D is for... Dastari

Joinson Dastari was a noted scientist from the powerful Third Zone alliance of planets. He was a bio-geneticist who had become Head of Projects at the Camera research station in deep space. He was encouraging the time travel experiments of fellow scientists Kartz and Reimer, which had attracted the attention of the Time Lords. They sent an agent to go and speak with Dastari, to dissuade him from continuing with this work. The agent they chose was an old friend of his - the Doctor in his second incarnation. However, this was all a trap to capture a Time Lord. Dastari had been experimenting on one of his Androgum servitors, a woman named Chessene, genetically augmenting her to expand her intelligence. Together they had formed an alliance with the Sontarans to obtain mastery over time travel. The Kartz-Reimer capsule could travel in time, but its occupants did not survive the journey. Dastari knew that Time Lords had a special genetic component which permitted them to travel safely through time, and the Doctor was needed to experiment upon to isolate this symbiotic nucleus. Dastari, Chessene and the Sontarans removed the Doctor from the station, making it look as though it had been attacked by the Time Lords. They took their captive to 20th Century Spain to conduct their experiments. The Sixth Doctor experienced the assault on his previous self and gave chase, picking up Jamie from the station on the way. Dastari then decided on an alternative method of obtaining the nucleus. The Second Doctor would be turned into an Androgum so that he would willingly help them. This plan failed when he left their base with the Androgum Shockeye to sample the culinary delights of Seville. As they searched the town, Dastari was flattered to receive the attentions of a young woman, who threw a rose down to him from her window. The Doctor had earlier told Dastari that he could never trust Chessene, and that her vicious true nature would always win through. Dastari realised that this was indeed the case when he saw her lapping at the Doctor's blood after he had been wounded by Shockeye. He decided to help free the Doctors. Chessene turned on him and killed him.

Played by: Laurence Payne. Appearances: The Two Doctors (1985).

• The third and final appearance by Payne in the programme. He had earlier played gunslinger Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters (a part which had been offered to Patrick Troughton). He then played the Argolin leader Morix in The Leisure Hive.
• He was best known for playing the detective Sexton Blake between 1967 and 1971. Back in 1954 he had been D'Artagnan in a BBC adaptation of The Three Musketeers. His Leisure Hive co-star Adrienne Corri had played Milady de Winter in this, and one of his fellow Musketeers had been portrayed by Roger Delgado (Athos). 
• As well as acting, Payne also found time to write a number of detective novels.
• He was blind in one eye - the result of a sword fight going wrong whilst filming Sexton Blake. Legend has it that he was told the sight could be saved if he rested up for a week, but he returned to work straight away and received another injury, and so lost the sight.

D is for... D'Artagnan

D'Artagnan was the hero of Alexandre Dumas' famous 1844 novel The Three Musketeers. He was summoned up by the Doctor in the Land of Fiction to fight on his behalf. He fought a duel with that other famous swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac, who was called upon by the Master of this domain. The Master then changed Cyrano into the pirate Blackbeard, but the Doctor countered by replacing D'Artagnan with Sir Lancelot, on horseback and in full armour.

Played by: John Greenwood. Appearances: The Mind Robber (1968).

• Greenwood was also the fight arranger for this story.
• The literary character was based by Dumas on a real person - Charles de Batz de Castelmore d'Artagnan, who was a captain of the King's Musketeers during the reign of Louis XIV. He was killed at the Siege of Maastricht during the Franco-Dutch war, in June 1673.

D is for... Darrius

Darrius was an elderly scientist who had been a friend of Arbitan, the Keeper of the Conscience machine on the planet Marinus. He was tasked with guarding one of the keys which operated the machine. He kept this in his laboratory, which he surrounded with lethal booby-traps. Darrius' botanical experiments led him to develop a growth accelerator, with the chemical formula DE3 O2. This not only caused the vegetation to grow, it mutated it so that it developed an intelligence hostile to animal kind. The old man became besieged by the jungle. The Doctor's companions Ian and Barbara arrived in search of the key, only to fall foul of his traps. Darrius agreed to help them if they could prove they had been sent by Arbitan, but before this could happen he was strangled by creeping plant vines. He gave the teachers a clue to the key's whereabouts before dying.

