to run a freezer centre. He has made no effort at all to leave the planet or to kill the Dragon (his jailer) despite having thousands of years to do so. His second-in-command Belasz is obviously plotting his demise, yet he does nothing about her until she nearly succeeds in killing him. He also never meets the Doctor until his final scene and then promptly kills himself. In fact, Kane may well be the laziest villain in Doctor Who history. The man just can't be bothered.

It is hard enough to reconcile the freezer centre with Kane’s domain, but when Ace and Mel escape from Kane’s headquarters, they run into the Dragon within metres of leaving. Not exactly well-hidden is the key to Kane’s release, despite the fact that characters say that the Dragon has never been seen. The Doctor manages to lose Glitz down a corridor with only one other entrance. Kane’s soldiers massacre everyone on Iceworld, but we never see any bodies. And on and on it goes, down, down, deeper and down...

Still, we’ve got this far without even mentioning THAT cliffhanger. Oh, wait, I’ve just mentioned it. Damn. Just a word of warning: once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it.

There we are. The Doctor; the Oncoming Storm, conqueror of the Sontarans, the Cybermen, the Silence and Mestor the Magnificent; the man who wiped out Gallifrey and the Daleks single-handed; the man who sealed the Medusa Cascade, sliding down his umbrella into a bottomless chasm for no apparent reason. Even the makers of the programme don’t know what he is doing!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tmNXj2W7yw4

But we are here to praise, not to blame,so...

Ten Reasons that Dragonfire can melt even the coldest heart

1.       Kane’s head-melting death. After Season 22 went too far and showed far too much violence and blood for a family teatime, Doctor Who played it safe for a couple of years, as if the programme had lost faith in itself to show anything that might draw negative publicity at a time when it was already struggling to survive. The nastiest it got was Katryca and Broken Tooth’s electrocution in The Mysterious Planet, although conceptually Peri’s ‘death’ in Mindwarp is much, much nastier. So it was a breath of fresh air to see Doctor Who working hard to send viewers scuttling behind the sofa again. This was Doctor Who pushing at the boundaries of acceptability once more, but without the gratuitous tone of Season 22. The scene had to be cut as well. Apparently one of Kane’s eyes popped out and rolled down his cheek as they were filming it...

2.       Edward Peel as Kane lends the story and character a gravity that the part simply does not deserve. Kane is nothing more than a glorified freezer centre manager, too stupid to actually leave his prison and too slapdash to post security guards at the entrances to his so-called Forbidden Zone. Kane’s motives are nebulous to say the least, but Peel works hard to invest his villain with an icy menace. It’s a pity he didn’t get to have any sort of confrontation scene with the Doctor.

3.       Patricia Quinn, as Belasz, also works incredibly hard to give the story some realism. It’s a real pity her subplot runs out before the story ends. After all, it would not be difficult to imagine her eventually siding with the Doctor against Kane. Her desperate longing to be free from Kane’s slavery overrides her sense of what is wrong and right, and Quinn plays this trait as something Belasz is aware of and trying to ignore. She is head and shoulders above the rest of the cast.

4.       The scene where Kane tries to tempt Ace into joining his slave army is almost powerful. Sophie Aldred in particular sells the moment, and you actually believe for a fraction of a second that she might take the coin from Kane. Bonnie Langford’s plaintive cries to her friend create a tension in this scene that the rest of the story unfortunately fritters away.

5.       He’s an obvious joke, but the intelligent guard who proves more than an intellectual match for the Doctor is still funny. He seems to have strolled in from Red Dwarf. I like to imagine that the Doctor, unable to escape the guard’s attention, simply punches him in the face and runs. Or telepathically summons Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor to glass him.

6.       Sophie Aldred as Ace is excellent from her very first scene. She exudes an easy charm and has an interestingly brittle facade that manifests itself as belligerence. Her insistence on giving everyone an immediate nickname demonstrates her inability to allow anyone to get too close to her, hence her own nickname, and Aldred seems to really understand this element of her character. Ace would go on to become the best companion of the eighties, and the seeds of her character are sown right here.

