The Ark in Space featured the eruption of ‘body horror’ into Doctor Who, capturing the ‘Me’ generation’s inward-looking self-absorption and obsession with body image and disease, especially uncontrollable diseases like cancer. Thirty years after the Second World War, an entire generation had grown to adulthood in relative peace and prosperity. With little in the way of outward threat (the Cold War was constantly looming, but rather abstract and certainly not personal), affluent societies (like that in California) turned inwards. Plastic surgery and modern dentistry ‘improved’ appearance, but, despite high-tech health care, some diseases could not be conquered, like various cancers. The body could still turn against someone, no matter how rich they were. The fear of disease and transformation is even more basic than that, but the mid-1970s context of The Ark in Space gave the story an additional resonance. Movies at the time were dealing with similar fears of loss of control over the body, whether through demonic pregnancy in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), or loss of identity in The Stepford Wives (1975) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). More pertinently, the SF thrills of The Fly (1958), with its transformation of a scientist into an insect, were also directly echoed.
Finding themselves adrift on a space station in the far future, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry have to save the remnants of mankind (who’ve been hibernating to escape a ravaged Earth) from infestation by the Wirrn. The space-borne, wasp-like Wirrn reproduce by laying eggs in other species (hence Hinchcliffe’s feeling that Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien bears a passing resemblance), but they can also transform other species into Wirrn hybrids (as happens to Noah, leader of the station) and absorb their knowledge. It’s a fantastic premise for an alien species, mostly well realised by the designers, and supported by the cast taking the threat seriously, in line with Hinchcliffe’s ‘new seriousness’ approach. The audience clearly liked this less-jokey approach to the show, with 13.6 million switching on for episode two, surpassing the series’ previous highest-rated episode (episode one of the imaginative Hartnell adventure The Web Planet, where 13.5 million viewers tuned in for an adventure that coincidentally featured several complex alien life-cycles!).
Outgoing producer Barry Letts had developed the remaining stories of season 12, so Hinchcliffe worked with the material he inherited. Although none of the other adventures would feature his ‘gothic’ take to the same extent as The Ark in Space, he was able to have some input into the feel of Genesis of the Daleks, the story that revived the much-maligned Daleks and introduced the character of Davros, their mad-scientist creator. Returning monsters were very much part of Letts’ plan for the new Doctor’s first season, so The Ark in Space was followed by a two-part rematch between the Doctor and the Sontarans, The Sontaran Experiment. Slight though this tale was, it still managed to pack in commentary on the ethics of torture, as Sontaran commander Styre experiments on captured humans in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The setting – although shot on location on Dartmoor – was supposed to be a futuristic London reclaimed by nature, a riff on the disaster fiction of JG Ballard.
However, it was the Daleks who were to make the biggest impact in the 1975 series. After years of low-rent appearances in poor scripts written by their creator Terry Nation in the style of 1960s cliff-hanger serials, they were in serious need of reinvention. Nation’s inspiration was to explore their origins, something only hinted at in 1963. Audiences had supposedly seen their ‘final end’ in 1967’s The Evil of the Daleks, but had never been privy to their creation. In pursuit of this, Nation again fell back on the tried-and-tested allegories he was comfortable with. Genesis of the Daleks presents two armed camps – the Thals and the Kaleds – fighting a war of attrition across the wastelands of the planet Skaro. Most of the story explores the Kaled struggle for survival, and the environment presented is akin to that of Hitler’s bunker in the final days of the Second World War. Nation presents a science-fiction take on Hitler’s Nazi fantasies of genetic purity, as Kaled chief scientist Davros struggles to find a way of preserving his people, aware that time is running out for the whole planet. Davros is a scarred humanoid figure locked into a mobile survival unit whose bottom half resembles a classic Dalek chassis. He has created a ‘travel machine’, modelled after his own high-tech wheelchair, to contain the genetically re-engineered form he sees his own people eventually becoming. These future Kaleds are already being engineered by Davros himself, in anticipation of nature.
