What's Wrong With... The Daemons

 

Listen to any interview or convention appearance by the 'UNIT Family' members and you'll hear how this was one of their favourite stories to make. Which is odd, as a few things went wrong behind the scenes.

Director Chris Barry had to miss his sisters' wedding, because Jon Pertwee wanted a day off following a cabaret appearance, and the star got into a bad mood when they were filming the scene where the Doctor has to explain the heat exchanger machine at the barrier. He rode off on the motorbike, and had to be calmed down by Nicholas Courtney.

Terrance Dicks tried to axe the Brigadier's most famous line. 

The location shoot was also plagued with unpredictable weather, which is noticeable on screen (slushy snow in the background to some shots).

The Doctor is presented here at his most bad-tempered and irritable. He is rude and snappy with everyone, especially Jo. This is a little odd, when you consider that the story was co-written by the producer Barry Letts. Was this really how he saw the Doctor's personality?

Onto the story itself.

The one everyone notices is that the dimensions of the heat barrier don't add up. The Doctor claims that it is a dome ten miles in diameter, centred on the village - yet we see a road sign at the barrier stating that Devil's End is one mile away. Is the village 8 miles across?

One that is not so noticeable on screen, but obvious when you read the novelisation, is that the Master's incantations include the children's rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb, recited backwards.

How does the Master bring Bok to life and control him? Is it through Azal's psionic powers? If so, why does he have to wake him up if he already has access to those powers? 

How can he be using powers he hasn't got yet?

Related to this - who killed the man at the start of the story, and why?

After the Nestenes, Mind Parasites and Axos, the Master's latest ally is... the bloke who's fiddling the Post Office accounts.

One minute the Master is keen to have Miss Hawthorne killed (by the hypnotised policeman) but the next she's only tied up - in a place where people can hear her cries for help. The Master is fine with Jo getting sacrificed, but Yates is also only tied up and easily able to escape from the cavern.

Jo and Mike's ideal hiding place - behind some metal railings with nice big gaps through which to be spotted by your enemies.

Jo shouts out that the Master should be stopped as he is evil. She's telling this to a satanic coven...

Bert the Landlord tries to get the Doctor burnt as a witch, despite the fact that he is in league with someone who is trying to raise the Devil, and most of the villagers are aware of this.

Jo appears to stop and collect her clothes, despite the fact that the church is about to explode.

Then again, Yates and Benton are so concerned about Jo and the Doctor that they stop to change out of their uniforms into civvies before coming to save them. 

Why change out of uniform? Landing a UNIT helicopter in the middle of the village green is hardly arriving unobtrusively.

Daemons can shrink their spaceships to a fraction of their original size. Why not just make them small, saving loads of power and resources, in the first place?

Both ship and barrow are seen to be round, yet the Doctor gives the spaceship's dimensions as an elongated craft (200 x 30 ft).

The hoof prints as seen from the air are about 20 feet long, but when seen up close are only about 3 feet long, and are much closer together.

The Daemon plan makes little sense. If you are intending that someone will pop up on the Earth who is suitable enough to gain your powers, then surely the planet deserves to continue even if there isn't such a person? What sort of a race is it that seems to exist for the sole purpose of giving its powers away to someone else? It is no wonder that Azal is the last of his people.

Azal's self-destruction just because of Jo's act of self-sacrifice also suggests a highly unstable race. If he's that touchy, why didn't he blow a fuse when the Doctor turned him down - which must have been just as illogical to him as Jo's actions.

Actually, everything about this final scene in the cavern suggests that Azal isn't an organic being at all, but some kind of projection / machine. 

When Benton and Garvin the verger fight in the cavern, the shotgun breaks and actor John Joyce has to hold it together.

Later, Benton is attacked by a Morris dancer who rushes into the pub as though he was expecting to fight someone in there.

Another Benton fight scene sees him floored by a cloak thrown over his head. It actually causes him to fall to the ground, the big girl's blouse...