7.       Mel’s leaving scene, described by Steven Moffat as the moment the Doctor slipped back into the room. The ‘Days like crazy paving’ speech is handled beautifully by Sylvester McCoy, and lays down a marker for where he wanted his Doctor to go. His sadness at losing Mel is palpable and he gives her departure an emotional kick that outstrips all previous leaving scenes right the way back to Romana in Warriors’ Gate.

8.       The Dragon – Alien on a child-friendly BBC budget. Almost every aspect is copied from the then-fresh Alien movies. The design is clearly ripped off from inspired by the HR Giger creation, from the elongated head to the metallic exoskeleton to the tubes that hiss gas. The only difference is that Ridley Scott and James Cameron shrouded their creations in darkness, making them a potent threat, but, like the Myrka before him, the poor biomechanical Dragon is exposed under harsh BBC lighting.

9.       Sylvester McCoy and his amazing ice acting. In every scene he moves as if he is slipping on ice – a not unreasonable assumption given that this is indeed Iceworld – yet the rest of the cast fail to pick up on his cue. So he just looks slightly embarrassing in his movements. A little more rehearsal time, and a little more leading from Sylvester, and we would have believed that this was really a world made from ice, rather than a series of cheap-looking and over-lit corridors.

10.   Ian Briggs has clearly decided that if he is going to steal the Dragon from Aliens, he might as well steal the plot as well. Therefore in part three we have Stephanie Fayerman and Stewart Organ (him off of Grange Hill), pretending to be the Colonial Marines in Aliens, creeping around the corridors with over-sized guns, with a motion detector giving off readings. But despite their efforts, director Chris Clough ain’t exactly James Cameron. Once again, as happens so often in these less well-regarded stories, it’s a case of imagination-budget mismatch. It’s CBBC does Aliens...

The money had run out. The programme was recovering after an unexpected shutdown. The new Doctor was still finding his feet. The script editor hadn’t yet fully implemented his vision of what was to come. The writer needed another couple of drafts. All these factors and more combine to trip up Dragonfire. It is inarguably a mess, but like so many before it, there are glimmers of what the story might have been. Dragonfire is a story that’s hard to hate, but impossible to love.

Next Time: The Space Pirates

OTT: Mordred

OTT

Number Three: Mordred

‘Here is the convocation. This blog we make the meeting place; the point between two worlds, two universes, two realities. By this post, brother to the ones about Major Shapp and Colonel Archer, I part the curtain of quality. Across the abyss, naff calls to naff, biomass to biomass, energy to energy. To TimeflightFTW I summon thee, from beyond the confines of acceptable acting...’

(David laughs).

We are deep into episode two of Battlefield, the 1989 Sylvester McCoy adventure. In a pub by a lake, the Doctor is growling warnings in Scottish of approaching evil. In a helicopter somewhere, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is dozing after spending the entirety of episode one journeying to actually be part of the plot. And in an abandoned house-castle-place, Mordred, son of Morgaine, seeks to bring his witchy mother into our dimension for reasons that escape me.

Cue a cliched Doctor Who summoning scene, in which Christopher Bowen as Mordred is lumbered with a lorry-load of dodgy lines, recounted above with *coughs* minimal rephrasing. Summoning scenes are always hokey even at the best of times, but Bowen gives it his best shot, trying to give at least a facade of seriousness to the scene.



Then it calls for him to laugh, and laugh, and laugh even more. Never in the history of Doctor Who has such a laugh resounded for such a length of time. Even Anthony Ainley must bow to its majesty. It goes on...

And on...

It’s a mighty feat of prolonged lunacy, and you can see in Christopher Bowen’s eyes that he is uncomfortable with the whole scene. He’s been pushed by the director to give it everything and more. It fits in poorly with his portrayal of Mordred as a slightly understated villain. That’s what makes it so special. He’s an actor embarrassing himself for the greater cause. He leaves every last shred of his dignity on the altar of Doctor Who. What a hero.

