Planet of the Spiders

'Came to the end of Jon Pertwee last night,' I told my boyfriend over breakfast.

'Emotional?' he asked, obviously fascinated.

To my surprise, and his disappointment, answering this simple question required the summarising of the whole six-episode story, skipping the car chase but going back to talk about The Green Death and also some of Doctor Who's previous seasons. It turned out it wasn't a straightforward answer, however easy it is to say, 'Yes, it's very sad when he dies at the end.'

That's because a huge effort is made in this story to build upon the preceding stories, in a way we hadn't seen since the first years of William Hartnell. It's not a very solid construction – more like Wile E. Coyote laying railway track as he rides off the cliff – but it does make a sort of sense, born of Barry Letts' deep Buddhist conviction, which suffuses this era. In this story we see quite explicitly that it's time for the Doctor to change: not because of his health or his luck, but his absolute self. What might be called his soul.

It's something that I've been feeling for several stories now, at least partly because the production team did such a good job in their first couple of seasons, when the Doctor was still chafing at the bonds of his exile and never stopped going on about the injustice of his incarceration on Earth. Every other story, when he sees his chance, he's ready to run out on Earth and return to his life as a cosmic hobo, albeit one dressed by Pierre Cardin.

And then he gets his freedom back and – stays on Earth! Still fossicking around the same old laboratory, now fussing with his car instead of his time machine. Has he opted to settle down with Lethbridge-Stewart for the foreseeable? Has he lost even the curiosity to foresee the future?

His exile by the Time Lords seems to have had a conditioning effect. He's become as non-interventionist and incurious as they. Once upon a time he was happier to call himself a citizen of the universe ('And a gentleman, to boot!') but now he identifies himself more strongly than ever with their Lordliness and ideology. In The Time Warrior, he disses them gently as 'galactic ticket inspectors' but essentially he's doing their job: clamping Linx's space-ship and, in the next story, issuing the British government's time travellers with an on-the-spot penalty (getting eaten by T-Rex).

Of course, he's in denial about all this. He tries persuading Jo to join him on the open road, but she's having none of it. She wants a mission and a relationship and every other linear thing the trans-temporal life is an escape from. He takes Sarah-Jane away for a weekend on Florana, a mini-break to Peladon, but he always comes home to his claret and sandwiches, and presumably a gentleman's hairdressers with whom he has regular, eccentric conversations. Spiders shows him on a night out at the Tarminster Civic Centre. Having finished his space car, he's taken up a new project to distract himself with.

To distract himself from that feeling of terror which we see – in a comedy sequence, of all things – on his visit to Metebelis Three in The Green Death. A fear of the unknown that he represses, because he knows that's not who he is. A fear which he ultimately, alone as he was that morning in Oxley Woods, goes to face.

I think it's true to say that this is a story about the end of the Doctor's life, while The War Games (which I watched about a year ago) is a serial. Just as Doctor in 1969 and earlier is a show, every instalment a new splash of spectacle, and Jon Pertwee's era is a series. A tremendous amount of care and attention has gone into devising this show, and oddly enough it necessitates this rather melancholy last season.

Death to the Daleks, and the end of the Exxilons too; the sourness of the Golden Age and the defection of Mike Yates and Jo Grant's wedding gift sent back in a Jiffy bag. Even Aggedor gets shot in the head. The Master seems to have vanished without a trace. The Buddhist philosophy asks its disciples to consider impermanence, and so does the last series of Jon Pertwee.

'And,' I told my boyfriend, 'the whole last story is about how the "old man must die, and the new man discovers to his inexpressible joy that he has never existed." And when they meet the Abbot of the meditation centre, he turns out to be the Doctor's old teacher from when he was a boy...'

'This is beginning to sound like a dream you had,' Jon replied, in bafflement rather than derision.

And it's absolutely true. All the mystery and wonder of Planet of Spiders comes from its complete illogicality. Coincidence piles on coincidence, without even the daring to call it 'serendipity'. The story begins with answers that are never answered: what's Lupton doing with his followers down in that cellar, if he doesn't know about contacting the Spiders, and why have the Spiders picked him as their agent anyway?

It ends with questions, too: why did the Abbot set up that meditation centre, and where does he go at the end of the story? What exactly is the Doctor's great fear, and what would happen if 'facing it' also entailed the rise of the Great One to dominate the universe with her ungodly will? How exactly do you teleport from Earth to Metebelis Three just by stepping on a bit of carpet? Why not do it all the time, if you can?

To a great extent, Doctor Who can never quite escape the fact that it's a 'show'. Lurid, sensational, ephemeral, daft. A showman and his assistant playing their part against a shimmering screen, with a puppet dancing on the table. How's it done? What's that? What will happen next?

