July 9: Planet of the Spiders Parts Three & Four

Part three appears to open with a shot of William Hartnell driving a hovercraft...

Part three gives us some exposition (such as how Lupton decided to join a Buddhist group because he wanted power; um, what?), but it's really about two things: how Tommy, the mentally impaired helper at the retreat, steals the blue crystal from Lupton, and how the action (well, much of it) moves to Metebelis III.  The scenes on Earth are still reasonably entertaining; it's nice to get some explanation for Lupton's actions, even if they're a little odd, and Cho-je gets to be happily serene ("It is good that we have come to the West.  You whip your poor horse too much.  He gallops so that he is exhausted and yet, you know, he never leaves his stable").  And John Kane does a good job as Tommy, making him sweet and likable.

But when events move to Metebelis III, things start to take a downward turn.  There's some extensive abuse of CSO, but the real issue concerns the actors portraying the "Two-Legs".  Some of them, like Gareth Hunt, are reasonably good, but then there's Jenny Laird as Neska, who seems to think she's only doing a rehearsal.  "No I shan't you shan't take him Sabor my husband my love why did you do it why why?" is only the most memorable of her lines for its sheer lack of emotion or inflection.  It's such a bizarrely wooden performance that you can't help but watch.  I've never seen Jenny Laird in anything else, but she can't be like that all the time, can she?

The Doctor defends himself from a blast from an Eight-Legs'
guard. (Planet of the Spiders Part Four) ©BBC

And so after part three ended with another fight between the Doctor and some guards who then zapped him and left him for dead, part four gives us the Doctor deathly ill (alas, not quite another example of the Healing Coma) and Sarah captured thanks to Lupton.  But the Doctor's able to discharge the energy he received from the guard thanks to a MacGuffin from the TARDIS, and what's more, he's able to find a mineral that acts as the opposite of the blue crystals from which the spiders derive their powers.  We also get the chance for more exposition, this time about why there are giant spiders on Metebelis III (they stowed away on the colonists' ship and went to the mountains, where the blue crystals mutated them into their present form).  No explanation on why Metebelis III is no longer the blue planet though (even if you accept the explanation that it's the moon that makes everything blue, there's no evidence of it in the night scenes we get here).

The other major event to happen in episode four concerns Tommy, who looks into the blue crystal and has his mind "realigned" (for lack of a better term), allowing him to read and understand things that were beyond him before.  Once again John Kane does a good job with this, as he absorbs the children's book he's been reading with growing excitement, as he realizes how much it makes sense to him.  Oh, and Mike Yates gets knocked out and then tied up by Lupton's associates.  And that's about it for events on Earth, as the cliffhanger once again is set on Metebelis III, as the Doctor unsuccessfully enters the spiders' citadel to rescue Sarah and is instead captured.  Although, curiously, the actual cliffhanger seems to concern Sarah giving up hope once she sees that the Doctor is a prisoner of the spiders, rather than (say) the Doctor getting captured...

July 8: Planet of the Spiders Parts One & Two

And so here we are, the start of Jon Pertwee's swansong.  There's a bit of a sense of coming full circle here: Mike Yates is back (and clearly once again on the side of the angels, even if he's no longer with UNIT after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs); Jo's returned (via post) the blue crystal from Metebelis III, along with a letter describing her adventures with Professor Jones in the Amazon; even the actors in the roles are primarily actors who'd been in previous Pertwee tales.  And into all this we're introduced to the dangers of Buddhism gone wrong, as a group of power-hungry people are in the basement of a Buddhist retreat trying to summon something.  It's sort of impressive how they manage to make the Jewel in the Lotus prayer sound menacing.