But in the back of your mind you just know that all the script said was ‘Mordred laughs...’

Carnival of Monsters: The Mandrels

Carnival of Monsters

Number Five: The Mandrels

There is an argument that asserts that because Season 16 relied primarily on humanoid foes, Shrivenzales and Ogri aside, the designers responsible for creating Doctor Who’s menagerie of menaces rather forgot how to design decent-looking monsters. Coupled with a budget that didn’t stretch nearly far enough, there was a growing problem. Not that the writers held back in their imaginings. When Season 17 was broadcast, we ended up with mangy-looking Daleks, Nimons in blue tights, a giant inflatable plastic bag called Erato and the admittedly nightmarish Scaroth.

Then there are the Mandrels in Nightmare of Eden.

Written as large and dangerous creatures, there’s something almost brilliant about their design. They have glow-in-the dark eyes, arms that are far too long for their bodies, and flared legs that could only have come from the seventies. The Mandrels are only a short distance away from being a classic design. I think they are completely brilliant.

Yet it is in their execution where something goes tragically wrong. Like the Slitheen twenty-five years later, monsters with long arms look good until they actually have to attack. Then all the poor performers inside them can do is flail wildly and hope that something connects. In Nightmare of Eden, the Mandrels main method of attack seems to be to swing and hope. Several characters die from what appear to be the most glancing of blows and yet the Doctor survives a full on wrestling match with one.

Although their importance to the plot is immensely clever, it actually relies on them becoming the victims in the story and to be almost domesticated by K9’s dog whistle, following the sound and making noises of bliss. They are like big hairy doggies. So instead of being the fearsome beasts that everyone in the story describes, they become almost cute. The BBC should have marketed Mandrel dolls in the seventies as cuddly plush teddies. They would have made a mint. I can imagine the response of children throughout the land when they saw one...

Unfortunately for the designers, at the same time Nightmare of Eden was first broadcast, The Muppet Show was also at its height, and it is hard to look at a Mandrel without seeing Sweetums, the big shaggy Muppet monster with the huge mouth who eats bunnies...

Art Gallery: Fury from the Deep

Art Gallery 4

Along with The Web of Fear, Evil of the Daleks and Power of the Daleks, Fury from the Deep is mourned as one of the lost Troughton greats. Fan wisdom decrees that it is an all-time classic, and certainly surviving clips paint a picture of lingering horror. This sequence with Mr Oak and Mr Quill is quite probably the scariest scene ever depicted in Doctor Who.

Those stories unceremoniously junked during the sixties and seventies automatically attain an almost mythical status. Chances are that we will never see them again, although the return last year of episodes of Galaxy 4 and The Underwater Menace means that we will always live in hope. Off-air soundtracks and John Cura’s telesnaps offer tantalising glimpses of what we have lost, along with the few censor-snipped segments that still exist.

The loss of Fury from the Deep is by all accounts a terrible loss for Doctor Who fans and Troughton aficionados in particular. So the Target novelisation by Victor Pemberton was duly greeted with bated breath and deeper-than-usual analysis upon its release in 1986.

However, it is not the contents that interest us but the front cover. It could have shown many things; the helicopter sequence, Mr Oak and Mr Quill, Victoria screaming, the Doctor in a woolly hat, Maggie walking into the sea and so on. All of these are iconic moments and scenes, made doubly so by the fact that most likely they are lost forever.

Yet artist David McAllister chooses to avoid all of these iconic images in favour of creating his own. Fury from the Deep’s cover sees a lonely oil rig standing by a mist-wreathed coastline, whilst in the foreground a tuft of seaweed reaches out of the waves, looking for all the world like hands reaching up from the ocean. It’s a somehow haunting image, effective in its simplicity. By not going overboard and smothering the cover in something approaching a ‘Greatest Hits of Fury’ compilation as some Target covers tended to become, McAllister allows his artwork to subliminally suggest the plotline, so that those great moments weren’t spoiled before the reader had even started the book. Its starkness symbolises a deeper, more mature story, and gives due honour to this missing classic.

