Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (59 page)

The Ice Warriors episode six

R:
It’s an episode of tough decisions. Penley operating the Ioniser, and risking a huge explosion, echoes the Doctor firing the sonic cannon and risking the death of Jamie and the other humans. And if inevitably the fact that we only get the best-case scenario is
something
of an anticlimax, there’s enough honest angsting over the dilemmas to disguise that. We’ve had so many stories since Innes Lloyd has become producer about the superiority of man over machine, whether that’s been facing down Cyberman or WOTAN. And it’s nowhere better articulated than here, as Penley calmly takes responsibility for a decision that only Man can feel qualified to take. When asked to take a risk, Roy Skelton’s computer voice goes a little doolally, and sounds a bit like a child crumbling under the pressure of pretending to be an adult. However abrupt the conclusion might be, it’s satisfying and life-affirming.

It’s interesting too that in the final act it’s Penley who takes the lead – the Doctor surrogate rather than the Doctor. We’ve had to get used to that a lot in the latter Hartnell stories, where the production team sidelined the Doctor altogether; it was a sign of no confidence in their leading man. Here it’s exactly the opposite. Troughton’s Doctor is so assured now that the plot doesn’t need to assert him unnecessarily – he can stand back for the good of the story without compromising himself. Indeed, it offers a conclusion in which we don’t even get to see the Doctor making an exit round, either saying goodbye or sidling away. As Penley and Clent put their differences to one side, the regulars are already off set, their jobs done, ready to embark on another adventure – and we hear the sound of the TARDIS (impossibly) over the scene as if to suggest they’re already impatient to move on. (I’d like to pretend that the end credits coming on too early, poised to start rolling, is another sign of that. But that’d be pushing it a bit.)

T:
What’s most interesting about this final instalment is the way the script allows Bernard Bresslaw to fully morph Varga from being an imposing alligator person into a fully formed character. He isn’t just ruthless, he’s snidely superior during his face-off with Clent, responding as he does to the man’s brinkmanship with a blunt and dismissive: “I will tell you what I want, and you will give it to me.” Then things
really
get engaged as Clent appeals to the Martian’s better nature – saying the humans within the base will soon perish if the warriors leave it without power as planned – whereupon Varga starkly replies, “Whereas we would not.” And there’s even a bit of Martian black humour when Clent says Varga will regret what he’s doing, and Varga says, “At least I will live to regret it...” It’s marvellous how this intense confrontation boils down to a hobbling base-leader who has to deal with the intruders with finesse lest they decide he’s expendable and shoot him, and a tall green reptile played by a whispering actor sweating under a mask.

All in all, Martinus’ direction has been typically strong – the quick cross-fading as the Martians and humans writhe in agony from the Doctor’s sonic-cannon attack is a typically impressive flourish, and it’s also quite shocking and grim when Walters dies with his eyes open. (That’s a change from the book, incidentally, in which he isn’t first stunned by Miss Garrett. Instead, the Ice Warriors walk in as Walters is attacking the computer and gun him down, sparing him the indignity of being shot twice.)

What an excellent adventure – I wholeheartedly applaud its message about humanity winning through over technology, but did have a chuckle at the line “The computer says no.” (Thanks to Little Britain, this sticks out a bit more that it once would have.) And it’s not lost on me that I’m writing these words about Man triumphing over machine as I’m watching this story on a portable laptop that contains entire seasons of Doctor Who, during a train journey (London to Manchester in two hours and eight minutes) and then will send these words for editing and review to my friend Rob – who is in a different city – in a matter of seconds, thanks to an information superway of linked computers. Yeah, bloody machines. Who needs ‘em?

The Enemy of the World episode one

R:
“Och,” says Jamie, in irritation, “does he think we’re children?” The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS, is delighted to find he’s on a beach, and wants to go paddling and build sandcastles. And within minutes, he finds out he’s not in a children’s TV serial after all, but something much grittier, with helicopters exploding and men firing guns at them from hovercrafts. It’s so nasty and so paranoid, and it feels like it’s a world apart from the cheerful sci-fi show which tries to send kids hiding behind sofas from the big, bad monsters. It’s telling that the Doctor has a very different attitude here than he would in most of his adventures, slyly refusing to trust Astrid Ferrier even after she’s saved them from certain death, getting angry and demanding to know what she expects in return. It’s quite clear that David Whitaker has plunged us into an adventure in which no-one acts just for the common good and there’s no such thing as a good Samaritan; there’s a world leader who’s trying to save people from starvation, but that instantly suggests it can only be because he’s a dictator in the making. There’s such a contrast here between the happy-go-lucky Doctor who behaves like an infant wanting a swim in the sea, and the suspicious Doctor who instantly sniffs out the darker self-interest of everyone he meets. In a
normal
adventure he’d accept the fears of Giles Kent – a discredited security officer – on trust, or get the same sort of prickling sensation on his skin he feels around Daleks. Here evil is rather more nebulous – and, indeed, of all the characters we encounter, it’s
Kent
who’s immediately the most duplicitous, contacting his successor Donald Bruce to force the Doctor to adopt the identity of Salamander (a statesman and would-be saviour of the world, who might have aims of being a dictator) early on.

