F is for... Fenner

Fenner was the second-in-command on the methane refinery which had been set up on the third moon of Delta Magna - the Earth colony world which was his home. He had a dislike for the green-skinned native Delta Magnans who had been displaced to this satellite centuries before. When his colleague Dugeen discovered that a spacecraft had landed in the nearby swamps, Fenner and the refinery boss Thawn went out hunting for its occupant, fearing that it might be the notorious gun-runner Rhom-Dutt. They captured instead the Doctor, who had come here in search of the Fifth Segment of the Key to Time. Though he hated the "Swampies", he drew the line at exterminating them, as Thawn wished to do. After the refinery's activities woke up the slumbering giant squid Kroll, all of Fenner's crew mates were killed - Dugeen by Thawn. and Thawn himself by the Swampies - leaving him the sole survivor. The destruction of Kroll meant that the refinery programme would no longer be viable, so he was out of a job. The Doctor recommended that he get to know the natives whilst he waited for a rescue ship to arrive from Delta Magna.

Played by: Philip Madoc. Appearances: The Power of Kroll (1978 / 9).

• Final appearance by Madoc in the series, whose first contact with the programme was through the second of the Peter Cushing Dalek movies, where he played the black marketeer Brockley. He first appeared in the TV programme as Eelek in The Krotons. This was followed quickly by his role as The War Lord in The War Games. He returned to the programme as Mehendri Solon in The Brain of Morbius - his favourite role in the show. 
• He was a late replacement for the part of Fenner. Due to a misunderstanding, he was unhappy with the part as he believed he had been offered the more substantial role of Thawn.

F is for... Fenn-Cooper

Redvers Fenn-Cooper was a well known explorer and big game hunter, who traveled extensively in Africa. One day he had come upon a spaceship belonging to the alien entity known as Light. The experience had driven him temporarily insane. The ship had been carrying out a survey of all lifeforms in the universe. Two alien creatures were employed to carry out the survey - one that would go out and interact with the environment and evolve to mimic the dominant lifeform, whilst the other would remain aboard the ship unchanged to act as a control specimen. The survey unit had the spaceship transported to Gabriel Chase, a house in Victorian Perivale, where he took over the household of a Mr Pritchard. He assumed the persona of the gentleman Josiah Samuel Smith. Seeking to elevate himself further, he hatched a plan to assassinate Queen Victoria and take over the British Empire. Fenn-Cooper had an invite to Buckingham Palace, and Smith had brainwashed him into wanting to kill the monarch. The control specimen managed to escape, and rapidly evolved into a young woman. Fenn-Cooper found himself falling in love with her, and decided to take her to the Palace instead of Smith. Once Smith had been overpowered, and Light destroyed, Fenn-Cooper decided to explore the cosmos with Control in Light's spaceship.

Played by: Michael Cochrane. Appearances: Ghost Light (1989).

• Cochrane had earlier played Lord Cranleigh in 1982's Black Orchid. His older brother Martin appeared in The Caves of Androzani, as General Chellak.

Fe is for... Fendahl

The Fendahl originated some 12 million years ago on the fifth planet of Earth's solar system. It was a gestalt creature which consisted of a humanoid core, with twelve huge snakelike feeding parts, known as Fendhaleen. It came into being when evolution took a wrong turn - leading to a creature which lived on death - consuming even its own kind. Fearing it might one day consume all living things in the universe, the Time Lords intervened and had the planet destroyed, imprisoning its remains in a time loop. However, the Fendahl core had managed to escape. It moved to Mars where it wiped out emerging life there, and then passed on to Earth. Here, it was caught up in a massive volcanic eruption in central Africa, and was apparently destroyed.

However, the skull was discovered by an expedition led by Adam Colby, and financed by the industrialist Professor Fendleman. It was brought to England, to Fendleman's home on the outskirts of the village of Fetchborough. There was a rift in space / time in the area, which the professor was studying using a time scanner. The skull had a pentagram on its crown, which acted as a form of neural relay. The Fendahl had been influencing the human race over the centuries, in order to provide a means for its resurrection. Fendleman was part of this scheme, as was one of his scientists - Thea Ransome. She also had a pentagram on her skull, and had been selected to act as the creature's new host core. Another of Fendleman's team - Max Stael - was secretly leading a black magic coven in the area, and they intended to help resurrect the Fendahl.

