Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (67 page)

I do like, though, how we have another variation of a character being seen in mortal danger via telephone/on a TV monitor. This one’s especially good, thanks to Troughton’s guilty panic and the calm, detached professionalism of Anne Ridler as Gemma does her job before trying to make her doomed escape. It’s a heroic death from a good character, and is as much the climax to the episode as Jamie and Zoe being under threat from the oncoming meteorites.

Both hazardous situations being the Doctor’s fault, the swine.

April 16th

The Wheel in Space episode six

R:
The best bit about the episode is – once again – Patrick Troughton. He’s barely been in the adventure, and when he has he’s seemed much more subdued than we’re used to. But he rallies around, as if smelling the odour of season climax in the air. The way he insists that risking the lives of Jamie and Zoe was necessary for the greater good – but stands guilty and disconsolate when forced to admit that Gemma Corwyn is dead – is beautifully done. And even better is his confrontation with the Cybermen (the only one in the entire story!): his little moues of unhappiness when the villains keep bringing the subject back to his impending death are very funny, but also sell the jeopardy so well. As written, the scene is little more than exposition, but Troughton makes the whole thing seem as if this face-to-face with the Cybermen is actually
about
something pivotal. As it is, the story fizzles out as soon as the enemy stop skulking in the shadows and become plain for all to see – the skulking was really the whole point. But the skill of Troughton manages to elevate the episode into a discussion about the ends justifying the means, and give us a scene of extraordinary tension; we barely notice the plotline long ago ran out of steam.

And we’re out of Season Five, and out of the cycle of telesnaps! Bar a few episodes here and there, Season Six exists entirely in the archives. It’s a relief. I think my eyes were starting to go funny. Idly watching the last minute of the story, I note with interest that the Doctor prepares to show Zoe a mental video of The Evil of the Daleks. He seems to start with the beginning of episode two – and it speaks volumes about my obsession with watching these things, that this automatically makes sense to me. Of course, I think to myself, he’s not going to give her episode one – she’s not going to want to sit through a reconstruction.

T:
He also gives away the ending to the next episode we’re about to see, so he’s clearly applying to be editor of the Radio Times...

The Cybermen are pretty easily defeated, especially as Flannigan somehow knows to spray them with space-plastic – are we ever told why this is lethal to them? – but at least he’s rather winningly so miffed at the headache they’ve given him, he’s decided to stomp about and give them a good seeing to. We
are
given an explanation for what he does to eject the ballet Cybermen into space, but it’s a bit muffled under his helmet. I’m not sure it matters, however, because in essence the Cybermen are thwarted by that canny manoeuvre of pressing a button. Three times in fact! (The Doctor does it to electrocute his opponents, Leo does it to blow up the Silver Carrier and Flannigan does it in the airlock. What drama.)

Still, this has its moments. I’ve knocked some of Michael Turner’s performance, but he’s quite sweet in this, deciding – with the no-nonsense resolution of a child – that he’s going to have a go at the Cybermen for Gemma’s death. It’s so pathetic that it’s actually rather endearing, and Jarvis’ death scene is very well (pardon my choice of words here) executed – the Cybermen pick him up and hold him aloft, but we only see this from afar on a scanner, so we’re spared the embarrassment of a dummy or Kirby wires. And the Cybermen themselves are massive – they tower over Derrick Gilbert, James Mellor and Frazer Hines, really fulfilling their remit of being silver
giants
.

And at least Leo and Tanya have got all sexed up thanks to the death and drama. Jarvis and Gemma can rest safe in the knowledge that their demises resulted in a bit of space nookie – it’s not just Tanya’s nose that’s tingling.

The Dominators episode one

R:
Philip Voss is really good in this. He’s cocky and arrogant – he fairly preens with self-confidence every time he checks the computer for radiation. And he’s naturally charismatic. And, frankly, Nicolette Pendrell is very easy on the eye. The script isn’t very sharp, but I could happily watch the continuing antics of their characters, the thrill-seekers Wahed and Tolata, for five episodes. I wonder what the Doctor will make of them?

