Timeless Adventures (16 page)

In
The Time Warrior
, the position Linx finds himself in parallels that of the Doctor: he’s an alien scientific advisor to a ‘military’ group. The application of advanced technology in a historical setting drew on the real-life situation early in the Vietnam war where the superpowers would help one side or the other with weaponry and advice, without becoming directly involved (already depicted in the 1968
Star
Trek
episode A
Private Little War – Star Trek
having begun its initial run on UK television in between Troughton’s final story and Jon Pertwee’s debut.)

The political commentary in the following story,
Invasion of the
Dinosaurs
, was a lot more substantial than that of
The Time Warrior
. Following the eco-environmental message of
The Green Death
, Malcolm Hulke once again flexed his agit-prop muscles under the guise of a teatime adventure. The Doctor and Sarah return to the present, only to discover London deserted. The city has been evacuated (as ever,
Doctor Who
draws on Second World War iconography) due to the appearance of prehistoric dinosaurs! The villains are radical environmentalists intending to use a time machine to return Earth to its unspoilt state, as it was before the effects of technology and pollution. Only a select few will survive Operation Golden Age.

Rather than an alien invasion, the story presents a group of driven idealists as the ‘threat of the week’, while still delivering the requisite serial thrills with the arrival of various (unfortunately unconvincing) dinosaurs on the streets of London.
Doctor Who
had featured scientific-conspiracy storylines before (notably in
The Ambassadors of
Death
). This conspiracy tale stretched all the way to the government (through the minister, Grover) and involved the army (a dramatic conflict personalised as UNIT’s own Mike Yates – series semi-regular Richard Franklin – is revealed to be in on the conspiracy following his experiences during
The Green Death
). Fear of an armed takeover of Britain was a political reality in the UK in the 1970s, reflecting concerns about the possible actions of Labour in government. Labour were returned to power in February 1974, just as the last episodes of
Invasion of
the Dinosaurs
were being transmitted. The involvement of Mike Yates on the ‘wrong’ side of the conspiracy demonstrated the show’s new interest in longer-term character development (anticipating the way that much television drama is now made). Rarely in
Doctor Who
had characterisation of minor supporting characters been consistent (the Brigadier having suffered some odd character swings through the years). Very few were dealt with in anything more than a perfunctory manner, even when the series was as grounded in an ensemble group as it was in the first half of the 1970s.

Hulke concluded
Invasion of the Dinosaurs
by allowing the Doctor to deliver a speech backing the aims of Operation Golden Age, while condemning their methods. It was an environmental plea made directly to viewers, via a comment to the Brigadier, and one that appears years ahead of its time: ‘At least [they] realised the dangers this planet of yours is in, Brigadier. The danger of it becoming one vast garbage dump, inhabited only by rats… It’s not the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier. It’s simply greed.’ It was an unusually bald, uncompromising statement for the show to make, and one that probably struck a chord with younger viewers.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs
simultaneously appealed to the 1960s idealists who’d seen their hoped-for advancements dissipate in the 1970s and to children (of all ages) who think dinosaurs are ‘cool’.

The boldness of
Doctor Who
in foregrounding such obvious political content at this time may have been a result of the end-of-an-era feel. During the broadcast of
Invasion of the Dinosaurs
in February 1974, Jon Pertwee announced he’d be hanging up his frilly shirts and velvet capes and handing the keys to the TARDIS to a new occupant. Three reasons were eventually cited for his departure: he’d allegedly been refused a requested raise in his fee by the BBC; he wanted to move on to new acting challenges; and he felt that, with the death of Roger Delgado and the departure of Katy Manning, his
Doctor Who
team was disintegrating around him. Both Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks then announced their intention to also move on to pastures new with the end of the eleventh season. They had tried to leave two years previously, after
The Time Monster
, but the BBC had persuaded them to continue, afraid that breaking up the team would harm the success of the show (a situation later echoed in the behind-the-scenes story of the latest revival of
Doctor Who
). Terrance Dicks wittily commented that ‘
Doctor Who
is the only prison where time gets added on for good behaviour!’