Fury from the Deep may be lost, but we are lucky to have such a complete record of its images and plot, as we are with all the missing stories. Very few series with lost episodes are documented half as well as Doctor Who. At least we can experience those destroyed episodes in some shape or form. It’s not the same as actually watching them, but it’s better than nothing.

We are also lucky that the concept sketch didn’t go on to become the actual cover. Fury from the Deep deserves better than a picture of the Doctor after someone has sneezed on his nice woolly hat...

(Image reproduced from The Target Book by Telos Publishing. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out on a brilliant history of the Target novelisations. Get on Amazon right now!)

Masterpiece Theatre: Arc of Infinity

Masterpiece Theatre

Number 5: Arc of Infinity

Season openers need to grab the attention. They need to hook the wider audience with easy-to-follow plots and understandable concepts, pull in fresh viewers, invest them in the characters and make them want to come back next week. It’s an interesting dichotomy that, while often highly enjoyed by the general public, season openers are rarely regarded as the best stories by Doctor Who fans, mainly because they lack the darker edges and emotional pay-offs that later episodes in a season tend to display.

A recent exception to this rule is The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of the Moon, in which Steven Moffat makes no concessions to the casual viewer, demanding that his audience pay full attention to his labyrinthine plotting. However, he makes sure that the characters are introduced properly, and that the strands of the plot arc are clearly understandable. Even though he pushes the format to its limits and, with the possible exception of the Doctor’s failed regeneration, little prior knowledge of the series is actually needed to appreciate the story. The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of the Moon manages to appeal to both the casual viewer and the fans there for the long run, introducing a memorable (or maybe not) new enemy in the Silence and setting up a season-long plot designed to keep the ratings as high as possible for the entire run. This is intelligent, engaging Doctor Who designed to capture a huge audience for the whole season.

Contrast this with Arc of Infinity, and it is easy to see where this 1983 adventure gets it wrong.

As the first story of a season, Arc of Infinity is by any measure a bit of a damp squib. As the first story in the Twentieth Season, it is actually detrimental to the rest of the series. It is the first indication of the series beginning to disappear up its own behind, laden with obscure continuity references that the casual viewer cannot hope to understand, and all this in a time when viewers couldn’t simply watch old episodes in order to understand what the characters were on about.

The story is a sequel to The Three Doctors, a set of four episodes aired during the Tenth Anniversary season. Fans tend to heavily criticise Attack of the Cybermen for exactly the same faults as Arc of Infinity, but Arc got there first. It is also a sequel that fails to understand the original. A sequel should extend the mythos and deepen our understanding, and at the same time offer us something fresh to allow us to see the original in a different light. Aliens deepens and extends Alien, the unfairly-derided Star Wars prequels provide us with motivations and threads that pay off in the original trilogy, and in the Doctor Who universe, The Time of Angels places the Weeping Angels firmly at the top table in the pantheon of Doctor Who monsters by developing their powers and motivations. Yet Arc of Infinity reeks of John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward reusing poor old Omega only because he was in the Tenth Anniversary story, not because they actually had any plans to deepen his character or take him off in a worthwhile new direction. It smacks of creatively bereft decision-making and a fatal misunderstanding of the programme. Instead of celebrating the past, at times John Nathan-Turner ransacked it. I wonder if he realised this.

I doubt that many viewers had any idea who Omega was, even those who had been watching ten years previously, or even two years before when the story was repeated in 1981. He is not exactly a well-known villain, and yet the story hinges on our knowing who he is. When his identity is casually dropped into the story, towards the end of episode three, we are given no real back story. We are told that he is ‘one of us, a Time Lord, the first and greatest of our people, one who sacrificed all to give us mastery of time.’ The Doctor immediately knows who he is, but how does the audience? There is no earlier scene seeding his existence with the viewer, so therefore this is not a pay-off but a bit of exposition. We don’t know, so we don’t care.