One of the adult Fendahleen was killed when hit with shotgun cartridges filled with rock salt. When Thea transformed into the Fendahl core - appearing as a beautiful golden being - Stael killed Fendleman. He then took his own life rather than be turned into a Fendahleen. This weakened the creature, as it needed all thirteen components to attain full strength. The Doctor was able to steal the skull, then rig the professor's equipment to create an implosion - destroying the house, the core the Fendahleen within. The Doctor then deposited the skull into the middle of a supernova, destroying it utterly.

Played by: Wanda Ventham (Thea Ransome / Fendahl Core). Appearances: Image of the Fendahl (1977).

• Second of three appearances in the programme for Benedict Cumberpatch's mum. She had first appeared in The Faceless Ones ten years previously, and would return to the programme for Time and the Rani.

F is for... Fedorin

The Deputy Controller of the Central European Zone, Fedorin was blackmailed into killing his boss - Alexander Denes. The would-be world dictator Salamander was determined to take over the World Zones Authority, and was doing so by eliminating his political opponents. One of these was Denes, who was known to be an ally of his rival Giles Kent. Salamander first had Denes' authority undermined when he arranged for a volcanic eruption to occur in his region - blaming him for failing to heed his warnings and therefore of being responsible for the great loss of life. Fedorin was then told that Salamander had incriminating evidence about him, which would be released if he did not murder Denes. He was given a phial of poison to carry out this act. However, Fedorin lost his nerve and informed Salamander that he could not go through with it. Salamander then poisoned Fedorin's drink, claiming that he had committed suicide.

Played by: David Nettheim. Appearances: The Enemy of the World (1967 / 8).

Inspirations - Frontier In Space

When it came to working out how best to celebrate Doctor Who's 10th Anniversary, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks looked to the programme's past. One of the things they considered was the fact that there had been a mammoth 12 part story during the William Hartnell era - The Daleks' Master Plan.
What if they were to embark on an epic of similar scale for Season 10? Both men knew the director of that earlier story - Douglas Camfield - and so they had a word with him about how he had coped. He told them to run a mile from another 12 parter. It had been extremely hard work - especially when the principal writer had produced very little in the way of a workable script. Camfield and then story editor Donald Tosh had had to virtually write the episodes not being written by Dennis Spooner themselves. The story simply hadn't sustained itself over the 12 weeks. Of course, Camfield had the additional problem of the way the programme was made back in the mid 1960's, where recording had to be done "as live", and with limited VFX available. The series could now utilise CSO, and episodes could be filmed out of order. (This story was recorded before The Three Doctors, though it was the third story broadcast). There was also the major matter of the smaller season.
Taking Camfield's advice on board, Letts and Dicks decided on the next best thing. Two 6 part stories that could have a linking element - so they would be the equivalent of a 12 parter.
The first half would feature the Master, who would be involved in some suitably grandiose scheme. It would transpire that he was really working for the Daleks, and this would lead into a Dalek story proper.

Following their discussions with Terry Nation regarding his giving permission for the Daleks to be added to what would become Day of the Daleks, the writer decided that it might be fun to revisit his creations for himself. His efforts to spin them off into their own show were now well and truly buried, and they didn't make him any money if not in use on Doctor Who - always a consideration for Nation. He agreed to write a new Dalek story himself for the tenth season, with an option to have first refusal on any other one each year thereafter.
The writer chosen to script the first half of this double story was Malcolm Hulke -  a safe pair of hands and very good friend (and one-time landlord) of Dicks. Not only would he provide an exciting set of episodes, it was known that he could inject some social comment into the proceedings.
His last outing had been Colony In Space, which had a lot to say about pollution, self-sustaining farming communities (good) and big industrial corporations (evil).
For the Master's scheme, they looked back to that earlier Dalek story. Then, they had been intent on waging war against whole galaxies. Hulke took this notion and then took a look at current world events. This was 1972, and the Cold War was in full swing. What if some third party were to try to heat it up?

