#17 (10.9 - 10.14): Frontier in Space.

The latest standoff between the Doctor and the Master.

6 episodes. Running Time: Approx. 144 minutes. Written by: Malcolm Hulke. Directed by: Paul Bernard. Produced by: Barry Letts.


THE PLOT:

The empires of Earth and Draconia stand at the brink of war. Each side's ships have been raided, with survivors swearing that the other side is responsible. So far, Earth's President (Vera Fusek) and Draconia's emperor (John Woodnutt) have been able to maintain the peace, but calls for action among both races are growing.

This hostile environment is what awaits the Doctor and Jo when the TARDIS materializes inside an Earth cargo ship. When the ship is attacked, the members of the crew see their attackers as Draconians, even though the raiders are actually Ogrons. The Ogrons knock the crew unconscious and steal the TARDIS. When the Doctor attempts to tell the authorities what happened, he and Jo are arrested, charged with being spies working for the Draconians!

The Doctor soon realizes what is happening: A third party is using technology to trigger a fear response among the crews. Someone is trying to start a war. But no one in authority, either among the humans or the Draconians, is willing to believe him. Seemingly every conversation just leads the Doctor and Jo to a new interrogation, accusation, or prison.

Eventually, they are remanded to the custody of a colony offical - The Master! He is in command of the Ogrons, who are following his plan to destabilize the galaxy's two great powers. There's one more complication: The Master isn't working alone...


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: He retains a cool head throughout. In Part Two, when he and Jo are being held in the freighter's cell, she keeps trying to plan an escape so that they can get back to Earth. He points out that the ship is already on the way to Earth and that the people who will interrogate them are the very people they need to speak to. He initially hopes to get either the President or the Draconians to believe him. By the second half of the story, he unhappily resigns himself to the reality that no one will believe him unless he can provide proof, but he remains determined to find a way to prevent war.

Jo Grant: Most of her best moments in this story involve the Master. There's a scene in which the Doctor escapes from a cell under surveillance. Jo plants herself between the eye of the camera and the Doctor and essentially filibusters, rambling from topic to topic to keep their adversary from realizing that the Doctor has gone. Later, she resists an attempt by the Master to hypnotize her (again), and she holds firm against his fear device. He may be able to make her see monsters such as Sea Devils and Drashigs, but she rejects each illusion in turn, shouting back that "it's not real!"

The Master: This was Roger Delgado's final story as the Master; and though it wasn't planned as such, it turns out to be a fine showcase for the character. The Master's plan is genuinely clever, aggravating existing tensions and then mostly leaving the humans and Draconians to do his work for him. After a slightly "off" showing in The Time Monster, Delgado is back in top form here, the picture of urbane charm as he plays all sides against each other.

Ogrons: They were introduced the previous season as the Daleks' mindless henchmen. This serial clarifies that they are mercenaries who will work for anyone who pays. They're still not terribly interesting creations, being "dumb muscle" and not much else. It's not hard to see why they didn't catch on past the Pertwee era, and I'm legitimately confused as to their popularity in Doctor Who books and audios. They're better here than in Day of the Daleks, though, mainly thanks to the Master's clear impatience with their stupidity.

Draconians: Unlike the Ogrons, they are interesting, their society structured around strict codes. They are formal in speech and manner, and they abhor direct lies - though as the Draconian ambassador's actions show, they are not above deception as long as they can make it work within that framework. The design is particularly good, the makeup elaborate enough to be convincingly alien while still leaving the actors' faces free for a full range of expressions. Given how well they work in terms of both writing and makeup, I'm surprised that this was their only television appearance.


THOUGHTS:

Frontier in Space benefits from some good world building. This starts from the very first scene. The two crew members on the freighter discuss the potential of war with the Draconians. It's your basic exposition exchange, but it's given a lift by the attitude of the older crew member, who shrugs the whole thing off: "They steal a few of our cargoes, we steal a few of theirs. It'll all blow over."

A lot of information is sketched in quickly. Both sides still bitterly resent a previous war, one that we eventually learn was based on a misunderstanding (one that so closely mirrors the origins of Babylon 5's Earth/Minbari war that I can't help but wonder if J. Michael Straczynski had seen this story). The human government is at least somewhat authoritarian, with political dissidents sent to a prison from which no one returns. The Earth President has a lot of authority when it comes to questioning the Doctor and Jo or maintaining/severing diplomatic relations with the Draconians, but she cannot dictate purely military matters. These sorts of details help to make this future seem more real than many of Doctor Who's future societies.

