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 Monster of Peladon

After the savourless stodge of Death to the Daleks, we come to a dish carefully prepared. A proper story, with mystery and political allegory: a secret traitor, an icy villain and – what more could you ask for – a giant green phallic monster with six arms who worries that humans are alarmed by it.

It's a sequel, the one instance of this Doctor returning to a previous adventure, and Sarah Jane's sharp tongue prevents it all getting too sentimental. There are brave queens deceiving their viziers, political skulduggery, ghosts and brave dashes and mad miners. When a beautiful young woman is dragged through secret passages beneath an ancient citadel, a mad-eyed man on her arm, a slavering beast on her trail, it makes you wonder how Philip Hinchcliffe could ever be thought the last word in gothic Doctor Who.

So why is it all so flipping dreary?

Why do we long for the episodes to spool by faster? Why do we yawn, tut, scratch ourselves and think of other things? Why does this whole story feel so unnecessary?

It must at least be the inevitable comparison with the fabulous Curse of Peladon. Nothing stands up to four episodes of plotting, red (or rather emerald green) herrings, and the gorgeous David Troughton being utterly serious in a jumbo purple velvet collar and silk hotpants, whilst talking to a man of a certain age with a pink streak in his hair. While the torches flicker...

It was like nothing we had ever seen on Doctor Who before, and recycling the sets only reinforces that we haven't returned to the real Peladon, not to that assemblage of alien beings, that sense of something daring and weird and authentically panto. If only Brian Hayles had taken a gamble and tried the Peladon approach with a whole new planet. To be honest, Terry Nation tried that last story with an arid alternative to swampy Spiridon and it was a total disaster – but at least he tried (and to be honest, he didn't try very hard).

Then there's the unavoidably crude politics. It's about the miners strike – so here are some miners, on strike. Do you see? Only sadly, caricaturing them as badger-like superstitious hotheads, the script manages to treat them with such insensitivity they might as well give them all Welsh accents, hire Talfryn Thomas and be done with it. Then we have Sarah Jane offering the Queen of the planet a crash course in women's lib; thank goodness for Lis Sladen's delivery or we'd all be cringing into our purple velvet sleeves.

I mean: yes, fill a story with cartoons, but have fun with it. Don't pretend you're making any kind of political analogy. Go big. Go wild. Go colourful.

I have to make an exception here for Alan Bennion, back for the third time here as an Ice Lord from Mars. He knows what he's about, and if it wasn't beneath me to make some cheap puns, I'd call him truly chilling. He's arranging the Doctor's execution and threatening the murder of hostages, and that's before the mask slips and he's revealed as a bad guy.

The Third Doctor has really lacked for enemies of his calibre. What a shame Azaxyr, leader of a Martian splinter group, isn't more the focus of this story.

Almost done now. The days of this incarnation are numbered. At one point, when the Doctor and Sarah Jane think they're slipping away unnoticed, the canny Queen Thalira cries out – with some emotion – 'Goodbye, Doctor!' And yes, you think, it's almost that time.

In one scene, with vague presentiments of Caves of Androzani, the Doctor actually seems to go past the point of mortal strength and collapses lifeless in his chair for an hour. Sarah Jane is quite rightly in bits (albeit for the second time, for the same reason, in one story) and when she says, 'I can't believe he's dead. He was the most alive man I ever knew...' Well, you feel that emotion – and you can almost kid yourself that this was his last hurrah, among the badger-men, penis people and screaming queens of Peladon.

Goodness, though, that would have been bloody weird.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

… And nobody really knows what the dinosaurs actually looked like, do they?

I said in my Green Death review that we were saying goodbye to the UNIT era. I thought then that it was appropriate it ended with clinking glasses and the Doctor disappearing off on his own in Bessie, his most faithful companion in all his time on Earth. Well, I just didn't know what I was talking about, evidently.

How's about Mike Yates pulling a fun on the Brigadier, eh?

And while we're about it, how about the Brigadier risking mutiny by rescuing the Doctor from a senior officer?

What, indeed, about a story where all the Green Utopianism that's typified the Dicks/Letts era becomes a government conspiracy to commit global genocide?

Everything's cracking up. The halcyon days are gone. Even Bessie's been put in the garage, passed over for something spangly and futuristic. (Why not just stick some fold-out wings on his jaunty Edwardian roadster? Is he scared he'll have Dick Van Dyke on his doorstep, threatening litigation?)

