Episode 90: Horse of Destruction

NB: This episode no longer exists in the archives, nor is there a full set of telesnaps. Representative images are therefore used to illustrate it.

Synopsis:

Cassandra's warnings are ignored as the Trojan soldiers drag the huge wooden horse into the city...

With everyone's attention on the marvel, Vicki slips away to the dungeons and frees Steven from his cell. They mingle amongst the crowd in the city square. Cassandra notices her absence and sends one of her temple handmaidens - Katarina - to find her and watch what she does.

Spotting the girl following them, Steven urges Vicki to go and find Troilus and convince him to leave the city before it is too late.

Priam learns of Steven's escape, but refuses to heed Cassandra's demand that Vicki and the horse be burnt. The aged King still believes that 'Cressida' is responsible for their salvation from the Greeks.

Uncomfortable in the belly of the horse, the Doctor wants to leave, but Odysseus insists he keep silent and remain where he is.

Knowing that Troilus will not willingly leave Troy if under threat, Vicki tells him that Diomede is out on the plain, and he should go there and recapture him. She knows the young prince is still jealous of her friendship with Steven.

That night, the Greeks emerge from the horse.

On the plain, Troilus instead finds Achilles. The two men fight and the Trojan kills the Greek hero who had slain his brother, though he is himself badly wounded in the struggle.

Odysseus and his men open the gates and the Greek forces swarm into the city. As Troy burns, Vicki locates the Doctor. She orders Katarina to go and find Steven and bring him to the TARDIS, then informs the Doctor of her intention to stay here with Troilus.

In the palace, Odysseus kills Priam and Paris, and orders that Cassandra be taken to Agamemnon as a spoil of war.

Katarina finds Steven, but he has been wounded by a Trojan warrior. She helps him back to the TARDIS and she and the Doctor take him inside. The ship dematerialises just as Odysseus comes to claim it - leaving him wondering if the Doctor hadn't been Zeus after all.

Out on the plain, Vicki and Troilus are reunited. She is able to convince him that she could have left but stayed on to be with him as she loves no other. They see a force approaching and the young prince recognises them as his cousin Aeneas and his men. Troy is lost, but they can find a new home elsewhere.

In the TARDIS, Katarina believes herself to be on her way to the afterlife. She thinks of the Doctor as a god, with the ship his temple.

Steven is delirious, his wound infected. The Doctor desperately hopes that he can find help for him at their next destination...

Next episode: The Nightmare Begins

Data:

Written by: Donald Cotton

Recorded: Friday 8th October 1965 - Riverside Studio 1

First broadcast: 5:50pm, Saturday 7th November 1965

Ratings: 8.3 million / AI 52

Designer: John Wood

Director: Michael Leeston-Smith

Additional cast: Adrienne Hill (Katarina)

Critique:

Without doubt the silliest episode title in the history of the programme, but John Wiles and Donald Tosh thought it could have been worse. Cotton had wanted to call it "Doctor in the Horse" or "Is There a Doctor in the Horse?" - as in the call for medical assistance in a theatrical setting.

The title may be humorous, but the storyline takes a very dark turn after the comedy of the first three instalments. In this, it bears similarities with The Romans, which also had to have a darker conclusion despite moments of camp farce in earlier episodes. It's no coincidence that Cotton was the one to novelise Spooner's scripts.

There is room for a little humour this week - such as the Doctor's complaints within the horse, and his wish that he had had time to give it shock absorbers.

Cotton elects to depart from Homer's Iliad by having Troilus survive, and Achilles die at his hands. Homer has the opposite, as Achilles has to survive long enough to suffer the legendary arrow - fired by Paris - to his heel (the only part of his body unprotected after his mother had dipped him as a baby in the river Styx).

The most famous versions of the tale of Troilus and Cressida are the play by Shakespeare, and his source - the poem by Chaucer. The earliest versions of the story do not include the events of this story. They end just where Cotton begins, with the duel in which Hector is killed. They concentrate on the love triangle between Troilus, Cressida and Diomede. She actually favours the latter for the most part.  

Cressida is actually an amalgam of two female figures - both hostages of the Greeks. Criseyde has been taken by Agamemnon. Her father Calchas tries to claim her back but when rejected he prays to Apollo to smite the Greek army. He does this by inflicting a plague on them in the ninth year of the siege of Troy. Agamemnon is forced to return Criseyde to her father, but out of spite for Achilles takes his hostage - Briseis - as recompense. This leads to a schism between Agamemnon and Achilles - which is the point at which Homer starts the Iliad. The dramatic Cressida is a mixture of Criseyde and Briseis.

Cotton ends his version of the story with the appearance of Aeneas. This Trojan, nephew of Priam, is the central figure of Virgil's Aeneid. This tells of his journeying to find a new home for the displaced Trojans. Like Homer's Odyssey, the hero suffers many adventures before settling in Italy and founding the city of Rome.