Hulke was always good at weaving substance into his stories, and this is no exception. The Master is deliberately playing on the tensions between the two empires, but he didn't create them. His plan relies on fear. The humans fear the Draconians, and the Draconians fear them. With a slight push from his hypnotic device, he is able to use their existing fear to push both sides to make bad decisions and to take increasingly rash actions. It is, to put it mildly, not difficult to find real world instances of calamitous decisions that were driven by fear.

Structurally, there are good and bad elements. The narrative keeps itself fresh with frequent shifts of focus. The first two episodes revolve around the Doctor's and Jo's (unsuccessful) attempts to convince the Earth and Draconian authorities of the truth. The next two introduce the Master and his role in creating the current crisis, while also making time for an entertaining prison break caper. The final two episodes shift again, with the Doctor finally finding allies as the story reaches its conclusion. The regular changes in setting and focus keep the six episodes from becoming too stale.

Some staleness happens, however, because this serial suffers from severe repetition. In Episode One, the Doctor and Jo are captured and put in a cell. They escape, only to be recaptured and put back in that cell. In Episode Two, they are put in a cell on Earth. The Draconians break the Doctor out and briefly hold him captive, until he escapes and is recaptured by the humans. This continues for the entire story, with the Doctor and Jo being basically passed from one group to the next and from one cell to the next. There is simply too much of this, and the capture/escape pattern becomes tiresome long before the end.

Performances are strong. Pertwee is at his most authoritative when dealing with the various officials. He remains generally calm throughout, but we can see the Doctor growing more frustrated as the story goes along. He and Katy Manning continue to play wonderfully off each other, granting added energy to their scenes together, and Roger Delgado is excellent opposite both of them.

Oh, and if you haven't seen this serial yet... AVOID SPOILERS! There's a terrific twist late in the story, one that few viewers would be likely to see coming even though the story lays all the necessary groundwork. If you somehow don't already have prior knowledge of it, then don't look up anything about this serial before watching it.


OVERALL:

There's a lot to enjoy in Frontier in Space, from the interactions among the characters to the efficient world building. It does suffer from too many repetitions of the capture/escape formula, though, and this is definitely one of those stories best viewed an episode at a time rather than all in one sitting.

It's enjoyable thanks to strong performances and a fast pace, and it gets an extra boost from a late plot turn. Still, I think the repetitive structure keeps it from being as good as it might have been.


Overall Rating: 7/10.

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#14 (9.21 - 9.26): The Time Monster.

The Doctor, Jo, and the Brigadier are
pitted against the Master. Again.

6 episodes. Running Time: Approx. 147 minutes. Written by: Robert Sloman, Barry Letts (uncredited). Directed by: Paul Bernard. Produced by: Barry Letts.


THE PLOT:

The Master is passing himself off as "Professor Thascalos" in order to run experiments at the Newton Institute, located near Cambridge. Using his TARDIS as a power source, and with the aid of the unwitting Dr. Ruth Ingram (Wanda Moore) and her assistant Stuart (Ian Collier), he attempts to summon Kronos, the most powerful of the Chronovores, time creatures who were once worshipped as gods. With Kronos's power, the Master intends to control the universe!

The power from his experiments draws the attention of the Doctor and UNIT. The Doctor tries first to separate the Master from his TARDIS, then engages in tactics meant to delay him. In the end, though, he will have to chase the Master into the ancient past, to the lost civilization of Atlantis - where the Master has already found an ally...


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: Spends much of the first four episodes fidgeting with gadgets and spouting Technobabble. Fortunately, Jon Pertwee is back on form, his authority and charisma giving a significant lift to what might have been dry material. He also gets a particularly good scene in the final episode. As he and Jo await execution, he reminisces about a day in his youth when he decided that life was pointless, only to have an old man point out "the daisyest daisy (he'd) ever seen." It's a lovely monologue, very well performed by Pertwee.

Jo Grant: Though the Doctor's assistant, she seems to also regard herself as his protector. She insists on accompanying him to Atlantis even when he points out the danger, insisting that it's her job to help him. When the Master seems to have defeated him, she announces that she doesn't care what he does to her.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: After a pompous official starts talking about conducting an official inquiry, using that to berate a Cambridge professor, the Brigadier intercedes by declaring the exact law, subsection, and paragraph to compel secrecy. He quickly shuts the official down, and it's clear that the Brig enjoys using his position to squash a bully. Later, when Capt. Yates is endangered, he tries calling for Yates on the radio. When he gets particularly worried (in time for the cliffhanger), he switches from calling him "Captain Yates" to "Mike."

Sgt. Benton: While he's guarding the lab, the Master attempts to lure Benton away by impersonating the Brigadier's voice. The sergeant isn't fooled, using the opportunity to set a trap. It fails, of course, or the story would only be two episodes long, but it shows resourcefulness on his part.