The Time Lords send the Doctor and his companions, Sarah and Harry, to Skaro, with instructions to destroy the Daleks at their creation. Their aim is to avert the death and destruction the Daleks will cause, or to at least affect their genetic development, resulting in less aggressive creatures. With no choice but to get involved, the Doctor is soon engaged in a variety of riveting ethical debates with Davros. It’s unclear how much of the finished script was Nation’s and how much was due to extensive rewriting by script editor Robert Holmes, but Genesis of the Daleks was a huge improvement over Nation’s scripts for the Pertwee-period Dalek adventures. Holmes and Hinchcliffe rehabilitated the Daleks, lifting them to a new metaphorical level at a time in Britain when the pseudo-fascist National Front was on the rise. To present debates about eugenics, genetic engineering, racial purity and race survival to peak BBC1 audiences in the mid-1970s was brave, but it succeeded admirably with the public. Genesis of the Daleks has become one of the most clearly recalled and oft repeated (the two may not be unrelated) of all Doctor Who serials.
Although there are elements of the Frankenstein story (Davros creates the Daleks in his own image, only to have them turn on him as their programming refuses to allow them to recognise any other being as superior to them), the story tackles other deep-seated issues. Faced with the opportunity of destroying the Daleks outright – all he has to do is touch two wires together to detonate explosives in the Dalek embryo chamber – the Doctor hesitates. ‘Have I the right?’ he asks himself, fearing that destroying the Daleks in this way makes him just the same as them, a perpetrator of genocide (‘If I kill… wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.’) This is a distillation of the philosophical question of the ‘problem of evil’: how can the existence of God be reconciled with the existence of evil and suffering in the world? For a popular drama, primarily aimed at children and reaching over 13 million viewers, to tackle such a weighty topic was unusual.
In the news at almost the exact time of Genesis of the Daleks’ first broadcast, the tragedy of Cambodia and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime of the mid-1970s showed that such fascism wasn’t a thing of the past. Mass extermination of perceived enemies was a key Khmer Rouge tool, a policy echoed in the Daleks’ ultimate practices. The Doctor, however, sees a bigger picture: ‘Many enemies will become allies because of the Daleks.’ In the end, he adopts a liberal compromise, setting Dalek development back by a thousand years.
When Doctor Who returned to television in 2005, an early episode, entitled Dalek, saw the Daleks recreated once more as a threat to be feared by the Doctor and the audience. Showrunner Russell T Davies referred back to Genesis of the Daleks as the first move in the ‘Time War’, an off-screen conflict primarily between the Time Lords and the Daleks that forms the back-story to the new series. This retrospective continuity (known in fan circles as ‘retcon’, see chapter six), makes Genesis of the Daleks an even more important story to the series’ narrative history.
The season concluded with Revenge of the Cybermen, another returning old monster with a script written by their co-creator Gerry Davis (heavily reworked by script editor Holmes). This, however, lacked the dramatic reinvention accorded the Daleks, simply presenting the Cybermen as an almost generic robotic threat, attempting to wipe out Voga, a planet rich in gold content, as gold is deadly to the Cybermen. In a Letts-inspired, cost-cutting exercise, Revenge of the Cybermen was filmed immediately after, and on the same space-station sets as The Ark in Space, with the narrative set on the same station at a different
point in time. This was a cleverly economical use of resources, one not often repeated (but used by the new series producers, both on the 2005 series, with the space-station setting of The Long Game and Bad Wolf, and in the 2006 series, again in episodes featuring the Cybermen, where mid-season two-parter The Age of Steel/Rise of the Cybermen was shot back-to-back with season finale Army of Ghosts/Doomsday).
This first season overseen by Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes provided clear signposts of the direction the show would be taking. Although much of the material and approach had, of necessity, been inherited, the new team had put enough of their individual stamp on Doctor Who to make it distinct from the preceding Jon Pertwee period. The Ark in Space was a clear marker of the gothic direction in which Hinchcliffe and Holmes would take the show, while Genesis of the Daleks showed how their ‘serious’ approach to the drama, and the themes it could contain, would pay off in terms of audience popularity. The average audience for the season was 11.5 million, a definite step forward from the first five years of the 1970s.