This wasn't a new idea by any means. You just have to take a look at the James Bond movies to see that. An obvious example is You Only Live Twice, where Blofeld attempts to stoke a war between the USA and USSR by sabotaging their respective space programmes. His spaceship is hijacking their craft, disguised as the opposite side's on each occasion. SPECTRE are being employed, or are partnering, China in this. From Russia With Love features a SPECTRE assassin (Red Grant) who carries out a number of killings and places the blame for each on either the western security forces or the eastern ones.
So, the Master is Blofeld, the Daleks are the Chinese, Earth is the USA, and the Draconians are the Russians. That makes the Doctor James Bond, and not for the first time. He's the independent agent who is able to look at events from an outside perspective, and work out what is really going on.
Hulke throws in some additional elements, such as the internal politics of the Earth Empire. We have a Peace Party, whose members are sent to life-long imprisonment on the Moon without fair trial. The President does not hold absolute power. She has a very vocal opponent who is out to unseat her - so there is still some sort of democratic process. However, her chief opponent is the one who she has to work with most closely - the representative of the Military, General Williams. You could probably guess from what we see on screen that she and he have some sort of a history. The novelisation delves into this a little deeper. They were romantically involved but political opponents. He was given his role after a bitterly fought election, as a way of appeasing both sides. This would explain why she works alongside someone who seems to go against her every decision. She wouldn't have given him the job willingly.

On the opposite side of the Milky Way we have the Draconians. They are clearly based on Shogunate Japan. They are a proud warrior race, led by an Emperor - though he rules only through the support of other powerful families. Other warlords can depose him and install their own dynasty if he shows weakness. The Cold War evolved out of the ashes of World War II, but in Frontier In Space we have a situation where the two sides have actually gone to war against each other in recent memory. The USA and USSR preferred to fight each other by proxy - bankrolling and supporting opposing sides in a number of regional conflicts.
Fans of Babylon 5 will be very familiar with the lead up to that earlier war. One suspects that J Michael Straczynski was paying close attention to this story when it aired on PBS in New Jersey. The whole thing began as a misunderstanding. The Earth ship on its way to establish contact with the Draconians had its communications disabled due to an ion storm. The Draconian ship was a battle cruiser, approaching with its gun ports open. General Williams was in command of the Earth vessel, and he assumed they were going to be attacked - so launched a preemptive strike. The Draconians had used a battle cruiser simply because this is how a noble of the court would travel, and open gun ports were a sign of respect. Replace Draconians with Minbari, and you can see how they match.
Doctor Who doesn't just take inspiration from other sources. Such a long-running show provides inspiration for others as well.

That the Daleks might be lurking somewhere in the background might have been guessed at by the inclusion of the Ogrons. They are being employed by the Master to carry out pirate raids on ships belonging to both Earth and Draconia. Inspired by his own personal hypnotic prowess, he has devised a machine which stimulates the fear centres of the brain - making people see that which they fear most. Strangely, this makes Jo see a spaceship she has never seen before turn into another spaceship, which she hasn't seen before either. It is also fortunate that the Earthmen and the Draconians fear each other so much, otherwise the spaceship crews might be reporting attacks by spiders, snakes, wide open spaces or clowns, to name just a few of the most common phobias.
Later, the Master tries his box of tricks on Jo, and she is able to withstand it - but not before she sees him turn into some of the aliens she has met recently (a Sea Devil, a Mutt and a Drashig). This is an element of the story arc / character development which Letts and Dicks succeed in threading through the entire Pertwee era. Jo was hypnotised by the Master on her very first meeting with him, and here she is standing up to him in what will prove to be their final encounter.
As it was, the Ogrons were a late replacement for the Cybermen. If you have a copy of Steve Cambden's book The Doctor's Affect, turn to Chapter 24 and you will see a VFX sketch which shows a Cyberman burning through a bulkhead door. This was drawn up for this story. The reason that they did not appear in the end was down to the costumes being found to be in a dreadful state in storage, and not the old insistence by Terry Nation that they should never appear in the same story as his Daleks.

