May 9: Spearhead from Space Episodes 3 & 4

Episode 3 is largely a delaying action, as apparently the meteor that Sam Seeley has is the swarm leader for the alien Autons, and is thus vital to their plans of conquest and without it their plans can't advance.  Nevertheless it's still entertaining.  Plus this allows us to see our first real look at an Auton in action, as one shoots at Ransome, the fired plastics factory employee, as he flees said factory, while another one ransacks the Seeleys' cottage looking for that swarm leader, taking a shotgun blast to the chest with no ill effect.

And then we also have Ransome's still-panicked discussion with UNIT about what's going on at his old workplace, and some guff about the Doctor trying to leave in the middle of the crisis⁵³, just to prove that the TARDIS isn't going anywhere for some time.  So all in all, not a lot of actual story advancement here: UNIT learns about the factory, sees an Auton in action, and finds the swarm leader and that's about it.  But it's all so well written, directed, and acted that the time never drags.

Episode 4 gives us the recovery of the swarm leader by the Autons, which means their plan can now proceed and they can unleash the Autons on the public.  The scenes of the mannequins in the storefront windows coming to life and smashing through the glass to kill the populace at large are justly famous (even if we never see any glass actually break), endowing a familiar object with deadly menace.  There's something chilling about those blank plastic faces walking toward you, with their fingers hinging down to produce a strange gun.  It's eerie in concept and, brought to life in such a memorable way by the production team, highly effective.

The Autons begin their attack. (Spearhead from Space
Episode 4) ©BBC

This is the high point of the episode, coming roughly at the midpoint; before that we get the Doctor and Liz investigating Madame Tussauds for strange goings-on and Ransome being obliterated by an Auton.  Afterwards it's a race against time to stop the Autons and their controllers, the Nestenes, from taking over the planet.  This does mean we get a rather nifty battle between UNIT forces and the Autons (at the same location as the battle between UNIT forces and the Cybermen in The Invasion, I notice), but it also means that, as the Doctor and Liz sneak off to fight the problem at its source, we get an awfully long stretch of the Doctor struggling with the Nestene manifestation (which is some sort of squid) while Liz struggles to work out what's wrong with the Doctor's Nestene-killing device.  And maybe it's because I've seen it before, but it takes an awfully long time for Liz to figure out that the reason the device isn't working is that the magic wand attachment isn't plugged into it.  All while Pertwee pulls faces and struggles with tentacles wrapped around his neck and slapping him in the face.  (And consider that this version was actually a remount for a take from an earlier day that was deemed even worse, and ponder what that must have looked like...)  But in the end Liz plugs the cable in and the Doctor saves the day, causing the Nestene to explode in the process.

Spearhead from Space is, it must be said, a triumph from start to finish.  The decision to go to an all-film production (thanks to a scene-shifters strike at the BBC) is a real benefit, as it allows Derek Martinus to be much more mobile with his cameras than he would have been if he'd had to do studio work.  This gives everything a much more dynamic feeling, and the sense of coherency by having everything look the same visually with no switching between film (25 frames per second) and video (50 half-frames (aka fields) per second, which are interlaced to provide a "smoother" motion -- this is putting it very crudely, mind) also adds to the effectiveness of the finished product.  To be honest, this isn't a story about the Doctor, and by the end we still don't have a firm grasp on who this new Doctor is, other than that he's definitely the Doctor -- but in terms of setting up the show's new Earthbound format, Spearhead from Space works marvelously well.  Robert Holmes's script knows exactly what it wants to do, and it has no problems doing it.

And as this is the last story to be produced by Derrick Sherwin (who only really became the producer for the last couple stories, but who's really just carrying on the style that Peter Bryant had, since Sherwin was Bryant's script editor), we can take a moment to evaluate his and Bryant's impact on the show.  A lot of their shows were made in moments of crisis, but there's definitely an effort to move away from simple monster stories and back to moments of human drama, of personalities reacting to one another rather than a generic alien race trying to take over everything (which isn't to say that those stories go away, but there's still noticeably less of them than during Innes Lloyd's tenure).  But their ultimate impact was probably in setting the stage for the next couple years of stories, limiting the Doctor to one time and place in an effort to create a more familiar setting for viewers (even if, as Malcolm Hulke famously complained, this meant that the only stories now available were mad scientists and alien invasions -- fortunately this turned out to be a somewhat cynical viewpoint).  But whatever their overall merits, you can't deny that they go out on a high note.







⁵³ Well, we call it a crisis, but to be fair all he's really got to go on at the moment he decides to try and take off is a piece of plastic that defies analysis.  He doesn't even know about the plastic factory shenanigans yet.  So from his point of view it's hardly the abandonment of his friends in a time of need that it's sometimes made out to be.