WhoThrough: Doctor Who Season Seven
The ongoing series moves on to colour, UNIT, Pertwee and John.
When my wife and I married in 2014, we started watching Doctor Who in order, one story a week. Five and a half years later we finished and started again. These are a combination of my scattershot notes from the first and second WhoThroughs.
SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE
Crazily high production value implied by shooting wholly on film, and on location, that’ll not be repeated for decades. “We’ve drawn attention to ourselves”, probes into space, a very sound set-up for what’s coming. Lovely moment as the Doctor literally changes from Troughton to Pertwee as he shifts from disliking his new face to liking it.
Start of episode two, trouble in a factory, feels like the start of an ep one – a mystery awaiting the Doctor. The “Is he dead?”/”No.” cut is incredibly brisk and modern. The episode two cliffhanger is muted by us having seen Autons wandering around during the episode already.
The dead UNIT soldier crashed into a bloody windscreen is very nasty – between that and the dog killed off-camera it’s clear why the contemporary Earth setting was expected to be “scarier”. General Scobie opening the door to his doppelgänger is very like a scene in Thunderball (1965) – and Seeley calls the alien capsules “thunderballs”, too! Liz jumping at a sudden noise feels out of character. The Doctor wipes out the Nestene without a qualm…which contrasts notably with the ending of the next story.
DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS
Shot of Bessie in contemporary traffic is lovely – the Doctor as anachronism. Interesting moment where the Doctor swallows back his first-hand knowledge of dinosaurs to blend in. Last week Liz was the Scully, now it’s the Brig’s turn – that needs figuring out. Is Liz going to get to do anything? Story two and already her scientific brain has been put aside so she can look into personnel records – secretarial work, basically.
Episode one gives the Doctor the fearful cliffhanger, the shocked reaction, which is pretty unusual. Episode three has the Doctor visit Quinn and it’s like an episode of Columbo – we know Quinn’s secrets and the Doctor is entertainingly irritating as he pushes for answers, trying to get Quinn to slip up. A lot of cliffhangers are the Doctor under threat which indicates a huge repositioning of the show’s form.
The horrible speed with which virus spreads is genuinely frightening – really helps the seven-parter, too; feels like a huge story development, a second story within the first. The kazoo score is ghastly, like Beaker from The Muppets is singing the theme. Occasional forced business – the Doctor not mentioning Quinn’s death, Liz passing the scorch mark but some soldier reporting it later, the two formulas. Nice that the Doctor, rather than Liz, is kidnapped. (When it’d actually fit for her to be the one working on the antidote.) There’s a nightmarish tension as the Doctor winds things up and says goodbye – something is coming. The Brig’s genocidal actions are, within the fiction, less egregious than they might be because of the horror of the prior biological warfare. But still, blimey. Neat to have it happen after a comedy car sequence, too.
THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH
TV host is such a great way in, as was the radio journo in Web of Fear – no wonder RTD used it. Easy to mistake the Doctor’s UNIT lab for a new TARDIS interior with the console in the centre. Now he’s jumped a few seconds into the future, the Doctor’s watch will be wrong. The writing when the Doctor arrives at mission control has some immediate zest to it, as did the TARDIS opening. The first UNIT story to feel like it’s decisively set in the future – British space program, pop-up videophones, etc. Huge fun chucking in new powers for the Doctor – the object displacement, the anti-theft device.
Every cut to location feels like another show – action movie, spy movie – one the Doctor isn’t in. Indeed, he’s kept away from almost everyone, including Liz, to the point of being sent into space. The Doctor gets a fair few costume changes, which helps grow the show up a bit, makes him less a kids’ TV character. Why is the mission control announcer so insanely glamorous? Nice moment as the Doctor wakes up to Liz, showing a real affection there. Even once we know the General is lying, Abineri plays the lies dead straight…which makes him seem terrifyingly capable, and bonkers.
I rather like the title coming after the recap and it’s a shame they didn’t stick with that. Where last story cliffhangers were as often about concepts, shifts in the story, here it’s more back to lives under threat – but they’re far scarier than usual (Liz going over the dam, the unstoppable spacesuit looming over the Doctor) for which the snappy cutting helps a lot; you don’t feel like everyone’s pausing to accommodate the moment.
There’s a lot of You Only Live Twice about the captured capsules and locked up astronauts. Dead UNIT soldiers apparently don’t count – when listing the problems the first deception caused, their deaths don’t rate a mention.
There’s something hideous about the discovery that the killer aliens are, in fact, civil servants trying to do something peaceful and human involvement made them alone killers. Important growth for the show, in that the aliens looking monstrous is in conflict with who they are – along with “Hello, are you a Silurian?” the show is fighting previous ‘othering’ in what is, oddly, known as the most right wing of eras. (Mostly for surface reasons than actual themes and messaging.)
INFERNO
A sweet, emotional moment as Pertwee’s Doctor describes how he feels to be shipwrecked on Earth, thus justifying the story to come. Clean characterisation in ep one, even if Professor Stahlman is needlessly combative, Sutton overly sexist, etc. Early tech thriller business sadly makes the Doctor and Brigadier look rather ineffectual. Hard to tell if the slowness of getting Bessie out the hut and locking up is a comment on the difference it makes not to have a remote control, or just ‘how slow old telly was’. (Going with the former, cos the pace this season has been pretty sharp.)
The arrival in the parallel universe works much like a TARDIS landing – immediately the Doctor is a figure of suspicion, arriving during a crisis. But it feels harder now. The universe hop also plays like a ‘Christmas future’ warning, with the drilling having pulled ahead of the original world – time travel without the time travel. Something rather thrilling about the mystery being standard Who fare, but it being harder to solve because of the world we’re in.
Fascist doubles are genuinely upsetting, a parallel for the ‘werewolf-zombies’ the chemical makes. There’s an argument to be made that we had to up the right-wingedness of the setting to compensate for the regular setting of the Doctor as a staffer for the military. On the other hand, the problem is essentially caused by a government seeking industrial growth believing in one man’s British exceptionalism.
Parallel-Sutton’s fury in episode four is actually fantastically acted and written, and the fatalism of that section is brutal. Pertwee with his collar undone really does feel looser, stronger, more desperate yet more imposing. The fire extinguisher limits as a weapon would feel more concerning if there weren’t five more going unused on walls nearby. Sutton rather ends up this world’s companion, but this once again pushes Liz off to the side.
The Doctor’s coma is a cheap way to fill out the final episode, likewise arresting him for something Sir Keith has orders to make happen. Is “Batman at the controls” a reference to the then-current imported TV series? The spinning silver transitions to and from the parallel universe are a genius bit of TV grammar that make things instantly clear.
The constant installing of UNIT in temporary offices means we’ve seen almost nothing of UNIT HQ this season. The Doctor and Liz were apparently here as observers before the murder, which means their presence when a murder happens is a total fluke – a hangover from the old show’s formatting. (Without it we’d lack the TARDIS console to solve the plot; at least the Doctor’s urge to change places links to the theme.) Is this the first use of a garage remote on TV?
Stunt sequence amnesia continues – on regular earth they chat about the ‘ominous feeling’ the project is giving off, as if we hadn’t had blue-green werewolf-zombies and murders aplenty by now. One werewolf-zombie being given a STAHLMAN badge to make him identifiable is hilarious. (And shows when the production is doing something different from the script, because clearly the werewolves were intended, like zombies, to still look like the humans they were.)
Check out the WhoThroughs for Season One, Season Two, Season Three, Season Four, Season Five and Season Six.