Talking of VFX, the Ogron eating monster was so bad that director Paul Bernard kept its appearance to an absolute minimum - a few brief glimpses on location. Removing it from the studio session would add to the appalling mess which is the conclusion to this story. First of all, the Draconian Prince and General Williams rapidly become best friends when the truth about the start of the last war is revealed. The Prince was on Earth for ages prior to this, but they never mentioned it then? One minute the Doctor is a dangerous spy and the next everyone is listening to him and believing his every word. The episode ending is then totally botched by Bernard. The director of the following story - David Maloney - went back and tried to salvage it, but it is still confused and unsatisfying. The Doctor is supposed to have made himself look like the Dalek leader, using the Master's hypnotic device, which causes the Ogrons to run off. The Doctor and Master have a scuffle, in which the Doctor is wounded. Jo takes him into the TARDIS. On screen, we don't see the Doctor turn into the Dalek, so the Ogrons seem to panic and run away for no real reason. There is a slight scuffle between the Doctor and the Master, but the latter then simply vanishes.
This is particularly annoying as, with hindsight, we know that this was to be Roger Delgado's final performance as the Master. He had already agreed to be killed off in the series as it was preventing him getting other work - people assuming he was working on the show full time rather than just the occasional story. As it was, Delgado went off to Turkey to make a movie and was killed in a car crash.
The link to the next half of the story is the Doctor asking the Time Lords for help in following the Daleks to their base...
Next time: Now That's What I Call Daleks! Or Terry's Old Gold...

Exit Wounds - Torchwood 2.13

In which Captain John Hart is back - and he has brought Jack's long lost brother Gray with him. Tosh detects numerous spikes of Rift activity around the city, so the team splits up to investigate. She and Ianto go to the central telephone exchange, and are confronted by a group of men dressed in black monk-like cowls. They shoot them dead. At the city's hospital, meanwhile, Owen encounters a savage alien creature which seems to eat anything and everything - which he identifies as a Hoix. He manages to sedate it. Gwen and Rhys go the police station where PC Andy informs them that they have come under attack by Weevils, which have killed all the senior officers. Gwen finds herself having to take charge of the situation, with Rhys being tasked with helping Andy. Jack has gone to the Hub, where he is attacked by Captain John, who shoots him dead in a hail of machine gun fire. When he comes back to life, Jack finds himself chained up and being subjected to electric shocks. John activates the Rift Manipulator, then contacts the team members and tells them to go up to the roofs of their respective buildings. He then transports Jack to the top of Cardiff Castle's tower.
They all witness a number of explosions going off all around the city, detonating at 15 key locations.

John then takes Jack back in time to the city as it was in the year 27 AD - open fields. Gray appears, but he is not John's captive. Jack tries to tell him how sorry he is for not saving him, but Gray holds his brother responsible for the years of torment he suffered. Now he is going to take his revenge. He reveals that John is enslaved to him through his vortex manipulator, which is grafted onto his arm. Jack is forced into a grave, which John must fill. John throws a pendant into the grave before he starts covering Jack with soil - telling Gray that it is simply a memento of their past relationship. Jack is doomed to an endless cycle of suffocation and resurrection. Once the grave is filled, Gray and John return to the 21st Century. The pendant is really a homing device, and in Edwardian times the Torchwood Three team of that era identify its signal and dig Jack up. He orders them to put him on ice in the morgue, to be reawakened on the day that Gray attacked the city.
As Gray unleashes hordes of Weevils on the city, Gwen manages to get to the Hub where she finds John is prepared to help her, Jack having deactivated Gray's control over him. He tells her of Jack's burial.