... Oh no! They’re dead! They’ve been zapped by some unseen robot called a Quark, and just before falling over, their faces have been blanked out and distorted. (Well, Tolata’s has been, anyway. I don’t think they could afford the special effect twice.) Another character called Etnin has just been zapped too, but he was neither charismatic nor pretty, so I wasn’t as interested. Of the four Dulcians we’ve yet met, the only one left alive is the tubby chap in a toga. It’s not that Arthur Cox is
bad
as Cully, per se – but Voss got all the charm, and Pendrell all the looks. Cully needs to be a bit of a wily rogue, an Arthur Daley sort. Instead, Cox just looks a bit
awkward
, running up and down a quarry with his toga flapping.

And we meet some other Dulcians. They wear togas too, except for the one who wears dungarees. Their performances are, at best, variable – but it seems rather cruel to name a character Kando when Felicity Gibson who’s playing her so obviously kan’t. And we meet some Dominators. They snarl a lot in contempt, usually at each other. Kenneth Ives, as the subordinate Toba, clearly likes blowing things up and killing people, and I like the little childish sadism he keeps on exhibiting – but it must be said, by the third time in one episode that his boss Rago (played by Ronald Allen) tells him off for doing the only mildly threatening thing yet in the story, it all gets very wearing.

And, of course, there are the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe. Troughton tries very hard in this, delighting in the idea they’ve landed in the perfect spot for a relaxing holiday. He shows delight in the atomic test dummies, and fascination in the spacecraft – but it all feels just a bit forced, because for once nobody else in the cast is even attempting to act with the same energy. When the Doctor finds out the TARDIS is threatened, it’s all Zoe can do not to stifle a yawn – she decides to hang about with a bunch of strangers she’s just met rather than see if they’re in any jeopardy. And Jamie looks a trifle bored, and occasionally suggests they take off and go somewhere else.

It’s a curious misstep for a season opener, this. Broadcast in August, when most of the audience are likely to be out enjoying the sunshine, this feels as lazy and as punch drunk as a warm summer’s day. Doctor Who is back on our screens, straight after a repeat of an epic encounter with the Daleks, and the first thing our heroes admit is that they feel tired and fancy a rest.

T:
Hang on, why aren’t we doing this properly, and watching The Evil of the Daleks again? They even went and sutured the repeat into the show’s continuity, so surely, we should be including it in our marathon? We’re going to get letters, I know it...

One of the more curious aspects of this project is that we’re ruthlessly determined to get through it in one year, and so on a day-to-day basis, our takes on various episodes can’t help but be influenced by what mood we’re in. I’m feeling very good right now, as I have the day off, and I’m not working again ‘till Tuesday. That might explain why, even though I’ve previously felt less than kind towards the episodes I’m watching today, I didn’t massively object to Wheel episode six, and even The Dominators episode one seemed okay.

Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln delivered two pretty damned good scripts prior to this, and for all that one could criticise the final result on this occasion, there are some interesting, well-conceived ideas going on here. The radiation on the island gives everyone a reason to be involved with it: the maverick Cully wants to get paid for shepherding the youths into the danger zone, teacher Balan and his students are monitoring the radiation levels, and the Dominators land on the island because there’s radiation for their ship to suck up. Dynamically, there’s a clever juxtaposition between Balan getting his student Kando to display her knowledge of the history of the island, and a later scene where the two Dominators postulate on the ramifications of a primitive weapon they find in a museum. Both teachers grill their pupils about war, but for diametrically opposed reasons. (Oh, and I must ask: why is there a
working
weapon in the museum? Health and Safety would go ballistic!)