Dr. Ruth Ingram: As the scientist who has assisted "Professor Thascalos" (The Master) with his experiments, actress Wanda Moore has the most prominent guest role for the first four episodes. Sadly, she also gets saddled with a lot of annoying "battle-of-the-sexes" dialogue. She talks about how spineless or patronizing the men around her are - then patronizingly tells Benton to "stand there and look pretty." I'm fairly certain the point was to show male viewers how annoying sexism is by reversing it... but it mostly comes across as forced, and I suspect it did in 1972 as well.

Queen Galleia: Ingrid Pitt, a regular fixture of British horror films of this period, appears in the final two episodes as the queen of Atlantis. She is instantly smitten with The Master, recognizing him as a man who will do anything to achieve power, and she begins plotting with him against her husband, King Dalios (George Cormack). This might have made for an engaging bit of court intrigue, had the serial reached this point at least one episode sooner. As it stands, the entire subplot is rushed, with Galleia's coup occurring offscreen. Still, at least Pitt acts her lines instead of shouting them, which helps her to stand out from most of the other actors in the Atlantis segment.

The Master: Speaking of shouting... This is almost certainly Roger Delgado's weakest performance as The Master. He spends the first two episodes adopting a wildly inconsistent accent while pretending to be a foreign professor. He then spends much of the back half of the story shouting most of his lines. Given how many of the guest cast also adopt this style, I wonder if this was less a case of Delgado having an "off" day and more a case of questionable directing choices.


THOUGHTS:

The Time Monster has not generally been well-regarded. I actually enjoy the story, but I'll admit that there's a lot to criticize.

The story is focused on Atlantis, but the Doctor and the Master spend four episodes marking time in a present-day lab before they manage to get there. When they finally arrive, the Atlantis sets are tacky even by Classic Who standards. Between the costumes and the stagey/shouty performances, I had the distinct impression that I was watching a Greek myth as staged by an underfunded community theatre.

With most of the actual plot reserved for the final episodes, the first four parts consist of... well, padding. A lot of padding. The Doctor turns down the chance to observe the demonstration in order to follow his device that goes "bing," which leads him and Jo to... um, the exact demonstration he decided not to go to. He spends a big chunk of Episode Three building a thing to delay the Master. When he finally succeeds, it causes a delay that lasts... maybe as much as thirty seconds.

Other bits are actually a lot of fun. Characters are aged and de-aged. Others get stuck in time, running slowly in place until they just plain stop. The Master brings soldiers from the past to delay UNIT. The Doctor and the Master find their TARDISes fused, each materialized inside the other.

None of these set pieces do anything to advance the story, but they are amusing and clever. I just finished watching and already barely remember the Atlantis/Kronos plot. But I recalled the TARDIS-in-a-TARDIS and "soldiers plucked out of time" moments from my last viewing of the story, even though that was a good two decades ago!


OVERALL:

At six episodes, The Time Monster is too long for its rather thin narrative. It's also bizarrely structured so that almost all of the story is packed into the final two episodes, leaving the rest extremely padded even by '70s Who standards. It also features guest performances that are uneven at best - and sadly, I include the usually excellent Roger Delgado in that assessment.

What saves it, for me at least, is that a fair amount of the padding is fun. The various time tricks the Doctor and Master pull on each other are often enjoyable to watch, showing a scene-by-scene inventiveness that keeps the whole thing alive. The two worst episodes end up being the last two - the two where the story finally happens.

In the end, while I can't call this a good story, I would call it a fun one. Within this same season, The Curse of Peladon is "better" - but I was more entertained by this.


Overall Rating: 6/10.

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#10 (9.01 - 9.04): Day of the Daleks.

The Doctor is interrogated by the Daleks.

4 episodes. Running Time: Approx. 95 minutes. Written by: Louis Marks. Directed by: Paul Bernard. Produced by: Barry Letts.


THE PLOT:

International relations are tense, with troops preparing for battle along the Soviet/Chinese border and a third World War seeming increasingly inevitable. A conference meant to de-escalate the situation has fallen apart, with the Chinese refusing to take part. It falls to Sir Reginald Styles (Wilfred Carter) to persuade the Chinese government to reverse its stance and work toward peace.

The Doctor has little interest in any of this. "Humans are always squabbling over something," he declares. But his curiosity is piqued when UNIT receives a report from Sir Styles' country house, designated to be the site of the talks. A "ghost" appeared and attempted to kill him!

Though Styles insists that he simply had a bad dream, the Doctor believes otherwise. He finds muddy footprints near the window of Styles' study. Then he discovers a futuristic weapon and a crude portable time machine, confirming that an outside force is at work.

