Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (55 page)

But for all that The Evil of the Daleks is chiefly remembered for the Dalek civil war at its climax, it stands out because it makes so many changes to the main characters. This is the most complex examination of the second Doctor that we’ve seen yet – although he’s been the main source of whimsy in this story, he’s been truly shady at times, and displayed moments of unstinting pragmatism. His trust is again called into question in the final episode, as he talks of sacrificing everyone’s lives for the sake of a greater good. It’s a very multifaceted characterisation that only the finest of actors could pull off; needless to say, Troughton does.

And what of Jamie? You rightfully mentioned, Rob, how this phase of the show has been patronising towards people from the past – but now Jamie isn’t from the past.
That
Jamie – the Jamie who pointed, awestruck, at flying beasties in The Faceless Ones – seems to have left with Ben and Polly. He’s become our eyes and ears, our moral yardstick, and to retain that empathy, he can no longer be surprised by the likes of toasters, or to start worshipping glitter balls. The new companion admittedly gets short shrift in all of this – Victoria’s main character change is that she’s now an orphan, although even this is more moving (with Bailey giving a terrific performance in Waterfield’s final moments, as he says that the Doctor’s life was “a good life to save”) and realistically rendered than Dodo turning up and just
saying
that she was an orphan. Nonetheless, this adventure really
is
as seminal as everyone says, with the second Doctor and Jamie undergoing a sea-change, and looking miles away from their first appearance together in The Highlanders.

The Evil of the Daleks might be a couple of episodes too long in the middle, but that’s already a distant memory, as the final two parts have been steeped in action, horror, high stakes and high drama. Despite all its flaws, and despite some moments of pure fancy and indulgence, those involved – from David Whitaker to Derek Martinus to Patrick Troughton to the guest cast and everyone around them – helped to make something truly special.

That’s alchemy.

The Tomb of the Cybermen episode one

R:
This is all rather like one of those public information videos they used to show kids at school in the seventies, isn’t it? Don’t Play on the Railways, Don’t Play Near Electricity Pylons, Don’t Play in the Long-Buried Tombs of Alien Monsters. In the first episode alone, the hapless gang of archaeologists get themselves shot (don’t muck about with weapons testing machines!), electrocuted (don’t put your bare hands on high voltage doors!), and trapped within revitalising machines (erm... don’t get trapped within... um, machines... yes). Never before in the history of Doctor Who has such a group of people been assembled to look so much like cannon fodder.

And it’s great fun, and beautifully tense, watching them get picked off. It has a similar feel to The Power of the Daleks – we as an audience know that the characters are treating these aliens in far too cavalier a fashion, and that their complacency will be an end to them. The beauty of Tomb is that a lot of the suspense comes from just waiting to see whether the Cybermen will
ever
emerge, or whether just the remnants of their technology alone will be enough to kill everyone. And it’s helped enormously by Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, never more irresponsible than here; at one moment he’s frightened by the implications of the tomb and the dangers of the expedition, but he’s nonetheless unable to resist displaying his own cleverness, showing everyone the right levers to pull and the right formulae to follow to get themselves into ever greater jeopardy. It’d be rather like, on one of those public information videos, seeing the policeman whose job it is to warn kids to stay off the train tracks trying to entice them onto the live rail to prove his point.

It’s a Cyberman story, of course, so that means that Kit Pedler’s got a bunch of scientists of all different nationalities and backgrounds for us. But this time, we don’t get an opera singing Italian or a mad Dane – the acting is variable, and so are some of the accents, but there’s no special attention drawn to the fact that the archeological crew are from all over Earth; it’s simply a good, unforced representation of a multicultural team. (Barring the fact that there’s only one black man, of course, whose job is to be strong, simple, and virtually mute. It’s Kemel from The Evil of the Daleks all over again.)

And I love the TARDIS scene – which really feels like a prologue, with the titles withheld for
minutes
before the action proper starts on Telos. It’s probably an accident that it’s filmed somewhere with an echo, but it suddenly suggests the TARDIS as somewhere weird and cavernous. As a means of introducing the Doctor’s time machine to Victoria, it’s rather lovely. And bearing in mind it’s the first time we’ve seen inside the Ship since The Moonbase of all things, it may well be an introduction to a lot of the kids at home.

T:
I had hoped that K would be my companion on this part of the quest – so far, we’ve managed, somehow, to be apart for the stories that exist and together for the telesnap marathons. I couldn’t justify encouraging her to watch lots of flat pictures and indistinct noise, so apart from some snatched moments of The Aztecs (and I think, a flash or two of Galaxy Four), she’s not been about. Heck, I even tried to get the kids involved in watching The Tenth Planet – they were polite but hardly excited, and didn’t want to see more the next day. So I’ve tended to watch my episodes on my laptop as I’ve travelled by train from gig to gig, or late at night when everyone’s asleep.