Visually, this is better than you might expect. Tolata’s death is pretty gruesome; it’s quite the showpiece moment for a season opener, as is the whacking great explosion that destroys Cully’s sea-paperweight. And director Morris Barry has an eye for framing his pictures on film, so we get another forced-perspective shot involving the bottom of someone’s legs in the foreground and high up (like the Toberman shot at the beginning of The Tomb of the Cybermen), and a great moment at the end of the episode with the two little Quarks on top of a hill, joined by their towering master.

And I feel a bit sorry for some of the actors involved in this (but not for the reasons you might expect). Phillip Voss was previously the Mongol Acomat (hardly the best part in Marco Polo), and in this story, he’s the first person to get bumped off! For pity’s sake, this is a man who played Shylock for the Royal Shakespeare Company – he’s one of our finest classical actors, use him more than this! Malcolm Terris (playing another thrill-seeker, and slain early on in the story) is no slouch either, another good actor who’s not been well served by our favourite series. And while Arthur Cox always gets stick for his rendition of Cully, he actually plays the part with brio and a rebellious zeal. All right, he
looks
like a bank manager, but that’s hardly his fault. Ronald Allen, at least, is remarkably right – he has a cadaverous, sunken-eyed face that seems chiselled from stone; he’s impassive and cruel, with a hushed, gruesomely deadened delivery.

Why, though, do all the Dulcian men wear dresses or skirts? Some of them, at least, are students looking for experimental fun. And it happens that people dressed in such a fashion have turned up at the same location as some self-confessed Dominators; is this one of
those
sorts of parties? I hope the Doctor’s brought his car keys...

April 17th

The Dominators episode two

R:
As a comedy, this is absolutely marvellous. Much of the episode is taken up by the Dominators subjecting the Doctor and Jamie to intelligence tests – and Troughton and Hines are never funnier than here, trying to convince their captors that they’re safely stupid. I so enjoy the look of delight that Troughton gives as he’s told the answer to the simplest of puzzles (“Jump!”), his attempts to pronounce “electricity”, and the sulky pout he gives when talking of the clever people who boss him about. And Hines is in his element too, making the most of the comic rapport between the two of them that is by now second nature, playing a sort of bewildered fear that is very winning.

The problem is, though, that as a
drama
the laughs never go anywhere. After evaluating our heroes and dismissing them as idiots, the Dominators let them go with a warning to leave them alone. And that’s it – the story really hasn’t advanced any further, and before too long, the Doctor and Jamie are parading around gravel pits once more. Poor Wendy Padbury is stuck in a storyline which isn’t half as interesting as theirs, trying to impress a bunch of bureaucrats with her alien origins. There’s a comedy to all of this as well, of course – the council on Dulkis are
supposed
to be tedious old duffers, and on paper their dry academic response to what’s going on is not without wit. But there’s a limit to how long you can make jokes about people being boring without... well, being boring. The best gag comes from when Balan and his other student – Teel – draw a graph to show the radiation levels on the island of death, and take the inexplicable loss of that radiation as a natural phenomenon. (“It has happened, therefore it is a fact. We now know that the effect of an atomic explosion lasts for a hundred and seventy-two years.”) If you’re going to satirise pacifists as a bunch of gullible fools who’ll take everything on face value without suspicion or intelligent inquiry, that’s one thing. But it needs to be done consistently – why the story at the same time makes such heavy weather about the Dulcians not believing that the Doctor and company are aliens when they accept everything else so complacently is beyond me. So what we’re left with on the one hand is a society who’ll react without fear or great interest to the crises around them (which is a little dull), and on the other a society, conversely, who’ll stubbornly deny the evidence in front of their eyes (which is, if anything, even duller).

As I say, Patrick Troughton is brilliant – and the sheer variety of faces he pulls for comic effect in this episode makes this an entertaining enough romp. But I think even Troughton will be hard pushed coming up with enough tics and mannerisms to keep this afloat for three more weeks.