It was with the following season, the show’s thirteenth, that Hinchcliffe and Holmes’ modus operandi became clear: literary pastiche wrapped in B-movie homage. This was a new spin on the Doctor Who formula and gave fresh life to a show that was heading towards a decade and a half on air. ‘We were led sometimes to revisit some of the motifs that had worked in the past [in literature], but we wanted to reinterpret them through the format of Doctor Who,’ explained Hinchcliffe.
The season 13 opener had been intended to close-out the previous season, but was held over as the debut of the series was moved to August from its traditional New Year slot. Terror of the Zygons saw the final appearance of the true UNIT ‘family’, with both the Brigadier and Harry Sullivan making their final appearances as regulars (Harry briefly returns, after a fashion, in the mid-season The Android Invasion). The ‘Doctor-travelling-with-single-female-companion’ model, as used by Letts, returns here, cementing Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith as one of the series’ most fondly remembered companions (and the only one to make multiple comebacks outside of anniversary celebration stories).
With its Scottish setting and guest appearance by the Loch Ness monster (a rather poorly realised puppet standing in for a supposedly remote-controlled alien robot), Terror of the Zygons relates directly to the 1970s outbreak of Nessie monster sightings, a perennial happening since the first twentieth-century sighting in 1933. Although oil rigs feature in the opening of the story, the then-ongoing nationalist political battles over ‘Scotland’s oil’ only feature in passing in early dialogue. Holmes and Hinchcliffe were inspired by loss-of-identity Hollywood B-movies from the 1950s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). The invading Zygons (giant, orange, embryo-like creatures who made a huge visual impact, but have yet to recur onscreen) are shape-shifters, able to impersonate anyone. Relocating this body-snatching theme to the Scottish Highlands allowed writer Robert Banks Stewart to ally the theme to Scottish myths and legends like that of the Selkie (supernatural creatures able to transform from seals to humans).
There was another Scottish connection in the second story of the season. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the 1956 film Forbidden Planet (by way of Shakespeare’s The Tempest) provided the literary and pop-culture inspirations for Planet of Evil. Writer Louis Marks (who’d previously scripted environmental-thriller story Planet of Giants in 1964) adapted Professor Jim Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (that sees the Earth as a self-regulating organic system) to create a planet that is fundamentally evil. However, this intention is lost in the realisation of the story, which focuses more on Professor Sorenson’s split personality and the were-wolf-horror aspects of the plot than on any abstract notion. An expedition to the planet Zeta Minor finds a mysterious black pool: a gateway to an anti-matter universe. Attempting to harness the power of the anti-matter (a critique of the damage done by mineral exploitation to Earth), the expedition members are either killed or transformed. The monsters, supposedly protecting the planet from the invaders, are invisible and are only seen when struck by weapons fire. The realisation of the creature is like that in Forbidden Planet, while the Shakespearean connection comes from The Tempest.
The literary source in the case of Pyramids of Mars was Bram Stoker’s 1903 novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars – about an archaeologist’s attempt to revive an ancient mummy – mixed with a heavy dose of Von Daniken. Just as relevant, and perhaps fresh in the audience’s mind, was the 1972 UK ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’ exhibition that revived memories of the ‘cursed’ Howard Carter expedition of 1922. Over 1.5 million people visited the British Museum and the display of artefacts was a cultural sensation in the press. In addition, Robert Holmes (who scripted this serial under a pseudonym) was a fan of Hammer movies from 20 years previously (and would have been aware of the Universal mummy movies of the 1930s featuring Boris Karloff). ‘Bob liked to rework some of the old themes of Sax Rohmer [Fu Manchu]-type stuff and some of the more gothic pool of material that provided action-adventure stuff,’ admitted Hinchcliffe.