There's also a slight sense of playfulness in this first part, as the monk Cho-Je (Kevin Lindsay, last seen as Linx in The Time Warrior) outlines the Doctor's journey in this story as he describes Buddhist philosophy to Sarah: "A man must go inside and face his fears and hopes, his hates and his loves, and watch them wither away.  Then he will find his true self, which is no self.  He will see his true mind, which is no mind.  ...  The old man must die and the new man will discover to his inexpressible joy that he has never existed."  And in case this is all a little too abstract for some viewers, we also get magically appearing and disappearing tractors; a "powerful clairvoyant" in the form of Professor Clegg (Cyril Shaps, last seen as Lennox in The Ambassadors of Death) who gets to do some psychometry (even if the Doctor calls it psycholotry) on the sonic screwdriver -- which allows for a short clip from Carnival of Monsters, even if it's visibly a different sonic screwdriver; and even an earthquake as Clegg tries psychometry on the blue crystal while the evil (misguided?) wannabe Buddhists perform their summoning ceremony -- a ceremony which produces a giant spider⁸³ out of a blue glow on their mandala...

Part two keeps the goodwill going for a bit, as the spider leaps onto the back of the leader of the bad Buddhists, Lupton (John Dearth, last heard as the voice of BOSS in The Green Death), and starts ordering him around, while the Doctor looks at the final recorded images from Clegg before he died at the end of part one, only to see lots of images of spiders.  The spider on Lupton's back is after the Doctor's blue crystal, so Lupton heads to UNIT to get it back.  This is where things start to decline, as the entire second half of this episode is devoted to an extended chase sequence to try and get the crystal back, complete with "comedy" moments such as the befuddled police officer and the vagrant who gets run over by a hovercraft.  It mainly looks like an effort to fit as many different vehicles into a chase as possible, with Bessie, the Whomobile, an autogyro, a speedboat, and the aforementioned hovercraft all involved.  Oh, and it turns out the Whomobile can fly (and can reflect the yellow CSO backdrop to such an extent that it looks gold -- although the DVD has generally rectified this side-effect).  All of this might not be so bad if, at the end of the chase, the spider didn't simply whisk Lupton away just as the Doctor catches up to him.  But that's what happens, which leads the viewer to wonder why the spider didn't just do that in the first place and spare us twelve ultimately irrelevant minutes.







⁸³ And supposedly, in keeping with BBC guidelines, a deliberately unconvincing one, lest any arachnophobics be tuning in.

July 7: The Monster of Peladon Parts Five & Six

Oh look, they've decided to replay a decent amount of the last episode's cliffhanger, which means we get to see all of Terry Walsh in his glory again.

Alpha Centauri, Sarah, and Azaxyr view the sonic lance's destruction
on a monitor. (The Monster of Peladon Part Five) ©BBC

Things continue to pick up in part five as important plot points are finally divulged.  Although, wait, is Ortron on the good guys' side now?  He certainly seems eager to cooperate with Sarah's plan; maybe uniting against the Ice Warriors helped bring him aroun–oh, never mind, he's been killed by an Ice Warrior.  But yes, this is the episode where we learn what's really going on (thanks to, in retrospect, a rather lax level of secrecy on the part of Azaxyr and Eckersley): it seems that Azaxyr and his Warriors are not in fact part of the Federation but instead a part of a group helping Galaxy Five.  Eckersley organized the appearances of Aggedor to provoke a crisis so that Azaxyr could come in and take command of the planet and its supplies of trisilicate.  Not only do Sarah and Alpha Centauri watch the traitors discuss their plans over the monitoring system, but the Doctor (who survived the explosion) and Gebek overhear the same discussion from the other side of an open doorway.  Nice work, guys.

Then, while the Doctor and Gebek overpower an Ice Warrior guard (and look, it's one of the old-style oversized Ice Warrior helmets, as seen on the filmed portions of The Ice Warriors) and break into the refinery, Alpha Centauri reveals that they know that Azaxyr and Eckersley are traitors, so Azaxyr sends troops to take back the refinery.