Medieval legend also claimed that Aeneas founded London - Troynovant, or New Troy.

With Maureen O'Brien due to leave in this episode a new female companion was developed, as one featured in Terry Nation's forthcoming Dalek scripts. Rather than introduce them at the beginning of that story, which wasn't practical, it made sense to have them first feature here - making them of ancient origins. The series hadn't previously featured a historical regular, and it quickly became apparent why this might not be such a good idea. A character from the ancient past would have no conception of even the most basic scientific developments. Even a light bulb would need explaining to them.

A decision was then made to use them only as a bridging character, and to write them out again as quickly as possible.

The actor cast as Katarina was Adrienne Hill. She had auditioned for the role of Princess Joanna in The Crusade, and Douglas Camfield had remembered her for this part - so she was cast by him for use in his story, rather than by Leeston-Smith. Her first work on the series was Ealing filming with Camfield.

During the location filming at Frensham Ponds, both Cavan Kendall (Achilles) and James Lynn (Troilus) suffered injuries in their fight scenes. This led to a remount a couple of days later.

Some additional filming took place at Ealing on Friday 3rd September, of the Greek soldiers abseiling from the Wooden Horse.

It was on this date that O'Brien discovered that she was not going to be employed on the series after the Trojan story. The decision had been taken over the summer by John Wiles after he had observed her complaining about the Galaxy 4 scripts.

During rehearsals for Horse of Destruction Peter Purves and O'Brien took Hill to lunch to warn her about what she was letting herself in for, in terms of the punishing schedule of the programme, and the safe handling of its often irascible star.

Unusually for the time, one scene was recorded during the afternoon camera rehearsal period - a forced perspective shot of the Trojan soldiers opening the city gates.

The photographs of O'Brien and Lynn together were also taken this afternoon.

A recording break was scheduled both to set up smoke effects to indicate the burning city, and to apply make-up to Purves to indicate his wounds. Fight co-ordinator and stunt performer Derek Ware played the Trojan soldier he fights with.

Stock footage from a travel programme - Travellers in Kurdistan - was used for the approach of Aeneas and his troops.

According to fans who saw the episode on broadcast, after the Doctor expressed his concerns for Steven the scene shifted back to the model of the horse and the end credits rolled over this.

Hartnell, Purves and Hill all then embarked on a week's holiday before reuniting for rehearsals on The Nightmare Begins.

A number of cuts were made when it was found that the episode over-ran, and one of these was key to the personality of Katarina. Others were simply extensions to scenes featuring the bickering Trojan royal family, including Paris telling Priam that they "shouldn't look a gift from the gods in the mouth". 

Katarina had a conversation with Vicki which stressed her belief that she was going to die as the auguries had foretold this. Her pet dove flew backwards, beat its wings three times then died. When examined it was found to have no liver. Hence, she knew she was to die.

Lost also was another witty line as Priam thinks that a gift from the gods should have been better built.

The BBC audience report included criticisms that the famous Wooden Horse hadn't featured enough, and the Greek soldiers had taken an inordinately long time to climb out of it. At the programme review meeting on 10th November, BBC1 Controller Michael Peacock complained that the episode had been too brutal. It seems others present agreed as Sydney Newman informed them that this had been raised with the production team. Huw Weldon pointed out how important the children's audience was to the series. Tom Sloan, who was Head of Light Entertainment, thought most of Cotton's jokes would have gone over the head of the average viewer.

Trivia:

• The ratings rally slightly, whilst the AI figure is the highest for the story (though only by a single point).
• The draft script for this episode had the Doctor communicating secretly with Steven (then named Mike) and Vicki using morse code whilst he was still in the horse. In this version, Achilles was still alive at the conclusion, and Vicki left with the others in the TARDIS. Helen of Troy featured, whilst Katarina did not.
• Peter Purves tends to be very defensive about Hartnell and his performance, but one fluff he does like to recall is the Doctor's "I am not a dog!... a god!".
• According to an interview with Doctor Who Monthly in the early 1990's, Leeston-Smith could recall working with Max Adrian and Barrie Ingham but, bizarrely, had no recollection of working with William Hartnell. He also claimed that had Cotton's original episode title been kept it would have made him sick to use it.
• The director never made another Doctor Who story. He claimed that a new head of department preferred to use his own "cronies", and he found himself side-lined. He moved to Spain to work, and then to South Africa.
• The BBC's copies of the episodes were wiped by January 1969. The last known whereabouts of overseas film copies of The Myth Makers was in Singapore in 1972.
• One brief scene of the Doctor and Katarina in the TARDIS exists as an 8mm off-air recording.