The crucial thing is, for quite a while we don't know that Operation Golden Age are mass murderers in waiting. In fact, even at the end their leaders seem to see this as a point of philosophical debate. Of course, the scheme itself is so loopy it strains credulity - but if it seemed more credible, might it also seem more reasonable?

For at least half the story, there's the chance the Doctor is on the wrong side - and perhaps there is an ambiguity even at the end. The fact that the story ends with two men, however dangerously minded, getting beamed back to the Jurassic era, and apparently to the Doctor's satisfaction, only underlines this.

In fact, Mike's continued harping on to his superiors about the Doctor - not fingering him as a threat so much a potential ally - implies the Time Lord has been a dangerous inspiration to our sad captain. The Doctor spent all that time trying unsuccessfully to encourage a cosmic outlook in his young companion, but perhaps it rubbed off on the wrong person.

I don't know the circumstances that led to Mac Hulke leaving the series' writing roster (a lust for conference centres seems improbably involved) but it almost feels here that he's exposing, fatally, the ideological problems of UNIT and the Doctor. The question of what the Brigadier might try to achieve if his mandate was active rather than responsive (and just what are all those scientists developing at the research centre in The Time Warrior?) haunts this surprisingly grim tale.

A part of me really wants the Pertwee era to end with the Brigadier's complete disillusionment with the British establishment and his resignation from UNIT, perhaps to form his own splinter group. In Wales. With Nancy and her nut roast. Watching Troughton and Pertwee in sequence made me particularly curious about the Brigadier as a character, from the way he accepts the Doctor at face value to his conversation with the sceptical Liz Shaw, plus everything we read between the lines.

This is quite a good story for the Brigadier, insofar as it doesn't reduce him to a Nigel Bruce Dr Watson, but any real insights into his mentality are forever deferred. The big omission is  Lethbridge-Stewart's closing chat with Yates. But then the show has set up and then skipped these sorts of conversations, ever since The Silurians.

The Doctor arrives a week later than he intends to, and we all come close to being rolled back and nixed. (We would be in even more trouble if Sarah Jane a Smith hadn't stowed away the week before.) What would UNIT do if the Doctor finally made up his mind and returned once more to wandering time and space. And what exactly do they do with Professor Whitaker's time machine after he's gone? Hello, UNIT dating controversy.

Our hero is ready to go. He finishes the story with an almost exact re-tread of his invitation to Jo to Metebelis III. Only this time, instead of being oblivious, his friend can't stop herself listening to him. (She presumably hasn't heard how little the last paradise planet turned out to resemble the brochure.) And the series has shifted already, so that when they come back to the modern day, it feels alien and unfamiliar. As if we're seeing through Sarah's eyes now that she's stepped outside the everyday.

Can you believe this is the first time we've seen the Third Doctor in modern London? The first and only time, I believe. No stalking down Whitehall with Liz Shaw, or sipping espressos in Soho with Jo Grant. It makes him seem even more out of time, waiting at a bus stop with his frills out and his magnifying glass swinging on its pendant, yet somehow even more of that era - a glam Doctor, a combination of John Steed, Gambit and Purdey, a man who could be scientific adviser of UNIT forever if he didn't feel the need to tempt Sarah Jane to sample the higher dimensions.

There's a fair bit of padding in the last couple of episodes, including a superfluous chase in the woods. But I don't think I'll ever feel too harshly toward a story with lots of location filming. There are some gorgeous shots of the Doctor framed by woodland foliage that take us right back to Spearhead from Space. This is a Doctor who has come to feel and look strangely at home on Earth.

Not for long. The Police Box is beckoning. It's time for Sarah to meet the Daleks...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Time Warrior

Nowadays, by which I mean 1974, it strikes me as slightly odd that I used to remark so much on the bad-tempered old Third Doctor. I remember a lot of people in Jon Pertwee’s second season getting the sharp edge of his tongue, and then some hard words for Day of the Daleks’ Controller, as well as bureaucrats fighting The Sea Devils and experimenting on The Mutants. But as if mellowed by the charm of Jo Grant, or perhaps the impervious Master (no use shouting at him), the Doctor’s been getting increasingly sweet-natured and tolerant.