But just as they make a big hole in the door (part five's cliffhanger), the Doctor figures out the controls to the Aggedor-appearing device and wipes out the Ice Warriors.  From there he starts sending Aggedor around the mines, brutally killing any Ice Warriors that stand in the way of the rebels (mind, it's not played like that, but it still makes the Doctor look awfully comfortable with killing).  Despite an attempt to scramble the Doctor's brain with a groovy-looking effect that appears to kill him off (but is in fact Pertwee healing coma #6), Azaxyr's plans are ruined, and a showdown in the throne room finishes him off -- though still with ten minutes of the episode left.  Yes, there's still time for Eckersley to kidnap Queen Thalira and use her as a hostage while he makes his getaway.  (A genuine question: why don't people being dragged around against their will go limp and force their captor to literally drag them, rather than just stumbling after?)  Fortunately, Aggedor can track the queen down, but the noble beast is killed in the struggle with Eckersley, which also finishes off the traitorous mining specialist.  Thus order is restored to Peladon.

It may start dreadfully, but once it decides to stop remaking its predecessor and start being a generic action-adventure story instead, The Monster of Peladon picks up.  There's probably a whole subtext I'm missing, being not terribly familiar with the 1973 miners' strike, but unless that adds a number of subtle layers to this then the end result is still one that feels well-worn rather than original or interesting.  It's entertaining enough by the end, but there's really nothing to distinguish it from anything else, and instead once again the overall feeling is one of "good enough".  You can really tell by this stage that the production team's heart isn't really in it anymore, and that they're content to simply keeping doing the same old things until their contracts are up.

So, we have one Pertwee story left.  Will the team rise to the occasion and send the third Doctor out on a high note?

July 6: The Monster of Peladon Parts Three & Four

Gebek and the Doctor plan their next move. (The Monster of
Peladon Part Three) ©BBC

Oh good.  These two episodes are a bit better than the first two (or maybe I'm just in a better mood; I'm willing to allow for that possibility), even if Ortron is still insufferably xenophobic.  I thought maybe the Doctor and Sarah surviving the trial of Aggedor at the start of part three would be enough to bring him around, but alas, it's not to be.  "You may have deceived the Queen but you have not deceived me," Ortron tells the Doctor, and then has him locked up at the first hint of disobedience.  Of course, Sarah's also taking initiative by trying to convince Queen Thalira to be stronger as a ruler and not let the patriarchal society that Peladon possesses handicap her.  It's a rather topical speech, to be sure, but Elizabeth Sladen does a good job with it, and it also has that lovely line about how "There's nothing 'only' about being a girl."

But there are more important things happening.  These two episodes are concerned with advancing the plot, rather than screwing around mistrusting the Doctor and locking him up.  This is, in general, a good thing, and a welcome change from parts one and two.  Acting on Eckersley's suggestion, Alpha Centauri calls for Federation security troops to come to Peladon -- which is the last thing both the nobles and the miners want.  So while they're hatching a plan to convince the troops that things are proceeding smoothly on Peladon, Gebek breaks the Doctor out of prison and then takes him to the currently disused refinery, where Sarah said she saw someone moving inside.  Reasoning that that would make a good base to stage the Aggedor attacks from, the Doctor breaks in -- only to find an Ice Warrior inside...

It seems, we learn in part four, that the Ice Warriors are there as the Federation security troops -- although the question remains: if the troops had just landed, how and why did they enter the refinery?  But they're only causing trouble; while Izlyr had distinguished himself in The Curse of Peladon by being open-minded, fair, and just, his successor here, Azaxyr, is brutal and callous, declaring that if the miners don't get back to work he'll kill them all and bring in Federation miners -- justifying his actions by observing that the Federation is in a state of war with Galaxy Five and thus the trisilicate being mined in Peladon is desperately needed.  The nice thing about Azaxyr is that it ends up uniting both Ortron's side and Gebek's side -- they may not like each other, but they dislike the Federation occupation even more.  So they carry out their plan to make the Ice Warriors think everything's okay, only to attack when their guard is down.  But Ettis, who's clearly gone mad by this point, will have none of this plan; he's going to use the sonic lance that's been showing up periodically since part one to destroy the Citadel and everyone inside, including the Queen.  So it's up to the Doctor to stop him, which results in a swordfight that gives us our best ever look of Terry Walsh as Pertwee's stunt double, with more than one full-on view of his face.  (And they still haven't made Walsh's wig as white as Pertwee's hair has become.)