Omega is also impossible to square with his previous appearance. In The Three Doctors, he had pretty much set himself up as a god, sustained only by his own insanity and willpower. There was nothing left of him under his mask. In Arc of Infinity, there is no real reference to that previous encounter, and he is reduced to a tubby man in a chair with a funny mask, who eventually, and for reasons unclear, turns into Peter Davison. And he has a TARDIS, which was invented after the Time Lords discovered time travel, which was after Omega sacrificed himself... As I said, there is a lack of understanding about Doctor Who, and a slightly cynical disregard for its rich history. Honour the past and look to the future; that should be the mantra of any incoming producer. Furthermore, Omega in The Three Doctors is a ranting megalomaniac with a voice that could out-shout Brian Blessed. Omega in Arc of Infinity is not this man, despite Ian Collier’s fine voice-work. It’s hard to reconcile the two appearances into any sort of cohesive whole. Perhaps Omega somehow regenerated, and the man we see in Arc of Infinity reflects a quieter aspect of his personality?

Maybe the story needed the Gel Guards, to allow us to make the link between the two incarnations. Although they were slightly amusing in their design, I love the scene where they pop into existence and lumber towards UNIT HQ. Instead of Gel Guards, though, we get the Ergon. It’s a plucked chicken with a gun that can’t even walk straight. How in the name of all that is unholy did this design get approved? I’ve already spent enough time discussing this disaster, so I’ll direct you here instead of going on about poor Mr Ergon. Nevertheless the Ergon still provides one of my favourite moments in the story. Just watch Peter Davison giving his all to sell the danger.

While we are on the subject of all that is unholy, why, why, WHY must we suffer the return of whingy windbag Tegan Jovanka? The very best thing about Arc of Infinity, as we’ll see below, is the easy relationship between the Doctor and Nyssa. We believe that Nyssa wants to be in the TARDIS and that the Doctor wants her there. Why on earth does Tegan want to go off with the Doctor again at the end of the story, when she spent the entirety of the previous season moaning about getting home? If the companion, representing the eyes of the viewer, doesn’t want to be there, then why should we want to be there either? It’s a fundamental lack of reasoning that sours the reign of Peter Davison, my favourite Doctor. Certainly the Doctor’s expression at the end of the story says it all; he doesn’t want her there either, but unlike Eccleston or Tennant, he is too polite to say otherwise. Again, it is fashionable to deride Adric and Matthew Waterhouse, but Janet Fielding may well be the worst actress ever cast as a companion. She never once, in all her stories, sells the danger, the excitement and the wonder of travelling with the Doctor. All she does is pout and whine.

If Tegan had to return, and this is highly debatable because her story had run its natural course, then it would have been better to have left her out of the first couple of stories, to give Nyssa and the Doctor breathing space to develop and also to create more of a surprise (and free publicity, which John Nathan-Turner was usually so good at garnering) upon her eventual reunion with the TARDIS. However, it was not meant to be, and we were lumbered with a grumpy Australian for another two years. Christopher Eccleston would have chucked her out at the first opportunity, possibly with a well-delivered headbutt and the crafty theft of her purse. How we would have cheered.

Arc of Infinity placed 177^th in the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 survey, and that’s a pretty generous position in my opinion. Yet, like every single Doctor Who story ever broadcast, there is so much to love and cherish, even if in this case it’s virtually impossible to ignore its shortcomings. But let’s celebrate what Arc gets right, because somewhere under there is a layer of brilliance.

Ten Reasons why Arc of Infinity stays above sea level

1.       Nyssa and the Doctor’s easy relationship – it’s the first time since Logopolis where the TARDIS team have got on with each other. It will be the last time until The Mysterious Planet in three years time... It also proves that the Doctor works best with just one companion. Peter Davison visibly relishes Sarah Sutton’s performance, and gets a rare opportunity to relax and come off the defensive.