But... The Tomb of the Cybermen is the earliest complete Pat Troughton story, and sadly it’s the last complete story we’ll get to experience for some time. And so, while fully acknowledging that I’ve wanted to show K a bit of Troughton, I’m also hoping that she’ll give me a fresh perspective on a story that I think I may be unnecessarily prejudiced against. To be honest, even
before
The Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in the early 90s, I thought it was terribly overrated. I do like Troughton, and I like base-under-siege stories as a whole, but I think Tomb is amongst the weakest of them. But, am I just trying to be cool by knocking a sacred cow? Will I actually be pleasantly surprised this time? Who knows, but the next couple of days might be difficult...

What strikes me initially is that approximately the first five minutes of this episode (barring the first, brief shot of the TARDIS exterior) are on film. It’s a clever use of resources to begin the season on a glossy, expensive-looking note, even though it seems quite the luxury to squander some of this allocation on an exposition scene in the TARDIS. Still, director Morris Barry is clearly in his element – the scenes look absolutely first class, and the panning shots and high and low angles he uses on the “planet’s surface” transform the (not yet standard) quarry pit into something altogether more alien. The bit where the expedition party blows apart the rock covering the tomb is rather less successful – after the initial explosion, there’s a rumble that’s probably meant to denote a subsequent rock fall that reveals the tomb doors, but it’s confusing because everyone is looking disappointedly in one direction before Ted Rogers (one of Captain Hopper’s crewmen) points in a completely different one. It’s odd, and since K didn’t quite get what was going on either, I don’t think I’m just being thick.

Special mention must go to crewman Rogers. I know that’s the character’s name and not the actor’s name – but it amuses me that he’s called Ted Rogers! (Non-UK readers will probably need to be told that “Ted Rogers” was also the name of a fast-talking comedian who hosted the game show 3-2-1. It’s for this reason that I hope the electrocuted crewman was called Lennie Bennett, after the host of Punchlines and Lucky Ladders.) Alas, in what’s a fairly poor cast,
our
Ted Rogers manages to be the worst. Never has the line, “You’d better listen to him!”, been issued with such a lack of menace.

Anyway, anyway – I must accentuate the positive. This
looks
magnificent. The design is very impressive (setting aside the nursery switches that populate control panels), and the scenes in the weapons-testing room are enlivened by having the lights turned down, making everything seem eerie in the extreme. I really, really like the soundscape as well – this kind of story works so well when augmented by offbeat, alien sounds rather than just music. Horror has always frightened me more than sci-fi, but this cleverly uses the best in both genres, and so has the potential to be thrilling as well as scary. And there are some gruesome little touches, such as the sparks that char patterns into the electrified tomb doors, and the black burn-mark make-up applied to Ray Grover’s scorched crewman.

But it’s (apologies to anyone who’s getting tired of me talking about him) Patrick Troughton who makes the biggest impression on both of K and me. K is completely knocked sideways by his performance, and thinks he possesses a quick mind, which she regards as an essential element of the Doctor. She also spots how paternal he is, noting that the proactive nature of the new-series companions would undermine the authority that a Doctor like Troughton possesses. She also (for a Doctor we famously champion for his childlike vulnerability) feels completely safe with him – as if his innate power and wit is reassuring in spite of his shabby demeanour. She also laughed at the bit where the Doctor mistakenly takes Jamie’s hand and they comically pull away, which made me very happy.

By the way, and I have a sneaking suspicion – just an impression, mind you – that the shifty, non-Caucasian members of the crew might be the bad guys. What do you think?

March 28th

The Tomb of the Cybermen episode two

R:
The sequence where the Cybermen are resurrected is justly famous; there’s something grotesque about that moment when you can first see them inside their thawing tombs, beginning to stir, then breaking through their plastic coverings clumsily like sun-drunk bees. The whole episode, of course, is a build-up to this moment – it’s a slow burn exercise in tension until the Cybermen make their inevitable appearance. And so it’s a relief that director Morris Barry gives it a real sense of occasion. Never before in Doctor Who has something so beautiful and something so eerie been as well combined – as the familiar music of Space Adventure starts, and the Cybermen dwarf the frightened archaeologists... their Controller is awakened, and he dwarfs
them.
“You belong to us,” he says. “You shall be like us.” And you believe him.