And so Ettis ends up with the upper hand and activates the sonic lance -- only Azaxyr has remotely rigged it to explode when used, and so there's a colossal explosion which appears to kill both Ettis and the Doctor...

July 5: The Monster of Peladon Parts One & Two

It opens with a group of miners with the oddest hairstyles ever on the show (bushy afros that merge into the eyebrows with badger-like markings) being attacked by a strange force and believing it to be the spirit of Aggedor.  We've also got a new monarch on the throne (a queen, this time), and a chancellor who's not Hepesh but seems to be just about as pig-headed.  The Doctor and Sarah wander around and the Doctor has to reaffirm his credentials all over again.  And Alpha Centauri's back.  (Hurray!)  So despite the initial weirdness of the set-up with the miners, there's an awful lot of The Monster of Peladon that seems to be deliberately harking back to its predecessor (The Curse of Peladon, in case you've somehow forgotten).

Unfortunately, the fact that we've been here before means that all the plot beats that are wholesale swiped from the first story are immensely tedious in this one.  Making Ortron just as mistrustful of aliens and the Federation (despite an early effort to suggest otherwise -- "Right from the day Chancellor Hepesh died, I served your father loyally.  I worked for the things he believed in.  Progress, civilization, the Federation.  Now there is war with Galaxy Five and our people have to make sacrifices.  ...  We have to accept the duties of Federation membership, as well as the benefits") is frustrating to watch, particularly since he doesn't have a particularly good motivation for doing so; there's a suggestion that he thinks the Doctor and Sarah are responsible for sabotage and/or murder, but this seems to have been dropped as a motivation by part two.  Instead he's just treading in his predecessor Hepesh's footsteps, acting as an antagonist because that's what the story needs.

This might be bearable if the new part of the plot (all the mining stuff) was handled with suitable care, but most of the miners are treated as warmongering boors, and thus it's difficult to feel any sympathy for them.  Well, to be fair, Ettis is deliberately written as a hothead, in contrast to the cooler approach of the miners' ostensible leader Gebek, but that doesn't explain why all the other miners seem to agree with whoever happens to be speaking at any given moment.  Really, the whole thing feels designed to lurch from one crisis to the next, with little thought as to the cumulative effect on the characters.  Like Ortron, the miners behave however the script needs them to behave at any given moment.

Are there any bright spots in these two episodes?  A few; Nina Thomas does a decent job as Queen Thalira, even if the script requires her to be naïve and largely helpless, and Donald Gee's performance as Eckersley is the right side of concerned yet superior (and miles ahead of his performance in The Space Pirates -- unless video of that shows up to vindicate him).  Elisabeth Sladen continues to excel as Sarah -- her reactions in the throne room are particularly entertaining.  There's that first cliffhanger, as the Doctor mouths/speaks (depending on which version you're watching⁸²) "What the blazes is it?" when confronted with a giant glowing image of Aggedor.  And Alpha Centauri is as wonderful as ever.  But that's really it.  These two episodes are an unexciting muddle; let's hope things improve.







⁸² They brought Pertwee's line up slightly in the mix on the DVD -- presumably so people didn't think he was mouthing something ruder.

July 4: Death to the Daleks Parts Three & Four

Thank goodness for Arnold Yarrow.  His performance as Bellal the friendly Exxilon is easily the best thing about this story, as he approaches everything with a child-like sense of wonder that Yarrow makes impressively physical, with small gestures and head movements.