So this is all very different to what we’ve seen before. We get a helicopter, and we get a hovercraft – it is the directorial debut of Barry Letts, after all! – and in style it’s closest to the first season of Pertwee, and in particular to Whitaker’s own swan song, The Ambassadors of Death. And though Letts provides a hugely enjoyable action episode, with lots of shooting and running and falling over, you get the sense that all the energy he’s putting in is partly to conceal the fact that this whole thing is really rather out of sync with where Doctor Who has been heading – the odd mention of ice and Ionisers are there not just as pieces of continuity, but as reminders to the audience that this is the same programme.

As a sort of James Bond pastiche, this is rather successful. The sequence in which Giles Kent shows the Doctor a series of slides of Salamander’s victims is surprisingly chilling (one photograph shows a man backing away from an assailant in very real fear). There is an atmosphere of real world menace here; Donald Bruce’s bullying of Giles Kent, as he asks him to refer to him by the security position he has taken away from him, is just one example of subtle writing. The cliffhanger is smashing, and indicative of the episode’s tone as a whole – Bruce confronts the Doctor as he attempts a hasty impersonation of Salamander, and we’re on the edge of our seats, waiting to see where the lies within lies will take us next. There’s no real threat, but gripping suspense.

T:
It’s certainly
different
, I’ll give you that. Really, it’s an episode of two halves: the opening is an all-location extravaganza with loads of action but little plot, the second is a mass info-dump in a room. Whatever Letts might have done with the initial action sequences, however, it’s a bit spoiled by the fact that Astrid and the thugs Rod, Curly and Anton are all working for Giles Kent, but they’re
trying to kill her as well as the Doctor’s party
. No explanation is given for this (are they so overzealous to assassinate Salamander that they don’t stop to think that Astrid might be taking him into custody, or do they think she’s switched sides – what, exactly?), and I know that if I have a difference of opinion with a work colleague, we tend to stop short of shooting one another. Still, it’s hard to argue with the action-packed kick-off, which entails some impressive hardware (there’s a great telesnap of the hovercraft in action, with Rod lying on the side firing his gun), and some aerial shots which demonstrate a cunning use of the helicopter, both on and off screen.

And as you’ve touched upon, the Doctor is even more mercurial in this adventure than normal, isn’t he? He seems to be in a bad mood in Kent’s office, but he was previously sweet, mysterious and charming with Astrid, and prior to
that
he was hoping to happily scamper about on a beach with a bucket and spade. Just to make matters even murkier, when the Doctor is asked if he’s a “doctor” of law or philosophy, he (delightfully) twinkles, “Which law, whose philosophy?” Mary Peach is slightly odd as Astrid, though, especially when she states matter-of-factly that the Doctor’s helping her would probably involve his death, before opining that it’d be worth it, in a tone of voice that suggests that his not doing so would be about as disastrous as arriving five minutes late for the village fete.

And Troughton gets to indulge in a trait that will become much more frequent once he’s left the show, when the Doctor claims that humanity’s favourite pastime is “trying to destroy each other”. You tell us, Doctor! Why, the political back-and-forth we’re seeing here could only get shocking if we saw the Doctor himself turning nasty... oh.

April 5th

The Enemy of the World episode two

R:
1967 ends with Doctor Who behaving very out of character. There’s a joke about a disused Yeti, but besides that, you’d really hardly know it was the same programme. This is fascinating stuff, and after the claustrophobia of the last few stories, it’s almost disconcerting to have a plotline that leaps back and forth between Australia and Hungary quite so freely. I don’t honestly know how good Troughton’s Mexican accent is while he’s playing Salamander, and I suspect it’s rather all over the place – but that doesn’t matter a jot; he’s clearly having tremendous fun being a tyrannical villain, and, not unlike within his “darker” Doctor moments, he is at his most dangerous when he downplays the role. The scene in which Salamander coolly blackmails his associate Fedorin into becoming a murderer is superbly handled. It is quite an accomplishment all told that, even saddled with the sort of outrageous accent he used in Season Four for comic relief, he comes over as someone who’s in full authority. Indeed, in the one scene this episode where Salamander interacts with Jamie, Troughton’s performance is so different you can honestly forget that he and Hines have ever met before.