Eric Klieg, frankly, isn’t much of a villain. He can’t even break into the tombs and set his masterplan into operation without the Doctor secretly giving him a helping hand, but I do love the pride that he takes in The Brotherhood of Logicians – it sounds like the sort of university club that all the nerd students belong to. And so it’s so refreshing that when he starts on the predictable speech to the Cyber-Controller that he’s their equal ally, he’s interrupted in mid-sentence and forced to his knees. It takes the Daleks
episodes
of plot to get to this point in their stories, before their Mavic Chens and Theodore Maxtibles realised that you can’t bargain with the devil. The Cyber-Controller might as well be saying, “We don’t want to belong to your club. Come and join ours.”

T:
I have never quite bought the assertion that Troughton was a dark, manipulative Doctor. I’d always thought he had consummate skill in handling both drama and comedy, which – when combined with a clever, charming and original characterisation – made him the perfect Doctor. However, upon witnessing this directly after his behaviour in The Evil of the Daleks, I can see what people mean. There’s the way he lurks about in the weapons room, and later manipulates the controls to aid the lead villain, Klieg – it’s as if he can’t stop himself from joining in the adventure, even if it means playing along with the baddies, and even if people will almost certainly get killed in the inevitable crossfire. It’s as if he’s
compelled
to be clever, even if it’s not necessarily the
wisest
option. He is, to use his own words, an infernal meddler. All right, he tries to justify this by claiming he needed to see what Klieg was up to – well, if you hadn’t
helped him
in the first place, Doctor, his intentions wouldn’t have mattered, because he would’ve been stuck outside the Cybermen’s lair!

It’s much to this story’s credit, though, that the Cybermen seem so imposing. As you say, Rob, they look impressive and powerful during their awakening scene (although I’m not sure that we really needed the squeaky clingfilm sound effect), and they’re greatly aided by Space Adventure, that brilliant piece of stock music that is now their theme. Once they’re up and about, the director cleverly has them surround Professor Parry, which emphases their height and numbers. K was especially intrigued by the Cybermen’s voices, and was visibly startled when the Cyber-Controller piped up. And yes, that’s a point... isn’t it interesting that a mere two episodes after we met the Dalek Emperor, we now get a bulbous-headed Cyber-Controller? It’s as if the production team are trying to up the odds; whereas the return of the Daleks or the Cybermen used to be enough in itself, we now need the special/different-looking/Very Important Cyberman or Dalek. Perhaps it’s part and parcel of an attempt to make the Cybermen as iconic as the Daleks, now that (we know with hindsight) the Cybermen are going to inherit the mantle of Top Doctor Who Monster for the next couple of years.

But I fear there’s no escaping it – both K and I feel that while this entire episode is fast-paced and action-packed, it’s also fairly ordinary. It’s as if writer Gerry Davis is trying to emulate Star Trek, po-faced clunkiness and all. And can anything other than a love for Americana explain the extraordinary Captain Hopper and his quite bizarre vocabulary? He says someone has “balled up” the ship – sorry, is that a swear word? I do, at least, like his line about wanting to leave Telos with his “skin still fitting tight all over” – it’s lovely, as is Troughton’s gentle, childlike interaction with this no-nonsense military guy.

I would be totally remiss without noting how Katherine likes Deborah Watling’s pointy bra. See, I
knew
that having a female perspective would unearth some gems.

The Tomb of the Cybermen episode three

R:
The camera loves Deborah Watling. The scene in which she and the Doctor take stock of her family memories is beautifully played by both – and the way that Watling’s face looks straight out of the screen, wide eyed and vulnerable and speaking of how she misses her father, is heartbreaking. If Troughton’s Doctor has never seemed as irresponsible in earlier episodes of the story, here he is at his tenderest, gently chiding Victoria for letting him sleep because of his great age, and giving a surprising insight into the way that he copes with the absence of his never-discussed family. Amidst the scenes of tension and running about, it’s a truly affecting piece of humanity.

Not that the running around bits don’t work well; the first half of the episode in particular has a terrific claustrophobia to it, as the archaeological team are trapped within the tombs with the Cybermen. This is the first story to make explicit the threat that was only implied in The Tenth Planet – that these monsters won’t give the easy luxury of death, but want instead to convert us all into plastic parodies of humanity. When they explain how the Doctor and friends will be a new generation of Cybermen, Jamie protests that they’re not like them; the Controller’s overemphatic response – “You... will... be...” – is so dispassionate and so certain, it’s the most frightening the Cybermen have ever been. Klieg is utterly out of his league here; he cheers up when the Cybermen agree to listen to his proposals as if he’s got a schoolboy crush on them, and the way the Controller dips his voice whilst speaking to him is amusingly patronising. The Cybermats, it must be said, are rather less effective – you can see what the story’s aiming for in one shot, when one of them appears from nowhere at such great speed that it looks like a jump cut – but they do look a bit cheap. They’re still better designed than any Cybermats we see later in the series though, working best in close-up, when their eyes roll and bulge in a faintly disturbing way.