A Exxilon watches the Dalek work camp. (Death to the
Daleks Part Three) ©BBC

Sadly, the rest of the episode (while still more entertaining than the previous two) isn't quite up to snuff.  There's a strange moment where the Doctor cheers on a City probe attacking a Dalek, which he then follows up with a lame joke to Sarah about it.  ("The root won.  Dalek, nil.")  And, as we saw in Frontier in Space, wires show up so much more easily on film than on video, so what should have been an impressive shot of a City probe rising out of the water to attack the Exxilons and Daleks working nearby is marred by the all-too-obvious wires holding it up.  And there's also the matter of the Exxilon who apparently burns to death while standing in a lake.

It's also worth mentioning Terry Nation's curious decision to add some von Danikenism to the story, by having the Exxilons previously visiting Earth and showing the Incans how to build things.  The really odd thing about this, beyond the fact that The Dæmons had already mined this topic pretty well, is how little it connects to anything else in the story.  It's mentioned as proof that the Exxilons were traveling the galaxy a long time ago, and of course ancient humans needed alien help to build things, and that's it.  The Doctor doesn't, for instance, use the similarities of the carvings here and in Peru to help deduce how to get through a door or anything like that.  It's just brought up and then abandoned.

In contrast, the stuff with the logic puzzles in the City isn't bad, and the presence of the Daleks advancing behind the Doctor and Bellal helps add to the sense of tension.  Still, it does lead to possibly the worst cliffhanger ever, as the Doctor suddenly stops Bellal from treading on a bit of red-and-white tiling.  This is apparently because part three underran fairly significantly and they had to make an artificial cliffhanger (the original one was allegedly the shot of the Daleks appearing as the Doctor works out how to get inside the City).  Nevertheless, it's still an incredibly weak ending.

Part four is the best of the bunch, because here things are happening at a suitably exciting clip.  The Doctor and Bellal's journey gives us some nice effects and a bit of psychological tension (the part where Bellal is going to shoot the Doctor), while there's a nice bit of fun with Sarah and Jill creating decoy bags of parrinium for the Daleks to load up before escaping -- although this leads to the bizarre moment where the overseer Dalek, having discovered that Jill has escaped, cries "Human female has escaped.  I have failed!  Female prisoner has escaped!  I have failed!  I have failed!  Self destruct!  I have failed!  Destruct!" etc.⁸¹, rather than just going after her to get her back and/or exterminate her.

Once the Doctor and Bellal reach the heart of the City, though, it's just a matter of the Doctor performing some technical jiggery-pokery to kill off the City -- and having Hamilton and Galloway plant a bomb on the pillar supporting the beacon and then blowing it up doesn't help the City out much either, one suspects.  Then it's back out of the City to watch it destroy itself and for the Daleks to depart, after informing our heroes that they're the ones who caused the plague on the outer worlds in the first place and they're going to do the same thing to Exxilon.  But before they can, Galloway blows them up with a bomb he hid on board.

In some respects, this story is the opposite of the last one.  There, a strong script was thwarted by fairly pedestrian direction and lackluster model work.  Here, we have some interesting directorial choices (the Dalek point-of-view shots are a good example) and a reasonable amount of care being put into the costumes and sets, but it's all at the mercy of a script that frequently feels more like it's going through the motions rather than trying to do something different or interesting -- to the point where even the title (allegedly chosen by Robert Holmes, who hated the Daleks) can't hide its contempt.  It also doesn't help how visibly bored Pertwee is by all this.  Despite the best efforts of Michael Briant and his team, Death to the Daleks ultimately feels very uninvolving.







⁸¹ The Matt Smith story Asylum of the Daleks mentions that part of the Dalek asylum contains Daleks that survived encounters with the Doctor, and Exxilon is name-checked during this sequence.  Based on the on-screen evidence here, this Dalek is the most likely candidate to have survived to be taken to the asylum.  Ponder that for a moment.