The third annual outing for the Daleks (following
Day of the Daleks
and
Planet of the Daleks
) arrived in Pertwee’s final season in the form of Terry Nation’s
Death to the Daleks
and plunged the programme back once again from the relative sophistication of its 1970s scripts to its 1960s
Flash Gordon
-style serial origins, the only mode of scripting
Doctor Who
that Nation seemed comfortable with. The Doctor arrives on the planet Exxilon where a sentient city is draining power from everything (including the TARDIS and a Dalek expeditionary force). While the opening TARDIS power-cut scene might have mirrored the genuine power cuts caused in the UK by the mid-1970s energy crisis, Nation’s script quickly descends into sub-Eric Von Daniken code breaking as the Doctor and local ‘primitive’ Bellal make their way to the centre of the city.

By this stage, it was clear that the Daleks had been mishandled in their 1970s appearances, largely due to the show’s reliance on creator Terry Nation to script for them following
Day of the Daleks
. His repeated reuse of old ideas was painfully obvious, as was the lack of imagination brought to the Dalek serials by their respective directors. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s and the arrival of director Graeme Harper that the Daleks would get the kind of inventive visual direction they’d long deserved.

Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had always been open to writers using allegory (some subtle, some not) in
Doctor Who
to tackle contemporary social and political issues. It gave the series some heft, above and beyond its status as Saturday entertainment and, no doubt, made it more interesting to work on. Having dealt with topics such as environmentalism (
Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Sea Devils, The
Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs
), the end of colonialism (
The
Colony in Space, The Mutants
), the nature of television itself and specifically
Doctor Who
’s own history and function (
Carnival of
Monsters, The Three Doctors
), the duo were running out of topics as their time on the show drew to a close.

Where
The Curse of Peladon
had featured an allegory for the UK’s entry into the EEC, the sequel story
The Monster of Peladon
dealt directly with UK industrial relations, particularly the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974. Set 50 years later, the Doctor returns to Peladon with Sarah to find the planet in turmoil. The Federation, of which Peladon is a part, is at war with Galaxy 5 and is dependent on Peladon’s reserves of trisilicate. Those who mine it, however, are refusing to adopt ‘modern’ technological working practices, while protesting that they are not earning enough ‘to feed our families’. The roles of the moderates and radicals within the planet’s various factions mirror those of the principals involved in the bitter real-life mining dispute of 1972, as astute viewers would have recognised.

This political content was (lightly) disguised under the same codmedieval fantasy trappings as seen in
The Curse of Peladon
. The castle settings and faux-
Lord of the Rings
-style court served as the setting for a space opera, featuring a similar menagerie of glam-rock alien delegates and a mining class who uniformly sport badger hairstyles. It may not have featured the most convincing alien society ever created, but
The Monster of Peladon
reflected the culture of the mid-1970s as much in its mise-en-scène as in its politics. The big boots, the even bigger hair and the out-of-control glitter make-up reflected a typical night out in a 1970s disco.

This mining melodrama led into Pertwee’s final story,
Planet of the
Spiders
. Barry Letts – himself a Buddhist – took the opportunity to explore a subject little touched upon in his five years in charge of the show: religion. Conceived by Letts (and written, as was traditional now for the final story in a season, by Robert Sloman),
Planet of the
Spiders
was a Buddhist parable that tackled the Doctor’s repeatedly displayed thirst for knowledge. The upcoming regeneration offered Letts the chance to have the Doctor learn a hard lesson in the process of, essentially, losing one of his lives.