T:
I’m sure you can predict how I’m going to react to the rather patronising view of pacifism on display; it’s as if the writers haven’t quite worked out that an aversion to violence isn’t the same thing as witless gullibility. It’s also odd that they’re knocking pacifism, and yet the movement that the writers are railing against predominantly, in 1968, stemmed from the young and rebellious cocking a snook at the pompous, patrician establishment. They can’t quite inverse that for satirical effect without it seeming illogical, so it’s still the young people – Cully (who doesn’t seem to qualify as overly “young”, but let’s move on), Kando and Teel – using their intuition and energy to break the intransigence of the stuffy old guard (Balan and Senex), which doesn’t really work to reinforce the script’s reactionary stance.

Still, this isn’t as awful as I feared. I like the nifty molecular bonding wall that flips back and becomes an examination slab, and I think the gossipy council members are rather funny. Arthur Cox has a great moment where he looks genuinely hurt that he’s trapped in his father’s shadow, and doesn’t get treated as an individual. Troughton is excellent too – for all his keen intelligence, he assumes the role of clumsy schoolboy here with aplomb, and it’s very plausible that the Dominators would see him as a nincompoop. I rarely laugh out loud while watching these stories, but I did when the Doctor asked Jamie if he could manage to pull off acting like an idiot. The friendship and rapport these two have is comedy gold.

Some of my perspective, to be fair, might be influenced by Ian Marter’s novelisation of this story, which at times smoothes over what doesn’t quite succeed on screen. Quarks in Marter’s hands are giggling, chattering monstrosities – their childish jabbering is at odds with their murderous nature, which makes them unsettling and cruel. On screen, by contrast, their Orville voices and wibbly modulations make them seem inappropriately cute. The literary Dominators are closer to their on-screen counterparts – if I remember correctly, they have acrid breath, cracked lips and creaking skin, but these descriptions seem inspired entirely by Ronald Allen’s performance. He’s terse, direct and not unlike the walking undead. It’s a looming, underplayed performance of considerable skill which helps to disguise (sorry to say) the fact that many of Rago’s decisions are stupid. It’s rather ironic that although Toba is presented as a hot-headed, blithering idiot from his very first scene, his suggestion to scan the Doctor – and his desire to destroy the TARDIS and its crew – are the correct calls.

The Dominators episode three

R:
To be fair, there’s at least the attempt at something different with The Dominators. After a season of Earthbound stories focussed for the most part on scientific bases under siege, we’re on an alien planet once more. It’s the first time since The Tomb of the Cybermen that the production team have had a pop at that – and even if the planet looks exactly the same as the one we saw last time (presumably because Morris Barry has chosen the same quarry to represent Dulkis that he used for Telos), it does mean that we have an adventure which isn’t just relying upon claustrophobic tension. But, that said, it still feels awkwardly familiar. It’s that theme of do-nothingism again, as the Doctor once more tries to persuade people to take
action
rather than just wait for a crisis to resolve itself. We’ve seen it in The Abominable Snowmen, in The Ice Warriors – here it is again. This time though we’re not merely dealing with passive resistance, but with passive aggression too: because, if anything, the Dominators are just as lethargic as the Dulcians. Every time Toba gets carried away and runs off with the idea of doing something nasty, he’s restrained by his cautious commander. With the watchword of the baddy being one of patient investigation, and the goodies unprepared for more than patient debate, there’s barely a plotline at all. When Senex laughs off the Doctor’s pleas that the Dominators are callous and must be resisted, you can easily see where he’s coming from. I see more dangerous people than Rago on London buses.

So to get the most out of The Dominators, you need to look for a series of moments, the chances taken by the cast to put a bit of life into the proceedings. The way that the Doctor can unravel a shuttle’s navigation in mid-flight, so that when he lands on the planet the camera reveals him and Jamie charmingly buried within cables and wires. The little comic business worked out between Troughton and Hines over who gets to look through a telescope. And the beautifully funny scene where Zoe and Cully plan revolt from their slave labour, not lifting a finger to help as their other Dulcian captives stagger beneath boulders of stone. (Mind you, that last one may not have been designed to be funny. I take my chuckles where I can.)