July 3: Death to the Daleks Parts One & Two

Well, they didn't quite make it to Florana.  Instead, the TARDIS was pulled off-course to Exxilon and drained of all its power -- to the point where they have to use a crank to manually open the doors (ugh, look -- it's a Terry Nation script, just accept it and move on).  Fortunately, the oil lamp still works and they can move around, so it's not all energy that's drained.  Maybe it's just battery power that's drained?  Even leaving aside the distinction between organic and non-organic batteries, the Doctor complicates things by describing the TARDIS as a "living thing" -- and none of this explains why the Daleks can move around but can't shoot people.  Mind, someone's considered this, so (to jump ahead for a moment) the Doctor tells Sarah that the Daleks can still trundle around because they move "by psychokinetic power".  Thanks, that clears everything up.

There are a number of odd moments in this first episode, such as the part where Sarah goes back into the TARDIS for a warmer change of clothes but makes sure the Doctor won't leave while she changes.  The Doctor nods his assent, watches her enter the TARDIS, and then immediately wanders off.  Was he listening to her at all?  There's also the part where he discovers a hidden tripwire, digs it out a bit, and then chucks a rock at it to see what will happen.  Which is admittedly both understandable and entertaining, but perhaps not the most prudent decision ever.  Sarah, meanwhile, clubs an Exxilon who wandered into the TARDIS into unconsciousness and runs into the unknown, eventually discovering a (rather nifty) city in the distance with a flashing light on top of a tall pillar.  Unfortunately for her, getting that close means she's performed sacrilege and thus will be sacrificed by the Exxilons.  Oops.

The final odd moment comes at the end of the episode, after the Doctor has been found by the humans who also crashlanded while looking for a rare mineral called parrinium.  They see a ship come down (with a solid thump, though that might be intentional, to demonstrate the power loss) and then three Daleks emerge.  And do they run or dodge or get behind cover?  No, the Doctor and the humans stand there while the Daleks open fire, their gun sticks clicking away.

Cover of the 1978 Target novelisation.
(From On Target - Death to the Daleks)

Fortunately for the good guys, the second episode reveals that the Daleks' guns have also been subjected to the power drain, making them unable to exterminate the Doctor and company.  So if the Daleks can't kill you, naturally you decide to join forces with them.  And it's not like you can say the humans don't know about the Daleks -- Peter Hamilton's father was killed by them in "the last Dalek war".  But no, that's the plan.  It gets slightly derailed when they're all ambushed by Exxilons, who kill John Abineri's character with an arrow to the back -- so there goes the best actor of the bunch.  This is also the moment where the Exxilons smash a Dalek, causing it to explode -- which seems to have subsequently inspired one of the best Target covers ever.

A meet-up with Sarah later (in which the Doctor prevents her sacrifice by assaulting the High Priest -- an even worse offense than getting next to the City), Galloway reveals he's ruthless and willing to let the Doctor and Sarah die so long as they can complete their mission, while the Daleks equip themselves with projectile weapons (which they test on a model TARDIS -- quite the impression the Doctor has made on their culture, eh?).  In the ensuing confusion, as the Daleks enter the Exxilons' temple, the Doctor and Sarah escape down a tunnel -- and the lack of pursuers suggests things are even worse down here than back in the sacrificial area.  Still, nothing's found them yet, so when they reach a crossroads the Doctor tells Sarah to wait while he explores down a tunnel for half a mile (!).  So while they're separated, an Exxilon creeps up on Sarah, while the Doctor encounters a huge root-like thing with a giant eye...

The problem with these two episodes is that they're both pretty uninvolving.  Director Michael Briant is trying to give it energy and suspense, with some creative shots and day-for-night filming that actually works, for once.  The decision to make the Daleks silver and black, to look more like the '60s models, is also a good one.  But he can only go so far in disguising the predictable script from Terry Nation.  And the incidental music by Carey Blyton (and performed by the London Saxophone Quartet) doesn't help, with its slow, plodding melody.  One can only hope that things improve for the last two parts.