Played by: Edmund Warwick. Appearances: The Keys of Marinus (1964).

• Darrius features in the third episode only - The Screaming Jungle.
• Warwick was called upon at short notice to play the Doctor when William Hartnell damaged his back and had to be written out of the fourth episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth - seen briefly from the back before passing out. He was then called upon to play the Dalek-created robot version of the Doctor in The Chase the following year.

D is for... Darkening, Erasmus

In 17th Century England an alchemist named Erasmus Darkening was welcomed into the home of Lord Marchwood - Ashen Hill Manor. He stayed with the family for two years, during which time his experiments to make the family rich came to nothing. Darkening was really an alien scientist who had become trapped on Earth, and his real work was to try to establish a portal to his own dimension. This portal caused others to become trapped between dimensions, including Lord Marchwood's children. Marchwood turned on him and attempted to run him through with his sword. This caused the device powering the portal to become damaged. Darkening began to live off the life force of those he had trapped, making him immortal. In the present day, the Manor gained a reputation as a haunted house, leading Professor Rivers and her young research assistant Toby to spend some time there conducting experiments. They were visited by Sarah Jane Smith, Clyde and Rani. Sarah did not believe in the supernatural, but soon they were all presented with strange phenomena. Sarah then met Lord Marchwood, who had been trapped in the house for centuries looking for his lost children and trying to protect others from Darkening. Marchwood helped Sarah lure Darkening into a trap, ensnaring him in an electromagnetic field which destroyed him. His device was wrecked, and the trapped souls were freed.

Played by: Donald Sumpter. Appearances: SJA 3.4: The Eternity Trap (2009).

• Sumpter first appeared in Doctor Who in The Wheel In Space, back in 1968, playing crewman Enrico Casali. He returned to the show in 1972 as Commander Ridgeway, captain of the submarine in The Sea Devils. He appeared again in 2015, this time playing the Time Lord President Rassilon in Hell Bent.

D is for... Dark Horde

A warrior race known to Sarah Jane Smith. She was surprised when a trio of warriors arrived on Earth, as they were not known to venture close to this galaxy. Sarah found herself unusually ill-equipped to deal with them, but she and her young companions were saved by the sudden intervention of another self-styled protector of Earth - Ruby White. She created the impression that the Dark Horde were up against superior numbers, causing them to retreat. It later transpired that the warriors had only been a holographic creation produced by Ruby so that she could make contact with Sarah, whom she intended to replace. The warriors were masked, with foot soldiers wearing red cloaks, and their commanders black ones. They carried staffs which fired laser beams.

Appearances: SJA 4.6: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith (2010).

Inspirations - The Krotons

You may have noticed, if you ever write about Doctor Who stories, that the spell-check usually offers "Croutons" as a replacement for Krotons. (Though today for some reason I am being offered Protons or Kilotons). Croutons is very apt, however, as this was indeed an inspiration for the name of the titular creatures, as they were created out of a chemical soup.
This story, the first for the series by Robert Holmes, has an interesting history. For a start, it was a last minute replacement for another story which fell through late in the day. Holmes originally came up with a story called "The Space Trap" as a submission for the series Out of the Unknown. It was rejected, so Holmes restructured it for Doctor Who, submitting it towards the end of the William Hartnell era. It was received by Donald Tosh just as he was in the process of departing from the show. He thought it had some merit, and held onto it. Jump to a few years later and the script situation on the programme was becoming a bit of a nightmare. Derrick Sherwin had already cut The Dominators down to 5 episodes, necessitating him writing a new opening episode for The Mind Robber. The Invasion has been expanded from 4 to 8 episodes. Other storylines being developed were falling apart - such as Dick Sharples' deeply misogynistic "Prison In Space". Terrance Dicks went through the "slush pile" of old scripts that were still on file and came across Holmes' effort. Like Tosh he thought it had some merit, and asked Sherwin if he could proceed with polishing it up a little with Holmes as a potential stand-by script, making it fit the current TARDIS line-up.
Another behind the scenes headache at this time was Frazer Hines' on / off resignation from the programme. Had "Prison in Space" been made, a new male companion named Nik was to have joined the series, but Hines was talked into staying on to the end of the season by Troughton so that they could leave together. Troughton's departure was announced during the broadcast of this story.