The Weevils prevent Tosh and Ianto getting to the nearby nuclear power station, as it is threatened with meltdown due to power failure. However, Owen can use his influence over the creatures to get there safely. When Ianto arrives at the Hub he and John are locked in a cell by Gray. Upstairs, Tosh contacts Owen and agrees to talk him through what he needs to do to restore power. Gray suddenly appears and shoots her. After taunting her, he hears a knocking sound and goes to investigate. Hiding her agony, Tosh tells a panicking Owen what he needs to do. He manages to restore the power and prevent the meltdown, but becomes trapped in the control room. Tosh informs him that it will flood with radiation which will destroy his body. As he rages against a final death, Tosh finally lets him know exactly how she feels about him. Owen is killed. Gray finds the knocking is coming from a morgue unit, and is shocked to see Jack emerge. Jack tells his brother that he forgives him, but Gray refuses to reciprocate. Jack then uses chloroform to knock him out, and releases Ianto and John. They all go up to the main area where they find the dying Tosh, who tells them of Owen's demise. They are unable to save her, and she also dies.
The next day, Gray is consigned to the morgue. Tidying away Tosh and Owen's things they activate a pre-recorded message from Tosh - one she had arranged to be triggered in the event of her death. She tells them that she hopes she did not die in vain, and that she loves Owen. Gwen is unsure if she can continue, but Jack insists that they can rebuild, but will never forget the colleagues they have just lost...

Exit Wounds was written by Chris Chibnall, and was first broadcast on 4th April, 2008. It closes the second series, and for a time was almost the last ever episode of the series as Russell T Davies intended to discontinue Torchwood. As it is, it will be the last episodic story for the series, as subsequent seasons will comprise single story arcs.
The episode sees the departure of regular characters Tosh and Owen, who are both killed off.
Davies was insistent that regular characters could never be killed on Doctor Who, as younger viewers invested so much faith in them, but the more adult format of Torchwood meant that here all bets were off.
Season 2 has had a slight story arc running through it, with Captain John appearing in the opening episode and referring to someone called Gray at the conclusion. The episode Adam then showed who this was, and what had happened to him. We also get to see a previous incarnation of Torchwood, as we had seen before in To The Last Man and in Fragments.
The main guest star is James Marsters, of Buffy and Angel fame, once again as Captain John. As the story deals very much with the fates of the regulars, the only other guest artist of substance is Lachlan Nieboer, who plays Gray. He has since appeared in the popular ITV drama Downton Abbey.
The doctor who tells Owen about the Hoix, Dr Connolly, is played by Golda Roshuevel, who had previously appeared as the same character in Dead Man Walking.

Overall, it is an excellent episode, with plenty of incident and a truly heart rending conclusion. Series 2 stands up much better than the first.
Things you might like to know:

• The Hoix had, of course, appeared once before - in the 2006 Doctor Who story Love & Monsters. It is named on screen for the first time here.
• Naoko Mori's previous appearance as Dr Sato in the Doctor Who episode Aliens of London is given an explanation here. Owen was supposed to have gone to London to investigate the "Space Pig", but he had a hangover and so Tosh took his place.
• Last time, when looking at Fragments, we were able to give an accurate count of the number of deaths Jack had experienced. Here, he is buried alive in 27 AD, and not dug up again until 1901, so the figure now is uncountable.
• Captain John dances along to the pop song I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper - claiming that it is his and Jack's song. This was released in 1978 on the back of Star Wars mania, performed by Sarah Brightman and her dance troupe Hot Gossip. It references Darth Vader, Flash Gordon and Starfleet Command and the Federation from Star Trek, as well as using musical cues from Close Encounters and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• We previously mentioned how there were two Jacks in Cardiff at the same time back in 1941 - the one who was resident there, and the one who traveled back from the 21st Century. A third might have been only a couple of hundred miles away in London, about to meet the Doctor and Rose for the first time. We now learn that there was a third in Cardiff 1941 the whole time - the one dug up in 1901 and frozen in the morgue.
• The question has to be asked - did Jack know about his future body being in the morgue at all? He has lived and worked in the Hub for over a century, and knows every inch of it. Did he never come across his body in all that time and ask how it came to be there?
• The next season will see the complete destruction of the Hub, so presumably the frozen Gray is killed in the explosion.

Blog update...

In case you're wondering, I'm just taking a short break at the moment. Next post should be on Tuesday 7th August, with the conclusion to Torchwood Series 2.