2.       Colin Baker’s best ever Doctor Who performance. Now Colin is a good actor and a good choice for the Doctor, but the theatrical bombastics the scripts foist upon him do him no favours whatsoever. His tenure is blighted by dialogue that doesn’t even resemble English and an unfortunate tendency to sideline him from any meaningful acts of heroism. So his performance as Maxil comes as almost a shock. Sure, it’s occasionally a touch too arch, but for the most part it’s a pleasure to see Colin underplaying. It’s a reminder, if any were needed, that Colin is a damn good actor. Plus, he gets to shoot the Doctor and wear the Ergon’s feathers on his hat.

3.       TARDIS crockery. The Doctor has just been shot. Nyssa, in all her gentle kindness, brings him a drink. In a novelty plastic cup with a straw looping around the side... Peter Davison takes one look at it and gently puts it down out of the way. Understatedly brilliant.

4.       The lengths Nyssa will go to in order to save the Doctor are extraordinary in this story. Leela, Captain Jack and River Song apart, it is difficult to recall any companion so readily taking up arms to defend the Time Lord. It’s much more powerful from Nyssa though; she is a companion from one of the most peaceful planets the Doctor has ever visited. For her to wield a gun so casually shows how far she has come from her days on Traken. Maybe Davros had a point in Journey’s End when he said the Doctor turns his companions into weapons.

5.       The Ergon’s ray gun is great. The special effect as it turns people into anti-matter is very good, and aesthetically it is pleasing. It dismantles like Scaramanga’s gun in The Man with the Golden Gun. If only there was a disintegration setting to use on Tegan...

6.       Michael Gough gives a fantastic performance as Hedin. Whilst we don’t quite believe in his friendship with the Doctor, he invests the traitor with a quiet dignity and keeps him sympathetic at all times. Although it is far too obvious that he is in league with Omega, Gough at least tries to disguise his voice as he speaks to him in the sadly overlit room. Plus he can twirl a mean pen.

7.       The Doctor’s facial expression when he realises Tegan is coming with him. Priceless...

8.       The best scene in the four episodes is the one time we feel Omega’s loneliness at being abandoned. Unsure of himself and now wearing the Doctor’s face, Omega stumbles upon a crowd listening to ‘Tulips of Amsterdam’ on a pipe organ. He watches, bewildered yet entranced, until an irritating little squirt practically shoves him out of the way. As the boy smiles, we see Omega initially glare at him and then tentatively copy his expression, his first steps towards rehabilitation and reintegration after centuries of solitude. It’s the only time we feel sorry for Omega in any of the four episodes.

9.       The Amsterdam setting allows Doctor Who to become more global in its outlook. Although it is unfortunate that a story set abroad was picked to reintroduce Tegan, given the remote odds of encountering the Doctor again become even higher when you consider she just happens to be in a city in Holland, we get a slight sense that the TARDIS can indeed land anywhere. It’s a pity though that Doctor Who’s trips abroad in the eighties were governed by where the cheapest package holidays were destined, rather than by any real story purpose. This is another area where modern Who gets it so right; overseas filming is driven by providing the best location for the story, such as Vampires of Venice and Planet of the Dead, or by plot needs, in stories such as Daleks in Manhattan and Day of the Moon.

10.   Ian Collier does a very good job of playing Omega, or rather his voice does. He provides a moment that it equal parts eerie and amusing as Omega speaks with his voice as Peter Davison mimes. He has a rather thankless task, and has little space to portray Omega’s true aims, but by toning it down a bit at least brings a touch more realism than Stephen Thorne managed. His mask is rubbish compared to the original though.

This story sadly demonstrates Doctor Who’s first moves towards cannibalising itself and plundering its past, and its inevitable steps towards alienating the audience and cancellation. It’s a shame that, after an excellent Season 19, the quality of stories slumped towards the mediocre in Season 20, apart from the twin jewels of Snakedance and Enlightenment. Peter Davison’s Doctor continues to shine, but he has since said that it was the poor nature of the scripts he was offered that led to his eventual departure. He shines strongly here, in an average tale in an average season, and that’s a good a reason as any to watch it again.

Next Time: Dragonfire