The basic premise of the story is that there is an alien race (the Gonds) who are being held back, technologically, by another race (the Krotons). The latter crash-landed on the planet centuries ago, and they have been manipulating the natives in order that they develop to a stage where they can be used to help them get back home. The way they go about this does not make much sense. Each year, the smartest of the Gonds is invited into the great teaching machine - the Dynatrope - where their mental energy is drained. The hapless Gond students are then dissolved by acid in the wastelands beyond the machine where their fellows are forbidden to go. To get the Gonds to the right level, yet make sure they don't develop so much as to become a threat, the teaching machine is selective in what it promotes. The big problem with all of this is that by killing the smart students, thus preventing them from procreating and producing potentially even smarter kids, the Krotons are actually holding the whole race back too much. They are only going to get a minimal amount of mental energy with each intake - not enough to provide sufficient energy to reanimate them and allow them to leave the planet, which is the whole point of the exercise.

It is only when the Doctor and Zoe sit the tests that the energy is produced to bring the Krotons out of their dormant chemical slurry state. The chemical in question is Tellurium which, for once, is not a made up element. It has the symbol Te, and the atomic weight of 52. It has a hexagonal crystalline structure, which is reflected in the design of the aliens and their ship. The Krotons, as realised on screen, did lead to a myth that they were the product of the Blue Peter Design a Monster competition (the one which Troughton helped to judge in 1967). Apparently there was a Spinal Tap moment when the prop builders got the height dimensions wrong - leading to the bottom half of the creature having to be realised with a skirt.
They have distinctive booming voices which have a trace of an Afrikaans accent (though some people think they're Brummies). The spinning "heads" did not feature in the script, so were the idea of director David Maloney. This is his second story, and he was reportedly much relieved when offered this instead of the Sharples story. His first story - The Mind Robber - introduced Bernard Horsfall to the series (as Gulliver), and Maloney would employ him on three further occasions. Here he introduces Philip Madoc to the show. He will re-employ him as well (in his next story). Madoc's previous brush with the series had been his role as the duplicitous black-marketeer in the second Peter Cushing Dalek movie.

So, the idea of a civilisation being manipulated by an alien race who have come to be regarded as gods is not a new one. This is one of those "Pandorica" stories, where the TARDIS drops out of the skies and the Doctor upsets the entire social order in a single night. There haven't been too many of these in the series so far. The last one would have been The Macra Terror.
Here, the Doctor doesn't facilitate the changes single-handedly. He lets the Gonds know what is happening out of sight in the wasteland, which then prompts the younger elements of the society to rise up and rebel. I say younger, but these are clearly what you call mature students. We already mentioned the student riots of 1968 when looking at The Dominators. These would lend a topicality to Holmes' script, as would the whole idea of forced learning. The Gonds don't just learn from the machines, they are mentally conditioned to feel that their unseen benefactors are pleased with them into the bargain. One area which the Krotons don't want the Gonds to know about is chemistry, and weapons technology would also appear to be off the syllabus, as Eelek thinks slings and fireballs are up to the minute WMDs.

