May 8: Spearhead from Space Episodes 1 & 2

A new title sequence!  In color!  With a new Doctor!  And with the name of the story zooming right toward you!

Standard and special edition DVDs

It's not just the beginning that seems different.  It's partly because the whole thing has been shot on 16mm film, rather than the mix of film and video that's been standard for the last few years, but Spearhead from Space feels like a fresh start and a new way of doing things.  The all-film look gives it an advantage of coherency, and it's definitely helped along by Derek Martinus's excellent direction (in what would prove to be his final directorial role on Doctor Who), but there's also the matter of the script.  Episode 1 opens with a strange swarm of meteors landing in the countryside (and which, we learn in episode 2, are hollow and appear to contain an alien lifeform, while people who seem human-but-not-quite are dedicated to finding the meteors -- so, not at all like Quatermass II then) and the efforts of UNIT (as seen in The Invasion) to find them and work out what's going on.

But the main point of this first episode is really the newly-changed Doctor (now played by comedy actor Jon Pertwee), even though he spends most of the episode unconscious.  Yet by sidelining him, the episode snaps into focus around him, as the people of Ashbridge Cottage Hospital try to work out what's wrong with their new patient: he seems to have two hearts, his blood isn't human, and his pulse rate is 10 a minute -- in other words, he appears to be completely alien (even though Dr. Gemma Corwyn made no comment on any of this after her thorough examination of the Doctor in The Wheel in Space).  Remarkably, Dr. Henderson, the attending physician, starts to take all of this in his stride rather than refusing to believe the mounting evidence, and just tries to do the best he can for the Doctor.  There's also some stuff with the Brigadier and his new scientific adviser Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (in an astonishing jacket -- brown with white vinyl panels on the front that appear to represent plastic fur) visiting the Doctor and failing to recognize him for obvious reasons.  Though he recognizes the Brigadier, in a short scene which it's honestly all too easy to imagine Patrick Troughton playing.  Whether this is a deliberate attempt to introduce a bit of continuity between the two actors or just a coincidence, either way it's there.

But what's particularly clever about Spearhead from Space is how it deals with the question of "is this really still the Doctor?"  Unlike The Power of the Daleks, which goes out of its way to have the audience question whether that strange little man is still the Doctor, here Robert Holmes gets the audience firmly on the side of the Doctor from the outset, as we see this new man in the Doctor's old baggy clothes fall out of the TARDIS in such a way as to suggest that this definitely is the same person (even though it looks like Derek Martinus is trying to avoid showing the new Doctor's face for as long as possible -- this effect is, however, slightly spoiled by the fact that Pertwee's face is in the new title sequence).  And then he recognizes the Brigadier and greets him like an old friend, followed up by a discussion of his new looks.  Here the question isn't "is he the Doctor?" but instead "how long will it take the Brigadier to decide this man is the Doctor, which he clearly is?"  It's a nice touch that also allows us to get to the main storyline with a minimum of fuss, without having the Doctor's friends constantly mistrusting him.

And then for some completely inexplicable reason the sinister-looking Channing, who's been lurking in the background of the hospital scenes, decides to kidnap the Doctor with the help of some oddly plastic-looking henchmen...⁵²

Liz Shaw, the Doctor, and the Brigadier discuss the recent
meteor showers. (Spearhead from Space Episode 2) ©BBC

If episode 1 was about the Doctor, episode 2 shifts the focus to this apparently alien menace that Channing is a part of.  We see him at work in a plastics factory that has apparently fired a whole bunch of employees and is now working on a completely new and secretive operation.  Clearly something sinister is going on, and those special meteors are needed.  UNIT's found one, and a poacher named Sam Seeley has another.  And so there's a mannequin wandering the woods, homing in on the signals these flashing spheres are emitting so that it can collect them.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has recovered enough to escape from the hospital, enjoying a nice shower (Pertwee's nude scene!), stealing some clothes hanging about the place, and driving away in a vintage car to UNIT's HQ, where the TARDIS has been moved to.  He seems to be recovering nicely, although, as he tells the Brigadier, "It's no earthly good asking me a lot of questions.  I've lost my memory, you see."  This scene marks the point where the lines seem more designed for the new Doctor than the previous one -- it's hard to imagine Patrick Troughton doing the Delphon bit, but Pertwee makes it seem like a natural part of his personality.  He also has a charming bit with Liz Shaw ("Look, do I really have to call you Miss Shaw?") that he plays with a happy laugh in a manner that neither Troughton nor Hartnell would have done, and this also helps him distinguish himself from his predecessors.

So it looks fabulous, it has an exciting script from Robert Holmes, and the actors are giving it their all.  The color era of Doctor Who has begun with considerable style.







⁵² Actually, why does Channing try to kidnap the Doctor?  Even if we assume that Channing's worked out from all the reporters and (possibly, though we don't see it) by listening to the hospital staff that the Doctor isn't human, that doesn't alone seem to be a very good reason to kidnap him.  It's not like he's hiding one of the special meteors or anything, and there doesn't seem to be an inherent need for them to have an alien for themselves.  It looks more like they needed a cliffhanger and forgot to give a reason why it happened.