May 17: Inferno Episodes 1 & 2

Standard and special edition DVDs

So we've arrived at another scientific research base out in the middle of nowhere.  The Doctor and UNIT are already settled in at this project; this time it's about drilling deep into the Earth and penetrating the crust, thereby hoping to tap the vast pockets of Stahlman's gas down there.  How anyone knows this gas exists in the first place isn't brought up.  The man the gas is named after, Professor Eric Stahlman, is unashamedly the first mad scientist introduced in the Pertwee era.  Yes, we might cite Dr. Lawrence from Doctor Who and the Silurians as a mad scientist, but he's not remotely in the same league as Professor Stahlman.  Irritable from the get-go ("Our liver playing us up again this morning, is it, Professor?" the Doctor asks pointedly) and completely unwilling to consider the safety of anyone if it risks slowing down the rate of drilling, Stahlman comes across as pig-headed and dangerous at best.  There are no subtleties in Olaf Pooley's performance here: Stahlman is single-minded in his goal to penetrate the Earth's crust, no matter what the cost.

Of course, this causes a problem in that these first two episodes consist largely of various emergencies that Stahlman refuses to take seriously, and so several people argue unsuccessfully with him about slowing down or stopping the drilling, or at least taking some of the warnings seriously.  It works reasonably well in the first episode; after the second it starts to get a little tedious, as the Doctor, Sir Keith Gold (Christopher Benjamin, who'll return in The Talons of Weng-Chiang), and Greg Sutton (who played the caveman Za in An Unearthly Child) all try to get Stahlman to see reason -- or at least not endanger lives unnecessarily.

Still, it's not the only thing going on; there's also a subplot about a strange green goo⁵⁷ that turns anyone who touches it into a regressed ape-like creature (the credits call them "Primords") that emits intense heat and burns anyone and anything it touches.  This leads to some fairly brutal moments, as the first person to be infected, Harry Slocum, starts brutally murdering people (and note the blood spatter on his coveralls when he's inside the nuclear reactor control room).  Then two more people are infected (by Slocum, it seems, so either he smeared some of the green goo on himself or he can turn people into Primords à la werewolves), including a private who falls to his death (in what was at the time the highest fall ever performed by a British stuntman -- nice work, Roy Scammell).  And Professor Stahlman also ends up touching the goo -- not that you'd notice from his behavior, since he's already acting extremely irrational and territorial.  He even tries to sabotage the main computer when it starts warning that the whole place is in danger -- a scene which leads to Jon Pertwee's first use of what he calls here "Venusian karate"⁵⁸, in which a certain pressure point has the ability to paralyze a person (even if the actual effect is Pertwee grabbing someone in a non-dangerous (read: unable to be copied by children) hold).  Here it's used on Stahlman himself, although it doesn't stop him from ultimately destroying the microcircuit he removed from the computer.

The other subplot running through these first couple episodes consists of the Doctor trying to get the TARDIS console (still outside the TARDIS itself, as seen in the opening moments of The Ambassadors of Death) working again.  In episode 1 a power surge sends it and him through an interestingly directed but painful-looking realm that the Doctor later describes as "some sort of limbo", with a "barrier I couldn't break through."  Episode 2 sees him try again, but the power is cut off at a crucial moment and so the cliffhanger has the Doctor, the TARDIS console, and Bessie all dematerialize in front of Liz Shaw and the Brigadier...







⁵⁷ In reality a heavy duty hand cleaner known as Swarfega.
⁵⁸ Fandom tends to refer to it as "Venusian aikido", but this term isn't actually employed until The Green Death.