Considering that this story was first intended to be made for 1965, it is one of the few stories of the late Troughton era which actually reflects the times. Way back at the start we had Susan in her first episode portrayed as a with-it schoolgirl of 1963, digging John Smith and the Common Men on her transistor radio. Apart from some dialogue with Ping-Cho in Marco Polo, this side of her was dropped. The series preferred to concentrate on the mum and dad characters of Ian and Barbara after that opening episode. Ian may have known who John Smith & Co were, but he didn't appear to dig their music very much. Then there is his dad-dancing in The Chase. It was only with the arrival of Ben and Polly that the series started to reflect the times, with their opening story being set in contemporary London. Apart from the trip to the Tricolour coffee bar by the Doctor and Jamie in Evil of the Daleks, the series has tended to steer clear of reflecting the years in which it was made, though some Pop / Op Art imagery did creep into costume designs for the base personnel in The Ice Warriors, and the bunker dwellers of Enemy of the World. The attempted brainwashing of Medok in The Macra Terror had been a little trippy, and the scenes where first the Doctor and Zoe, and later Jamie, have their mental energy attacked in this story make use of distorted imagery. We'll only get really psychedelic stuff in the series once Barry Letts gets his hands on CSO, and is not afraid to use it.
Next time: it's the final monster show of the 1960's as the Ice Warriors get a return appearance.

Story 190 - Partners In Crime

In which the Doctor investigates Adipose Industries, who have recently launched a new weight-loss treatment - their slogan being "The Fat Just Walks Away". Unbeknownst to him, Donna Noble is investigating the same company. Ever since she met the Doctor a couple of Christmases ago, her life has remained in a bit of a rut, and she now regrets turning down his offer to travel with him. Both manage to trick their way into Adipose Industries' London HQ in order to secure a list of the company's customers, managing to miss each other repeatedly even though they are in the same part of the building. That evening the Doctor goes to visit a man named Roger Davey, who claims to have lost a few kilos. He tells the Doctor that he has been disturbed by his burglar alarm going off at the same time every night. The Doctor notices that he has a cat-flap, and recalls the company's slogan. Donna has an argument with her mother then goes up to the nearby allotments to see her grandfather, Wilf, who uses the spot to stargaze. He has been told about the Doctor, and urges that should she get the opportunity again then she should go travelling with him. Wilf had been the newspaper vendor whom the Doctor met a few months ago, after transmatting down to Earth from the Titanic spaceship. Donna then goes to see another Adipose customer - Stacey Campbell.

Donna has one of the gold pendants which are gifted to customers. Its proximity to the one which Stacey owns causes small fatty creatures to extrude from Stacey's body. Her entire body dissolves into the beings. Donna comes to her aid just in time to see one of them jump out of the window. She goes outside, again just missing the Doctor who is tracking strange signals. Stacey's dissolution is noted by Adipose's CEO, Miss Foster, and she sends a team to collect the fatty creatures. The next day, both return to the HQ, Donna hiding in the toilets until after everyone has gone home. Miss Foster knows that someone is still in the building, and discovers a journalist named Penny hiding in the same toilets. The Doctor uses a window cleaning cradle to spy on Foster's office, and is shocked to see Donna across the room doing the same thing from the door. As they see each other and try to communicate, Foster spots them and her guards give chase. Both meet up on the stairs and head for the roof. Donna explains that in order to find the Doctor again, she had been investigating strange occurrences which she thought he might also be looking into, such as the recent disappearance of bees and the claims of Adipose Industries. They use the cradle to escape down to the ground but Foster has her own sonic device and disables it. Donna almost plunges to the ground, but she and the Doctor manage to break back into the building.

Miss Foster confronts them and reveals that she is really Matron Cofelia of the Five-Straighten Classabindi Nursery Fleet. She chose the name "Foster" as this is her role - to act as nanny to the millions of fatty creatures which she is creating. They are baby Adipose, created out of human fat. Every time an Adipose customer takes one of their pills a baby is made out of their fat whilst they sleep, which is then picked up by her retrieval teams. The Adipose are an alien race whose nursery planet was lost. The Doctor points out that her activities on this planet are illegal and she risks prosecution by the Shadow Proclamation. Now that the Doctor has discovered what she is up to, she decides to bring forward her plans. Thousands of people will be dissolved like Stacey to produce Adipose offspring - a process known as parthenogenesis - and a spaceship has been summoned to collect them. The Doctor manages to prevent full parthenogenesis taking place, but thousands of the creatures are still created all over London, making their way towards the HQ. They are then teleported up to the massive spaceship. Miss Foster is ascending with them, but the Doctor warns her that she is no longer needed by the Adipose now that the children have been born, and she is complicit in their illegal activities. The Adipose let her go and she plunges to her death. Wilf, on his allotment, manages to miss the alien spaceship as it flies overhead. The Doctor suddenly finds that he has a new companion for his travels. Before she leaves she must leave the car keys for her mother to find, and asks a blonde-haired woman to pass on a message for her. The woman is Rose Tyler, who walks away and vanishes. Later, Wilf sees the TARDIS fly past the allotments, with Donna waving at him from the door...