'Bessie' drives so slowly that the Master could easily jump out and run away when the Doctor uses his remote control.

"What a tale I'll have for them now..." says Miss Hawthorne. Who is she talking about?-

What's Wrong With... Colony In Space

 

Time Lord files appear to be paper ones, in cardboard folders, kept in filing cabinets. Not the most secure way of keeping secrets such as a weapon that can blow up a galaxy.

On learning that the Master has stolen this particular file, the Time Lords decide to send the Doctor to the planet Uxarieus to prevent him getting his hands on the device.

However, they don't actually tell him where he is going, or why - nothing that might actually allow him to carry out the mission which is so vital to them.

He even arrives on the planet before the Master, but can't take any advantage of this because he hasn't a clue why he's been sent there or what he is up against.

Their arrival coincides with the presence of some colonists and the sudden arrival of some miners. The two groups are antagonistic towards each other, to the extent that relations rapidly break down and they start shooting at each other.

The Master is a Time Lord who has a fully operational TARDIS and can therefore travel to any point in the history of this planet. So why does he elect to arrive in the middle of a range war? Just two years earlier would have seen the planet empty apart from the natives.

Why initially find in favour of IMC, when he must not want them digging up the place whilst he's trying to get his hands on the weapon. Surely it would be better from the off to have to deal with some fairly feeble hippies.

An issue which afflicts many other stories - the colonists just happen to have established their settlement within a stone's throw of the Primitive city, and the miners just happen to want to land right on top of the colonists. There is a whole planet to play with. IMC could have landed on another continent and stripped it bare before the colonists were even aware of them.

We know why IMC have come - lots of lovely duralinium - but why are the colonists even here?

All we see is barren rock - no forests or grass cover. What made them decide that this was the best planet to start farming on?

There must be plant life somewhere, otherwise what do the natives live on. If it isn't around here, why did they not go to where it was?

Why is Earth classifying planets as suitable for colonisation when they are rich in the minerals that it desperately needs? Surely some sort of mineralogical survey should take place before any decision would be made?

Even if their spaceship can't lift-off safely ever again, the colonists could have moved off to another region by other means once they found that their crops weren't growing where they were.

At one point Gail from Coronation Street (Helen Worth plays Mary Ashe) says that the planet has no animal life - and then says there are birds and insects. 

This is the first time that Jo Grant travels in the TARDIS. It is also the first time that she even sees the inside of the ship, which just seems wrong. It is hard to believe that she has worked with the Doctor all this time and she has never asked to see inside, or been shown. If The Mind of Evil really took place 18 months after Terror of the Autons, then that makes it all the more unlikely that she has never been inside the ship.

She's the Doctor's assistant, so surely she would have seen the main thing that the Doctor wanted assistance with?

As for the TARDIS being capable of travel - she just saw it dematerialise in the last story. Why so incredulous now? Surely she must have heard stories from the Brigadier, Benton and Yates as well.

Mind you, Jo actually thinks that the colonists could have left Earth in 1971 when told they left back in '71. She also manages to forget within a couple of minutes that the Master's TARDIS has a booby-trapped entrance, despite only just having to slide along the floor to get inside.

The Master does not use lethal gas because he needs the Doctor's help in accessing the city - before he knows that the Doctor can help him access the city.

Earth is terribly over-populated, yet IMC can only manage one expert mineralogist on their team (Caldwell).

Caldwell pretends that he has killed Winton, and the IMC guards just accept this. They don't even offer to take the corpse away with them. When Dent finds out about this, won't he be suspicious that this does not sound like the sort of action Caldwell is capable of? He's been really outspoken in his opposition to violence.

Caldwell allows the Doctor to drive them both to the IMC spaceship - despite the Doctor not knowing where the spaceship is. (This is because petrol-head Jon Pertwee insisted on driving).

We keep hearing of how the Primitives are harmless, yet they go around with spears and knives at all times and abduct people as hostages for food. 