But it also acts a bit like a mandala: a picture of the universe, in microcosm. (Funny that the Third Doctor's era began with a modern counterpart to this image, the Earth photographed from space.) This is one of the Doctor's lives, in microcosm, from Cyril Shaps to Kevin Lindsay, Drashigs to the Doctor's tutor. The transcendentalist figure of the Doctor makes as good a figure for contemplation as any, a place from which to consider the self and try to get beyond it.

And at the end of the story, we roll up the magic carpet or rub out the mandala drawn in the sand, and consider everything afresh...

The Time Monster

In my blog last week, I talked about the unsinkable Jo Grant, and her ability to remain sunny in the continually reconfirmed knowledge that planet Earth in the future is a cosmic shithole run by total bastards. How does she remain so buoyant, I wondered, when others like myself find it hard enough to deal with an office job and the daily round of news headlines? Then this week, Jo unexpectedly crumbled.

'What happens if the Master wins?' she asks the Doctor. Chaos, he explains, on a grand scale, and it depresses Jo. 'Makes it all seem so pointless, doesn't it?' she says. Perhaps the banality of the Master's evil has hit home – the imminent catastrophe doesn't only mean death and destruction: it's a universe without meaning.

This is the prelude to the Doctor's childhood reminiscence, the story of how his blackest day was redeemed by the hermit on the mountainside, who taught him to see 'a heaven in a wild flower'; that is, the 'daisiest daisy'.

It's the first casual chat the Doctor and Jo have had since The Mind of Evil, and it's a rare moment of the Doctor dropping the 'Who' for a moment. In referring to past troubles, it recalls a fatherly moment in the tombs of planet Telos; in describing the countryside of home, it connects with a much earlier tale of burnt orange skies. We have a better sense than ever of who the Doctor is – paternal, happy in that role (he looks entirely at ease, telling stories in that prison cell), drawing on a lifelong wonder at the universe, empathy with the figure of the mountain hermit.

Here's the anchorite in his new form, perched on the side of the mountain that is our planet in a single era. Does that 'black day' he's so cagey about still threaten him? He worries at his circuitry and drinks his tea. Or reassures his friend with a story. Meanwhile, upstairs, his childhood friend is seducing Ingrid Pitt and planning the death of the actual Minotaur in order to – what?

It's not clear. The Master has a Tardis – i.e., the run of Universe – and can inveigle his way into any position he likes. He begins the story by trying to tame a god-like being from outside space and time. It does seem like an awful lot of hard work, especially given how things when he tried it last month, and that he must know the result will probably be chaos anyway, a mirror of his own megalomania. This is a story where Roger Delgado really lets rip, strutting up and down and cackling to himself. Entertainingly, but not becomingly. 

What's the nature of this madness? It's a story about messing about with time, and produces some of the most surreal and comic images of the whole series. There's capacity for exploration of some huge ideas, about how we use time and chronology to sort the Universe into order, to give our lives meaning. 'The whole of creation is very delicately balanced, Jo...' 

Or perhaps chronological narrative is a fantasy, and the Master plans to liberate himself from an illusory world into a state of naked existence. True enlightenment?

This is a sort of sequel to The Daemons. The Doctor was rather adamant in that story that science was a superior way of looking at reality, but in this story he can remotely interfere with the Master's Tardis by balancing a cup of tea on a wine bottle and making some mystical passes. The Tardis itself – pressed into use in a climactic moment that makes it suddenly seem more wonderful than it has since the 1960s – is indestructible, telepathic, illogical. The authors of this story leave us in no doubt: it's not just a spaceship – it's an idea that has somehow gained material form.

Now, The Time Monster is a bit over-extended, and sometimes the dialogue is a bit weird (like someone who's seen a lot of TV but never met a human being), but it has some amazing performances, from Dean Lerner and Miss Babs to Roger Delgado and Ingrid Pitt. It has that audacious Doctor Who spirit ('Who cares if the money's run out? We're going to have a bird-god-monster from another dimension destroy the city of Atlantis!') and the real sense of camaraderie that is unique to Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning ('Glad to have you aboard, Miss Grant.' 'Glad to be aboard, Doctor!').

And even if it doesn't really explore those ideas about time, meaning, madness, the life of the mind ('I shouldn't listen too hard to my subconscious thoughts, Jo, I'm not too proud of some of them'), it nonetheless suggests that there are two responses to the meaninglessness of existence and the daily toll of unhappy feelings. You could try and Master it, by chucking out the structure and narrative. Or you could tell a story about it. Better yet, you could throw yourself in and Doctor the story. Same mountain, different view.

There's also bags of extreme CSO. I think it really is the Pertweeiest Pertwee story.