Following
The Green Death
and
Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Planet
of the Spiders
builds on the character development of Mike Yates. Sarah is drawn by Yates into investigating a rural meditation centre where he has been recuperating. The residents have made contact with an alien force that manifests on Earth as over-sized spiders that can possess humans by leaping on their backs (a fate that befalls Sarah). After helping the humanoid inhabitants to try and overthrow their spider masters, the Doctor returns to the planet Metebelis 3 from where he’d previously stolen a powerful crystal (representing his quest for knowledge). He confronts the Great One (the spider god) and loses his life due to excessive radiation. The Doctor has to sacrifice his ego (his third persona) to make up for past mistakes and to secure the future (his fourth persona). ‘It is wrong to have a greed for knowledge,’ said Letts. ‘Greed presupposes a preoccupation with the self, the ego. We know that in the beginning the Doctor stole a TARDIS to satisfy his greed for knowledge, and in
The Green Death
he steals one of the [Metebelis 3] blue crystals for precisely the same reason. He is willing to allow himself to be destroyed, the false ego being destroyed to find the real Self. He knows he will be destroyed, but knows also that he will be regenerated.’

The
Doctor Who
concept of regeneration was filtered through Letts’ Buddhist philosophy in
Planet of the Spiders
. The meditation retreat is run by Abbot K’anpo Rinpoche and his deputy Cho-Je. K’anpo is revealed to be a Time Lord mentor of the Doctor. He is killed while protecting Yates from attack by the spider-controlled residents. In death, K’anpo is reborn as Cho-Je, his own future self. At the climax, K’anpo reappears to aid the Doctor’s regeneration. ‘The old man is destroyed and the new man is regenerated,’ explained Letts. ‘Yes, it was all a quite deliberate parallel.’ As if to emphasise his attachment to the tale, Letts not only devised the storyline, he also directed the six-episode serial.

It is surprising that
Doctor Who
had not tackled religion in any serious way (while
Star Trek
seemed to deal with some alien pretending to be one god or another every other week). It is fitting, though, that the Pertwee era should have come to an end in a celebration of that most 1970s of all religious philosophies, Buddhism, which had grown in prominence (or, at least, in media coverage) in the West since the late-1960s. It seems appropriate, after half a decade spent helping UNIT defend the Earth from threats coming from ‘out there’, that the Third Doctor should end his time looking inward.

Layered on top of the Buddhist parable is an examination of psychic powers, another 1970s social topic. The opening episode sees the Doctor investigating psychic powers and referring obliquely to notorious 1970s spoon bender Uri Geller. This leads into the adventure with the mind-controlling spiders, whose modus operandi is through mental domination of already wicked or weak people.

Planet of the Spiders
was Barry Letts’ attempt to sum up his approach to
Doctor Who
. Reflecting his leading man’s interest in fast-moving vehicles, he indulges Pertwee with a 12-minute chase scene in episode two featuring a variety of vehicles on land, at sea and in the air. Each of the long-running team of characters has significant character moments, as if to draw a line under their participation (although some would return, notably Sarah and the Brigadier). The wrapping up of the character of the Third Doctor secured the concept of regeneration as central to the series, and is given a name for the first time. The first change of actor was narratively mysterious, referred to simply as a ‘renewal’. Troughton’s Second Doctor doesn’t go to any great lengths to explain the change, except to connect the process to the TARDIS. The then script editor Gerry Davis even believed the change to be akin to that featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The
Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
. The next change is similarly provoked by a crisis, brought on by the Time Lords who punish the Doctor (yet still finding his existence in the universe to be of use to themselves). The change of physical appearance is part of this punishment.

Although mention of the Time Lords had been a common factor throughout the early-to-mid-1970s (especially with the involvement of the Master), little mention had been made of regeneration until
Planet
of the Spiders
required another real-world change of actor. It was only then, as a fourth leading actor was sought for
Doctor Who
, that the concept of regeneration really took hold, both in the programme and with the public at large. The use of the term ‘regeneration’ to describe the process of change that the Doctor undergoes is in keeping with Letts’ religious/philosophical take on the series. He felt it necessary to not only explain to viewers afresh about the Doctor’s ability to change (it had been five years since the last such occurrence), but also the need to codify the process, give it a name and normalise it for future producers (who’d be free to follow his template or not).