They are telepathic, yet the Doctor easily fools one with the old coin behind the ear trick, and later the Master launches an attack with smoke bombs, which they surely ought to have seen coming. Even if Time Lords can shield their thoughts, it doesn't explain other human characters like Caldwell knocking them out.

The Doctor realises straight away that a 50 foot high dinosaur can't fit through an 8 foot high door - but the colonists don't, and IMC obviously haven't realised it either or they wouldn't have done something that could so easily be disproved.

IMC must come across a lot of gullible opponents to launch the giant lizard attacks, and to have a spy posing as someone from an unknown colony, all turn up at the exact same time they arrive.

The spy - Norton - goes out of his way to make himself look suspicious, and later when there's a gun battle he shouts out a warning when it's guaranteed to get him killed. That's some loyalty he has to IMC.

The Doctor talks as though the radiation will vanish overnight once the weapon has been destroyed, and crops will suddenly flourish.

The colonists have pretty much declared UDI from Earth, in an armed insurrection. With all that duralinium on the planet, surely it is only a matter of time before the colony gets wiped out after the Doctor and company have left. There isn't even a site of special archaeological significance any more, that might protect the planet from mining, thanks to the Doctor.

Lastly, the TARDIS lands back at UNIT HQ in the opposite corner of the lab from where it took off from. Good job the Brigadier moved to the other side of the room for no real reason then...

What's Wrong With... The Claws of Axos

Chinn was actually right all the time...

When Axos first appears on radar heading for England, obnoxious civil servant Chinn (first name Horatio, in the novelisation) decides to have it shot down by missiles.

Later, once he has heard about the wonderful properties of Axonite, he attempts to keep it secret from the rest of the world and confine it to the UK.

In both these instances he is actually doing the right thing, albeit for the wrong reasons. The Doctor wants Axos to be allowed to arrive safely, as he thinks it might be friendly. He turns out to be wrong - though it is only to be expected that he would initially want to assume that aliens aren't always aggressive.

Axos intends to drain the Earth of all of its energy, and to do this it needs Axonite to be distributed across the entire globe within a short space of time, so Chinn's underhand tactics were actually preventing this from happening.

Chinn is conducting an admin exercise at UNIT - basically checking up on their HR it seems. Why would he be placed in charge of a First Contact situation. It is not as if he is at the landing site of the UFO when it arrives. UNIT have to travel down to Nuton from their HQ, so the UK Government could easily have identified a much more experienced politician or civil servant to handle what is likely to some incredibly complex and sensitive negotiations and sent them down. It is clear that the Minister does not rate Chinn's abilities very much from the outset, and he's quick to get his resignation typed up.

The army commander is told by the Brigadier that he and the others from UNIT are now free, and he should go and get fresh orders. He simply accepts this. Would it not be best to check on these new orders first, before letting your prisoners go free?

The Axons have the Master - so why do they wait until the Doctor arrives on the scene to suddenly be interested in getting time travel capability? Why didn't they sort this out with the captive Master, bearing in mind they also have his TARDIS?

How exactly did Axos manage to jump a few seconds in time, if it doesn't yet have any time travel capability?

Later on, the Master will try to leave Earth by stealing the Doctor's TARDIS. He already knows all about the Doctor's exile to Earth, and surely must have guessed that the ship would have been physically incapacitated by the Time Lords - not just mental blocks placed in the Doctor's mind. 

If he does think he can get it working, why move it down to Nuton? Couldn't he get it working just as easily back at UNIT HQ? If the nuclear reactor is essential for him, why not go to another one that isn't crawling with UNIT soldiers?

Would a piece of equipment from a 1970's nuclear power station really be compatible with a TARDIS - to the extent that it could make good a broken one?

We hear that Nuton provides electricity for most of Southern England, yet the Doctor (who is technically under arrest by the army) is left all alone to tinker with the reactor and other vital equipment whilst he is messing about with the Axonite.