Partners In Crime was written by Russell T Davies, and was first broadcast on Saturday 5th April, 2008. It opens the fourth series of the show, and see the return of Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, who had featured as the one-off companion for The Runaway Bride - the 2006 Christmas Special.
Jacqueline King returns as her mother Sylvia, but sadly Howard Attfield, who had played her father Geoff, passed away after filming only a few location scenes. As his character was a recurring one, it was decided to have Geoff die in the narrative prior to this episode, and his role in proceedings went to a new character - Donna's grandfather Wilf Mott. Bernard Cribbins had played an unnamed newspaper seller in a cameo appearance in Voyage of the Damned, and he was invited back to reprise and expand on the role. This coincidence would feed into a story arc point for the season, as the Doctor notes the ways in which Donna's life intersects with his own.
In preparing the fourth series it was not known that Tate would be available, and Davies had worked on creating a new companion - a journalist named Penny. When it became clear that Tate was willing and able to reprise Donna, the journalist was reduced to a supporting role for this one episode - mainly there for comic effect.

The big surprise for viewers on the night was the reappearance of Billie Piper as Rose Tyler. The short sequence in which she appears had been cut out of the preview discs sent to reviewers. The character was due to return at the end of the season, and it was decided to seed her return throughout the whole series with a couple of brief glimpses.
Series Story Arc: 
We've already mentioned the coincidences linking Donna's life with the Doctor's.
Then there is the mention of bees disappearing.
The other things disappearing are planets, as the Adipose have lost their nursery planet.
We see an ATMOS sticker on the windscreen of a taxi.

Sarah Lancashire, who had risen to fame through a long-running role in Coronation Street, plays Miss Foster. Davies based the character on Jo Frost, from the reality TV series Supernanny, and he claims that Eva Peron was another influence. Lancashire herself thought of her as a warped version of Mary Poppins. Penny is played by Verona Joseph, Roger by Martin Ball, whilst Stacey is Jessica Gunning, who appeared alongside Christopher Eccleston in the first season of Fortitude.
The Adipose were computer generated creatures, modeled using the same software (Massive) that gave us armies of Orcs, Dwarves and Elves in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Overall, it is a fast and fun start to the new series. The threat level is negligible - the Adipose deliberately intended to be cute rather than scary. The scene where the Doctor and Donna first see each other again is hilarious.
Things you might like to know:

• Yes, adipose tissue stores energy in the human body as fat.
• There were many design drawings for the creatures, and Davies went for the one with the little fang. They were made to look like slabs of lard, and Davies was inspired by a stuffed toy he owned.
• Massive allowed the massed ranks of Adipose to perform independently, whilst the solo ones were handled by more conventional CGI means.
• This episode was recorded fourth, just after the Sontaran two-parter, which was why they had the ATMOS sticker on the taxi.
• The Rose sequence was filmed during the making of Turn Left (by Graeme Harper), as were the reshoots with Cribbins replacing Attfield.
• The spaceship was intentionally designed to look like the one from Close Encounters of the Third Kind - as the one seen in the movie was referred to as the 'Mothership', tying in with the parental themes in this story.
• Miss Foster's demise was inspired by the many, many falls of Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, as he was often seen to pause in mid air before plummeting into a canyon.
• The window cleaning cradle sequence had originally been written for an earlier story - Smith and Jones.