I suppose it depends on who’s rubbing the nape of his velvet jacket the wrong way; any civil servant or wunderkind scientist with a jacked-up ego was ever liable to have the air taken out of their tyres. Perhaps it was the frustration of memory loss, or the thought that he'd never see Jamie McCrimmon's hairy knees again. In this story you might expect him to be more irritable once more, given the big events of The Green Death: strange to find him on Earth at all, really.

And to be so tolerant of the Brigadier, going through one of his bumptious phases, and Professor Rubeish’s  fiddle-faddling, not to mention an investigative reporter smuggling herself into a 'top secret' government think tank as if it was a tupperware party. She's only there because scientists working on government related research are mysteriously going missing! But then that's suddenly the key to Pertwee's Doctor: suave and cool and jokey when everyone else is getting aerated.

That's the delight of the Doctor's scenes with our two testosterone-tastic warriors, Lynx and Irongron, and particularly the latter, who bellows and stomps about and swings his sword in all directions. When the Doctor's disguised as a robot and Irongron suggests chopping its head off, the Doctor suddenly becomes the unflappable upper class gent: 'Isn't that a bit unsporting, old man? I mean, sitting ducks and all that...' It's a playfulness I fondly remember from the days of his previous incarnation – although, catch this Doctor pretending to be a fool. He'd sooner drag up in a pair of old tights.

There's another rather Troughtonish moment when the Doctor is chucking stink bombs over his shoulder at Irongron's troops; not with the schoolboyish pleasure that the Second Doctor would have taken, but with quiet contentment all the same. He's almost whistling to himself as he dispatches an army – a very, very small army, yes, but it's the Doctor who really makes us see that. He's rather affronted when Sarah Jane implies he might have caused some permanent damage with his gas: he's not a soldier. He's just having fun.

Taken entire, this rather muted performance sometimes under-sells the drama of The Time Warrior. Even when he's not onscreen, we very rarely get a real sense of menace from Lynx the Sontaran – his 'ocular' hypnotism of Sarah Jane Smith notwithstanding. Lynx doesn't seem to pose a great threat to the world: we never get a real sense of what effect his 'time meddling' will be, nor does anybody really seem to care overly about the scientists he's abducted from the 20th century.

In fact, the story has a weird effect, like a rather crudely taken photograph. Everybody at the centre of the shot – essentially the Doctor, the villains, and the new girl in town – are acutely in focus, but the other elements of the composition range from slightly to extremely blurry. It's the Brigadier I feel sorry for. A few years ago, it felt as if he and the Doctor were co-stars of this series, and now he's basically required for thirty seconds in episode one, to set the scene and raise an eyebrow. Nick Courtney plays the scene with good grace, but the Brig in conversation with Lynx is a missed opportunity.

As would Lady Eleanor in conversation with Lynx. Or, indeed, with Bella Emberg. Lady Eleanor is just short of being one of the Pertwee era's great female characters – few and far between though they are. In Season 10, we had none at all in The Three Doctors, the lovable Shirna in Carnival of Monsters, the President of Earth (okay, I'll admit, that's not bad) in Frontier in Space, one rather soppy Thal in Planet of the Daleks and Nancy, the companion that never was, with her deadly mushroom bake and existential flute-playing (or whatever it is Clifford says she's doing with her instrument). Eleanor is strong, wise and charming; I could also wish for a bit more of the Mary Berry of her day, Meg, played by Sheila Feay and a really bizarre wig.

But the woman of the match is obviously and incomparably Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Katy Manning is irreplaceable, and without an eye for Doctor Who history, you might worry about the show after her departure. Remember when they recast Jamie for an episode? Remember when Vicki's place in the Ship was taken by Katarina? But Sladen walks into the show and owns it, instantly. 'Oh, I could murder a cup of tea!'

It's funny, because Robert Holmes wastes no time on any of Sarah's background. It should be fairly pitiful that all we know about her is that she's a journalist with an aunt, and that she frequently says, 'Ooh, men!' like a character from Acorn Antiques. But he gives Sarah so much to do and say, that between Holmes and Sladen, Sarah Jane is vividly there, from the get go, and she's there by accident, as all the best companions are.

She took a chance, a wrong turning or a right one, and there it was – an unexpected new friend, unexpected new trouble, a man who looks like a currant bun with legs, and a man who takes it all in his stride.

Of course the Doctor doesn't get all grumpy with her. He knows a new best friend when he sees her...

Coming next, a story I've never seen... Apparently it's just 

called INVASION!! (Deja vu...?)