How to deal with an exploding nuclear power station: 

1. Drive a couple of miles away.

2. Hide behind a car or other object that can be blown away by a blast.

3. Wait thirty seconds.

4. Hurry back to the scene of the explosion.

5. Hold a meeting in the radioactive ruins.

When the power station begins to collapse we can clearly see the TARDIS standing in the background, minutes after it has supposedly left for Axos.

What happened to the Axonite that was in the TARDIS as it left Axos?

A time loop is a supposedly impossible thing to escape from - which is why the Doctor puts Axos in one in the first place - yet the Doctor manages to leave simply by "boosting the circuits".

Mind you, Axos did absolutely nothing to stop the Master escaping. One minute there's a force-field around his ship, the next it's gone.

How blind is Sergeant Benton to have been taken in by the Master's army officer disguise?

Then again, he and Yates thought that the body of a bearded man dressed like a tramp is that of clean-shaven, besuited Bill Filer.

Why did Axos dump Pigbin Josh's body on its own doorstep, to be found by UNIT, it if wants to fool the authorities into thinking it friendly?

When Yates and Benton are attacked by Axons whilst driving in a land rover, there is an odd background to the scene. It looks like a blue CSO screen that hasn't had its image superimposed on top.

Just who is Bill Filer? His role is never explained. Is he a US UNIT operative, or is he CIA? Why is he copied, when Axos sends Axons to abduct the Doctor anyway?

Filer claims to have read the file on the Master. Pity it didn't have any photographs in it.

Finally, critics of Doctor Who often used to talk about wobbly sets, as well as spaceships made out of washing-up liquid bottles, etc. This used to really anger producer Barry Letts, who maintained that sets only ever wobbled on soap operas. I'm afraid to say that there are two very noticeable occasions when the walls do wobble in a Doctor Who story - and they are both stories from his era. This is the first - the wall shakes when the Brigadier exits an office.

What's Wrong With... Terror of the Autons

This story is a sequel to Spearhead From Space, which was shown the year before. Despite being produced only a short time later, and written by the same writer (Robert Holmes) there are elements of this new story which don't quite match up with the earlier one.

In Spearhead, there is no indication of any Nestene sphere being unaccounted for. The only one missing is the one that poacher Sam Seeley has found, which the Autons eventually track down. Yet in this story there is an intact sphere that was somehow missed. 

The Autons in the first story could not, or would not, speak, but they can and do here.

The Nestene only needed the Autons in the first story to get their invasion plans up and running, so why not do the same again? Why do they need the Master?

And why does the Master need the radio telescope, when the Autons didn't need anything like this the first time?

Despite everything that happened in Spearhead, why on Earth would the Brigadier allow an intact Nestene sphere to go on show at a museum? How did the museum even know about it, if UNIT and its activities are supposed to be top secret?

Despite the Autons' previous use of a plastics factory, UNIT take rather a long time to start investigating them here. When it becomes clear that Jo must have encountered the Master at one of the ones on her list, why does it take the two suspicious deaths to attract the Doctor's attention to Farrell's? Surely Jo's list couldn't have been all that big?

Why does the Master go to the circus? It is a colourful plot location for the first two episodes, but is then discarded once the action moves on. Why did the Master not just go straight to the plastics factory and start making Autons there immediately? The kidnapped scientist, Phillips, could have been hidden there just as easily (if not better - as there are Autons there). And why kidnap the Phillips in the first place? 

He serves no purpose, other than to actually become unstable and put the Master's plan at risk.

The Master's TARDIS is not very well protected, and the Doctor is given ample time to get inside and steal the dematerialisation circuit.

Mind you, the Doctor leaves his TARDIS door open all the time, so why doesn't the Master do some sabotaging of his own when he breaks into UNIT HQ?

The sequences at the radio telescope cabin in Part One throw up all sorts of issues.

It's a great pity that we never got to see the scene of the Master and Phillips having to clamber out of the radio telescope cabin window - as that's the only way they could have got out after the Master had set up his trap.