Pyramids of Mars drew on the myths of the Egyptian gods and provided a scientific-seeming overlay to make the whole thing science fiction, a regular gambit during the Hinchcliffe period. Set in 1911, the story sees trapped alien God Sutekh manipulate (from his prison on Mars) Egyptologist Marcus Scarman. He instructs Scarman to construct a missile (with his robotic, mummy-like helpers) that can destroy the beacon on Mars that his fellow Osirans used to entrap him centuries ago. The setting allowed the BBC design teams to excel once again with the period-drama trappings of the locations, while the actual pyramid is a rather bland corridors-and-puzzles setup, as last seen in Death to the Daleks.
Hinchcliffe said of Pyramids of Mars: ‘It’s a historical show, but imaginative in the way that it combines the science-fictional element with the historical situation. There’s some very nice characterisation and some very nice acting, and a bit of humour in it. It did seem to combine everything that Bob and I were trying to do. It’s a typical ‘good one’ from us. I think [our stories have] got the qualities of a costume drama because people are very good at doing that at the BBC, but I think the stories were very different. We weren’t trying to be educational in any way!’
Despite an atmospheric opening set in a seemingly deserted English village, Terry Nation’s script for the next story, The Android Invasion, is a muddled affair that reverts to standard Earth invasion and body snatching doubles before the end. The initial set-up is intriguing, however, even if its main cultural source appears to be Nation’s own post-apocalypse series, Survivors (1975–77). The ‘duplicate village’ idea was one from spy fiction (or real-life myths about foreign spies), where they were used for training purposes to familiarise agents with environments they’d be invading. The same training function is served by the village the Doctor and Sarah land in. The android part of the invasion came from popular 1970s movies like Westworld (1973) and The Stepford Wives (1975, based on the 1972 novel), which director Barry Letts directly references visually more than once. Notable is the cliff-hanger to episode two in which the duplicate Sarah’s face falls off, revealing her robotic innards. It’s a minor, confused tale that serves simply as a breather before the gothic double bill that closed out the thirteenth season of Doctor Who.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is the most obvious gothic literary source for The Brain of Morbius, in which the brain of an executed Time Lord war criminal (and their former leader) is being prepared by mad scientist Solon (Philip Madoc, an actor who’d appeared in several guest roles over the years) for transplant into a body constructed from the parts of various alien species. A second strong influence is HG Wells’ novel The Island of Dr Moreau, which deals with cross-species pollination, an underlying theme in The Brain of Morbius (some of Solon’s dialogue even appears to be quoting from Wells’ book). Also present on the planet Karn, alo
ng with Solon and the remains of Morbius, are an un-ageing, mysterious Sisterhood who are the guardians of the ‘sacred flame’ that produces a life-giving elixir which aids Time Lord regeneration. They have kept an eye on Solon’s activities (while being unaware that Morbius has survived). The Sisterhood appears to have been inspired by Victorian adventure novelist H Rider-Haggard’s She (the 1965 film version would have been familiar to Holmes, who again contributed the bulk of the writing, reworking a script by Terrance Dicks). Hinchcliffe admitted that the Hammer movies ‘influenced Bob a little, but they never influenced me’, claiming Rider-Haggard or John Buchan were more his style. ‘Both Bob and myself were probably in that tradition.’
As so often with Doctor Who, the ideas and the writing are let down by the realisation. The ‘castle’ and ‘laboratory’ interiors are well done (Solon has adapted an old fuel refinery), and the lair of the Sisterhood of Karn features some great set decoration, but the exterior scenes take place on a planetary surface constructed in the studio. The cliffs over which the characters clamber on their journeys between locations sound exactly like wooden flats painted to look like rock. ‘The big challenge was that we didn’t have any post-production,’ admitted Hinchcliffe, explaining why the visuals of the show sometimes didn’t match up to the ambition of the scripts. ‘Everything had to be completed in the studio or during the bit of filming that you had. When you were being very ambitious with some of the effects, you were never quite sure whether they were going to work out, and neither were the special-effects guys! They were limited by time and money. You can’t say they were no good: most of them were excellent. But even the really good stories have some effects that worked well and others that didn’t. It’s the time element.’
Timeless Adventures Page 13