And that’s the nub of the matter, really; in The Massacre, the whole plotline of a Doctor’s double seemed entirely out of place amidst the more sober machinations of the Catholic conspiracists, and a strange irrelevance to keep William Hartnell out of the action; in The Chase, the double was even played by another actor altogether! This is a story all
about
there being a doppelganger – partly to showcase Troughton’s versatility, of course, but also to make the Doctor too seem a little more disturbing and unknowable. The sequence at the top of the episode in which the Doctor impersonates Salamander, then switches back to his familiar affability once Bruce leaves, is very telling – this Doctor suddenly looks a bit fake and threatening as well in his smart suit, someone who could become another man entirely within a trice. This all works because the Doctor has become so central to the series once again. By the end of Season Three, I’d become so used to Hartnell taking holidays or being written into minor parts so often, at times his presence on screen seemed rather out of place, a throwback to a style of story that Doctor Who had moved away from. But since he was introduced in The Power of the Daleks, there hasn’t been a single episode in which Troughton hasn’t been a major force. He’s refined and reshaped his Doctor over the stories since then until we now have a performance in which we can have total confidence – he never looks out of place as Hartnell often could, he never seems to fluff his lines or seem unconvinced by the genre he’s being asked to play. So that’s why now, halfway through his tenure, giving him a different costume and a different accent is so effective. When Hartnell appeared as the Abbot of Amboise, it always served to remind you that this figure
might
be the Doctor. When Troughton appears as Salamander, the shock is that he never could be.

It’s not untypical over the Christmas season for children’s TV stars to dress up in different costumes and play against what the kids at home would be expecting. It’s what Blue Peter and Crackerjack would always get up to. This could so easily have been a variation on that theme – but Troughton here is resolutely
not
giving a pantomime performance, in a story so cynical and dirty that it feels about as unseasonal as it could get.

T:
If you’re acquainted with the Doctor Who novelisations as much as I am, the most notable absence from this episode is the word “bastard” – which Ian Marter shockingly added while writing the book version of this story, in the scene between Salamander’s head-thug Benik (who is brilliantly given the first name of Theodore, I think) and Bruce. Oddly enough, I was someone who always wanted my Doctor Who to be grown-up (I was obsessed with telling people that it
wasn’t
a children’s programme, despite my being the ripe old age of ten at the time), but this left a bad taste in my mouth. There was something very un-Doctor Who about that swear word, and the televised scene certainly doesn’t miss it, largely thanks to Milton Johns (as Benik) being so silkily threatening.

Bruce also gets a cracking character moment at the top of the episode, when he collars Jamie and tells him to watch his step – despite the fact that the poor lad hasn’t said anything. It’s a terrific example of impotent bullying that illustrates Bruce’s anger magnificently. Indeed,
most
of this story is about the people involved rather than the action – both cliffhangers have entailed people putting themselves at risk (or, Fedorin’s case, not having the courage to do so) to get involved. With only the telesnaps to guess from, I think it’s safe to assume that the protracted silence at the end of the episode concentrated on Fedorin looking all guilty, and the disgraced Denes being inscrutably noble.

There are a few other things of note here... Salamander gets a splendidly horrible line about why Fariah became a food taster – “She was hungry” – and he calls the guards “boys”, an interesting touch that brings him further away from the Doctor, who’d never be so matey with thugs. And it increasingly becomes obvious that the time travellers need to be extra cautious with regards altering the political balance of power at this point in Earth’s history. Why, if they’re not careful, this sort of incorrigible meddling is going to catch up with them...

The Enemy of the World episode three

R:
In his one scene as the Doctor, Troughton is a joy, lamenting the destructiveness of man as he holds up a broken piece of crockery. The problem is, he’s still finding reasons not to take part in the main action – come on, we’re halfway through the story! It’s very strange, after a couple of stories which have been about the dangers of inaction, to have an adventure which is pretty much all a quest to give the Doctor enough reason to get involved. Jamie and Victoria going undercover as spies is strange as it is – like Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines seems almost a different character out of his standard uniform – but when you consider that they’re facing these dangers just to get information sufficiently lurid to prompt the Doctor into lifting a finger, it’s all the stranger. And then you remember that this
is
by David Whitaker, script editor of the first season – and then this throwback to the style of those early Hartnell adventures which were more about running away than taking any responsibility makes more sense.

And that’s one of the reasons why the tone here really does seem so downbeat. Jamie and Victoria have a plan to save the life of Denes – and it fails, completely and profoundly, and Denes is shot in the back. It’s a shocking moment, all the more because Barry Letts rather throws it away – we don’t even see Denes fall down as he’s shot, he’s not even given the dignity of a decent death scene. So all the initiative the companions have shown to get taken into Salamander’s confidence was for nothing, and they’re led away dismissively by guards – not even to appear in the following episode. It almost feels as if they were operating by Doctor Who rules, and the story rather sharply has tripped them up to tell them they’re appearing in the wrong show. It’s impressive and startling, certainly, and unlike anything we’ve seen for ages – but it does leave something of a bad taste in the mouth.

Thank God, then, for Reg Lye as Griffin the cook. It’s a terrific comic performance of such deliberate pessimism that it makes all the sour drama around him feel lifted as a consequence. It’s Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh transplanted into a James Bond thriller. It’s rare for a character in Doctor Who to come along where
every single line
is a gag – and even rarer for an actor to make every single one of them count. Griffin is never mentioned before this episode, and he’s never to appear again, making this one of the oddest cameos ever in the series – and one of the best.