Why have the trap in plain view of the window? And why on Earth doesn't the Doctor check through the window, rather than blindly edging the door open as he does? He doesn't bother to warn the Brigadier, Jo, Mike Yates etc. and get them out of the area before he tackles the bomb.

UNIT have been called in because two scientists have gone missing, yet no-one has bothered to check the cabin - where the two men work. If they had checked it, then did the Master pop back again afterwards to set up his bomb trap?

The Master's bomb would have made a right old mess of the radio telescope had the Doctor failed to prevent it falling. 

That's the radio telescope which is vital to the Master's plans.

The civil servant Brownrose comes to UNIT to tell them about lots of unexplained deaths in the region. Did every single one of these people really die on their own, with not one witness to see them collapse seconds after holding a plastic daffodil? Surely the flowers would have been dropped on the floor as the person dies - giving a clue to the authorities that they were involved, if every corpse had a daffodil next to it?

A fluff between Pertwee and Richard Franklin - when Yates says he had "gone to fetch some cocoa", the Doctor responds "fetch a tin of what?". No-one mentioned a tin of anything.

Director Barry Letts is happy for us to see the troll doll being blasted to bits by a handgun - but can't bear to let us see a solid rubber toy being cut open. He later stated that there were complaints from parents about their children being afraid to take their teddy bears to bed at night in case they came to life and throttled them.

Just what was the Master's plan here? Did he want to see the Earth destroyed by the Nestene, or did he want to conquer it for himself? If the Nestene were going to destroy the planet, why did he continue to co-operate with them when he knew that he no longer had his dematerialisation circuit - and so would be stuck here as well? He has lots of opportunities to get his circuit back, but fails to take any of them.

Why did he not just allow the RAF to bomb the coach? He would have got rid of the Doctor and sacrificed only a handful of Autons, whilst he could have sneaked off to the radio telescope - a location UNIT haven't thought of until the Doctor warns them.

And did it really take the Doctor to point out to him that the Nestene might not want to treat him any differently to anyone else on the planet? When the Doctor does this, he switches sides amazingly quickly. There is not even the slightest hint of an argument about this. 

At the conclusion, the Doctor grins as he says he's looking forward to his next meeting with the Master - despite the fact that hundreds of people have just been killed.

(Barry Letts' boss objected to the original line: "Until I kill him, or he kills me..." as being too much of a downer).

Behind the scenes, a single location shoot was the cause of many problems. Nicholas Courtney suffered a panic attack and could not film, so an extra took his place. You can spot him as he is wearing white socks, which the Brigadier would absolutely never do. Then the stunt involving Terry Walsh's Auton policeman went slightly awry, and he tumbled down the slope far further than intended after making contact with the car. On the same day, Katy Manning injured her leg tripping over some rocks (she was as blind as a bat without her spectacles). Production Assistant Nick John, brother of recently departed companion actress Caroline John, joked that as she had only just joined the production she could be easily replaced - something which upset Manning, and Jon Pertwee in turn.

The Auton policeman caused a complaint from the police, arguing that youngsters were being encouraged to approach officers if in trouble - not be put off by them in case they were Autons.

His first chance to direct a story now that it's in colour and he's in charge, Barry Letts is over-zealous in his use of CSO. The backgrounds to the museum, Auton laboratory, and Mrs Farrell's kitchen are obviously photographic - the latter looking the size of  a barn.

When Robert Holmes later went up for the Script Editor job on Doctor Who, he was told by Head of Serials that some idiot had once written a story which generated lots of complaints from parents and police, and he should try and avoid this sort of thing. He elected to keep quiet about his involvement...

K.O Round 1.9

This round sees Season 8 up against Season 21.