He soon comes face-to-face with them: a guerilla force from the future, determined to assassinate Styles to prevent their world from coming into being. Theirs is a future in which humanity has become a slave race, ruled over by the Doctor's oldest enemy - the Daleks!


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: As was true in The Enemy of the World, the Doctor refuses to rush to judgment without full information. When the guerillas capture him and Jo, he tries to get more information about their motivations. Throughout the story, people try to rush him toward action: the guerillas, Jo, even the human Controller (Aubrey Woods) working with the Daleks. He just keeps probing each of them for more information, so that when he does take action it will be the correct one.

Jo Grant: In contrast to the Doctor, she acts impulsively, barely stopping to breathe let alone to think. With her and the Doctor captured by the guerillas, she frees herself and threatens to destroy their time travel device, not letting it go even when the Doctor urges her to. She sees the situation in simple terms: An armed group kidnapped her and the Doctor and plans to kill Sir Reginald, so this group surely must be evil - which also makes her a little too willing to believe that their opponents must automatically be good.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: An early scene sees him smugly needling the Doctor over his inability to get the TARDIS working... and I say fair enough getting his digs in, given all the barbs the Doctor's thrown his way. Despite the banter, he has absolute faith in the Doctor's judgment when crisis hits. The final episode sees the Doctor telling him to do two things. One of these is politically tricky and the other seems tactically foolish - but there's no time for an explanation, so the Brigadier puts full trust in him and gives both orders.

Capt. Yates: A fun early moment sees him pulling rank on Benton for the express purpose of confiscating some food and wine. When Jo confronts him about it, Mike smirks while telling her, "R. H. I. P., Jo... Rank has its privileges." When the Doctor and Jo disappear, he goes straight to the Brigadier, recognizing that something has gone badly wrong.

Daleks: This was their first (new) appearance since Season Four's The Evil of the Daleks, and they were a late addition to the script. This has led some to complain that they feel tacked on, but I actually think they add quite a bit. Sure, the base story would work fine without them. But they add another layer, acting as Evil Overlords commanding the more visible villains of the story. On broadcast, the story suffered from Dalek voices that sounded alternately sluggish and tinny. The special edition replaces the original voices with Nicholas Briggs, who has voiced the Daleks on television since 2005 as well as in the Big Finish audio range, and that alone gives a considerable lift to their presence.


THOUGHTS:

"There are many different kinds of ghosts, Jo. Ghosts from the past and ghosts from the future."
-the Doctor muses about the "ghosts" that are attempting to kill Sir Reginald Styles.

The first scene featuring the Doctor and Jo signals that this story is going to play with the idea of time travel, rather than just using it as a way to get them into the story. The Doctor is first seen attempting to repair his TARDIS. Something goes wrong, and future versions of himself and Jo appear. The Doctor has an irritable exchange with himself before the console overloads, putting an end to the interaction.

This winks at the type of story writer Louis Marks has created, with forces from the future fighting in the present - one side trying to undo that future, the other trying to preserve it. There are a few twists along the way, which I won't spoil for anyone who hasn't yet watched it. The script is genuinely clever, and comics writer John Byrne would acknowledge drawing inspiration from it for elements of his classic X-Men story, Days of Future Past.

This serial is well-paced, its story comfortably filling the four episodes. There's a lot of action which is well staged, even in the original broadcast version. The story also pulls off the balance of taking itself just seriously enough to convince of the stakes, but not so seriously that it become unenjoyable at any point.


THE SPECIAL EDITION:

The 2011 Special Edition makes some noticeable improvements. Action scenes feature laser effects, whereas the original mostly just conveyed weapons fire through prop guns and sound effects. Establishing shots are used during shifts to the Dalek-controlled future, giving us a glimpse of the dystopia. The climactic battle features a heavier Dalek presence than the broadcast version, which was hampered by having access to only three Dalek props.

The one effect I preferred in the original was for time travel. The broadcast version's optical effect worked nicely, whereas I find the Special Edition's CGI to be a bit cartoonish and even distracting. But outside of that one element, the Special Edition's changes are noticeably for the better. The Dalek voices alone make it the superior version.


OVERALL:

Day of the Daleks is fun, clever, and nicely paced, and it makes good use of the full regular/recurring cast. Though I know some disagree, I also think the story makes good use of the Daleks. They may have been added late in the day, but their presence as Evil Overlords works better for me than many stories that reduce them to mindless minions that shout, "Exterminate!"

I find this to be a very good story, and a promising start to Pertwee's third season.


Overall Rating: 9/10.

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