Season 8 was the first to be made entirely by the Barry Letts / Terrance Dicks partnership. The previous year had been set up by Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, so Letts' hands had been tied. He didn't like the restriction to Earth or the seven episode story lengths. This year he got more stories, by reducing the episode count, and managed to find a way of getting the Doctor back into outer space. And a regular villain was introduced - a Moriarty to the Doctor's Holmes, and the Brigadier's Watson. The Master appeared in every story, which Letts and Dicks quickly came to regret as it became too predictable for the viewer. Letts took on the role of producer with a number of conditions - one of which was that he could get to direct the odd story. he does this on the season opener Terror of the Autons. Something else Letts intended was experimentation with the latest VFX techniques. He was a great champion of CSO (Colour Separation Overlay, as the BBC called it).

Autons stands out for the number of shots per episode, as well as the use of CSO to replace backgrounds - with the unfortunate result that Mrs Farrell appears to have a kitchen half a mile long. As well as introducing Roger Delgado's Master, we also get Katy Manning as Jo Grant, and Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates.

The Mind of Evil is notable for its prison setting, armed ambushes and convict gangs - brutally realistic ingredients for a family fantasy show. The monster is kept well down in the mix, so these harder elements are more prominent.

The Claws of Axos is another four-parter, and another very bright, colourful story. The Axon monsters are a great design. Director Michael Ferguson shared Letts' interest in experimenting with new VFX techniques.

Colony in Space got the Doctor back onto an alien planet, thanks to the clever idea of the Time Lords occasionally using the Doctor as their unofficial agent, thus managing to keep the exile in situ. This was the first story to be directed by Michael E Briant.

Finally, we get The Daemons, co-written by Letts using a nom de plume. Thanks to the mix of Paleolithic archaeology, paganism and black magic, set against the backdrop of a quaint English village that has the Master for its vicar, this one is a cast, crew and fan favourite.

Apparently, had Peter Davison known how good Season 21 as going to be he might have been tempted to change his mind about leaving. He hadn't enjoyed Season 20 very much - even though it was supposed to be the big anniversary year.

It doesn't get off to the best of starts. On paper, Warriors of the Deep should have been a classic, what with the return of both the Silurians and the Sea Devils, and a base under siege. There was also a new dinosaur-like monster, called the Myrka. The realisation was awful, however. Overly lit sets that should have been dark and dank, a pantomime horse Myrka, poorly redesigned Silurians and Sea Devils, a couple of dreadful guest performances, and messed up continuity.

The Awakening was the last of the old two-part stories, and it has obvious inspiration in a story from Season 8 - The Daemons. Quaint English village, ancient buried alien evil, and a church blowing up at the end. Frontios was written by former Script Editor Christopher H Bidmead and gave the character of Turlough some much-needed character development.

When Peter Davison announced his departure, it was decided that companions Tegan and Turlough would also depart. Janet Fielding did not want her departure overshadowed by that of the star, so she elected to leave first, in Resurrection of the Daleks. This was the rearranged 20th anniversary Dalek story. This saw the return of Davros, who would be played by Terry Molloy until the end of the classic series. The body count in this story is higher than The Terminator.

It was Mark Strickson's turn to leave in Planet of Fire, which also saw the introduction of new companion Peri Brown. Writer Peter Grimwade's shopping list also included the Master and a foreign filming locale - Lanzarote. It was then time for Davison to depart, in the highly regarded The Caves of Androzani. It has often topped polls, and never been excluded from any Top Ten.

But then we go from the sublime to the ridiculous. Producer JNT decided to introduce the new Doctor in the last story of the season, rather than have the audience wait for the start of the next.

If Caves tops polls, The Twin Dilemma tends to sit obstinately at the opposite end.

A difficult decision this one. Season 8 has the creation of the UNIT Family, the introduction of the Master, and The Daemons. Season 21 has The Caves of Androzani.  Caves isn't quite enough to see off a whole season of Roger Delgado, so I am going to declare Season 8 the victor. The first and last stories of 21 also drag it down.

Next time, it's a battle of the Bakers - Season 18 versus Season 22.